Adventures in House Hunting part 15: brain is dead
Well I finally found out what "potential for open and creative floor plan" means. It means the house used to have an open floor plan and then someone put up extraneous walls. So, take down the wall between the entry way and tiny living room and you would have a decent living room. Break out the blocked doorway between the living room and dining room and you get a really nice lower floor layout. Then there is a bedroom, a bathroom, another bedroom-ish-room that opens onto a sunroom / closed porch room. 3 bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a couple of decent sized closets. The basement was nothing to write home about but it was dry. I think this one might need more work than we can manage though. It would need siding, all new windows, all appliances (including hot water heater) about $8000 in plumbing and some repairs to the walls and ceilings. Let's not discuss the floors...someone put vinyl floor tiles over all the hardwood floors in the entire building. I called the listing agent to let him know that it had been broken into and the "upgraded plumbing" mentioned in the listing was no more. It was a potential gold mine in a decent location but I don't think Ulfr or N want to bid on it.
We are also in the market for a new agent, I think. After our 3rd failed bid Mr. Spiffy started pushing us to look on our own and he'd provide access codes for the properties but not join us. That's actually what we did for Creative Floor Plan up there. I just don't like that. I'd rather deal with the listing agents directly than go on my own like that. So I think that's what we'll do for a while. Mr Spiffy may have noticed my evasive answers Sunday night about our next meeting because Monday he emailed me a list of houses - something he has never done - that we might want to see. Unfortunately for him, of the 7 he listed one was a 6-unit apartment building and another was Water Water Everywhere! which we've already seen ( ulfrslady.livejournal.com/73364.html). If he can't keep records of what he showed to which clients, I'm no longer interested.
I'm so burnt out on house hunting right now. We're weeding through the houses in our price range and nothing new is popping up. It might be time to make a strategic retreat but I really don't want to push this too long. It's hard enough seeing houses in the evenings now, I can't imagine how difficult it will be once it's getting dark at 6 PM again. We've got Entry Denied House scheduled for this weekend (if the current resident doesn't flip out again and decide it's not a good day) but if that doesn't pan out we may stop for a while.