12:30 p.m. - 2002-05-21
The Inside Of The Bat House
Hmmmmnnnn... this entry has to be quick because I have to go do some work, but I wanted to tell ya'll that we saw the inside of the Bat House yesterday.
Oooooooh! It's skanky in there! It's worse than I thought (although it's actually better than Bruce thought.) The kitchen has four, FOUR kinds of nasty, cheesy paneling!!A really frightening plastic type with tiny multicoloured speckles, the de riguer fake wood, a really weird and frightening fake brick, and then a two foot wide stretch of ...hmmm...how to describe it? Well, never mind, but it's nasty. Oh, and the cupboards are flimsy and tired and the drawers don't open.
The downstairs bathroom has the most disgusting toilet I have ever seen ("We can buy a new one for $59 at Home Depot!" chirps Bruce cheerily) and the upstairs bathroom has a rotten floor. However, this bathroom is also huge (it obviously was a bedroom at one time) and we could put in a megahumongous jacuzzi and be the envy of all our friends. Or at least we could have the cat box in there without having it shoved up against the toilet. It could be all the way across the room!!
Sorry. When you have four cats you think about these things.
The entrance way has been modified to make the house into a duplex in the most hideous way possible, complete with glops of plaster over the original beadboard ceiling and flimsy, buckling paneling over the badly done partitions. The good news is that it wouldn't be ferociously difficult to tear out and we could probably actually do it ourselves.
And the roof. The roof is the worst. It is literally burned out, and they just reinforced the remaining beams and popped a tin roof over the top! The good news is that because it was an electrical fire the owner was forced to redo the electrical system and also had to put a new heating system in. However, I do have an intense fear of electrical fires (after watching the Hadassah Thrift Shop next door to where we lived on Comm. Ave. burn down) and so it does give me pause to see those charred rafters...
Anyway, I'm not talking about the good things! It does have the original beadboard ceilings in a couple of rooms, and the original hardwood floors which are badly in need of some work but we could at least paint them and live with them as is for a few years. A couple of the rooms just need paint and new carpet to be quite nicely liveable as is for awhile. Basically, I think underneath all the cheesy updates the original house is fairly intact! We just have to peel off all the nasty layers.
David thinks it's about $30,000 worth of work. If we could get it for $30,000 we'd pay $60,000 total, of which we'd only have to finance about $40,000.David thinks the house would be worth $90,000 when we finished with it and if the neighborhood becomes a historic district it could be more like $100,000 or more....
This is so very, very tempting! It would be a hell of a lot of work but in the end we could have a groovy house that wouldn't put us into the poorhouse!
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