Maine real estate has a logic all its own. It doesn’t share this logic with other states, and it doesn’t share this logic with the general public. You’re going to have to figure out what’s going on here on your own. No one is going to explain it to you. Well, the real estate agent will try, but kindly offering that you can add a ceiling fan to your four-storey log cabin split-level foyer is advice, not an explanation.

But I must try. Here’s a handy selection of Maine real estate for sale for you to browse, with my own, admittedly feeble, attempts to explain what’s going on in them:

This one’s easy. A layup, really. If you’ve ever worked in a construction company’s office, in any capacity, you know that sometimes the house plans get pretty wrinkled when they come out of a fax machine laboring to clear a particularly nasty paper jam. This is what happens when you build it anyway.

This one’s a little harder. You’ve got to be a little bit literate to identify the “Dresden 1945” model chandelier from the Slaughterhouse-Five collection.

This house must have been built from an old architectural plan book I recall. It’s one of the two upstairs bedrooms from the “Obsessive Compulsive Cape.” You can put one of your modestly disturbed children in there and they’ll have hours of fun, even if you don’t give them any toys. Or furniture.

Plumbing supply houses have really caught on to the Go Bleep Yourself single-lever faucet craze. This homeowner has achieved the coveted “Double Aniston.”

Let’s say you’re an evil interstellar Mind Lord. Your Death Star is in the shop for repairs. as usual. The check engine light on one of those things will curl your hair, if it’s not all irradiated off under your helmet, I mean. You try to fill the hole in your schedule with some meetings around the Galactic Deathstorm office, to keep your minions up to date on your latest plans for taking over the universe, but your laser pointer keeps cutting a hole in the whiteboard and frying some secretaries in the break room on the other side of the wall. You realize you need a vacation. OK, Darth Boone, have we got a getaway house for you!

You know, conversation pits with fondue pots were really popular back in the late sixties. You’d invite all your friends over and sit on shag-carpeted levels and dip bread into molten cheese and talk about how many punch cards you folded, spindled, or mutilated down at the office, while the womenfolk compared notes on just how high they could get their hair using Johnson-administration-era bumpits and headbands. But times change, and sometimes you have to wind the clock back to go forward, as they say. So forget conversation pits. I can assure you there’s nothing more convivial than a medieval two-holer. But beware of this one. It appears from that empty wrought iron bracket that neither of you is going to be able to spare a square.

I remember the good old days when guys like this homeowner would just bring along some soil from the graveyard they were buried in when they moved to new, ahem, digs.