Just a few years ago, it was pretty easy to find an old fixer-upper in Maine, priced at a pittance. A lot of it is gone now, swallowed up in the gray floor-gray walls-gray vinyl-siding maelstrom that has infected the flip this house world. But there’s still some out there. I showed you a shingle style palace for fifty grand last week. If you’re not in a Sangerville, Maine mood, I thought I’d show you that it wasn’t a one-off. How about this brown study, in Madison, Maine?
Madison isn’t as far-flung as Sangerville, so the cover charge is a little higher: $99,000. Madison has nearly 5,000 people in it, which makes it damn near a metropolis in Somerset County. At one time, the town was teeming with factories making things like horse carriages and window sashes and doors and coffins. Just about cradle to grave employment, there. The Kennebec River ambles through the center of town, and it served as the power company and the highway out of town. It helped make Madison into a lumbering town, which supplied the wood for all the factories. There was a paper mill in town, too, but it closed in 2016. I think it’s been re-purposed to make some sort of boondoggly eco-friendly something or other, but whatever they’re doing in there, it doesn’t smell like a paper mill any more when you drive by.
Back to the house. It’s got 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. As far as wrecks go, it’s not all that wrecked.
It’s a Victorian, but a very late Victorian. They banged the last nail in this thing just before banging the last nail into Old Vickie’s coffin. It’s more or less a Queen Anne Cottage style. Asymmetrical, multiple rooflines, clipped corners, bays, wrap-around porches, and lots of things to collect spider webs. It rambles out towards the back and has a nifty attached barn, which is in good repair and neat as a pin inside. That’s quite unusual around here. In general, people in Maine put things into their barns, and leave them there to age for fifty years or so until they figure they can throw them away without feeling bad about it. At my last house, I watched out the window while the neighbors, who had sold their house, cleaned out the garage. Everything but a car came out. My wife and I amused ourselves identifying the vintage of the stuff as it emerged. Hey look, it’s Burt Reynolds’ bachelor pad crushed velvet orange sectional sofa! We were dumbfounded at last, though, when an entire airplane came out of there. Only curse words would do it justice. A f@#$%ing plane!
Back to business. This Madtown fixer is the best kind of neglected. You can fix a house that’s been neglected. It’s constant remuddling that wrecks everything, and eventually makes houses worthless. This house isn’t worthless:
Everything needs a little attention, but nothing is ruined. The dangling outlet hints that you’ll be fishing new wires in the walls eventually, but honestly, after you steam off the wallpaper, you can bash away at the plaster, put in what you need in the way of Romex and plumbing, and patch it back up easily enough.
Holy cow, this place is just short of a palace inside:
OK, maybe not a palace. But you could cock a snook at your friends when you invited them over for dinner. You know, after you spent 10,000 hours fixing the place. C’mon, it’s got pocket doors and wainscotting!
Right off, it’s got a workable kitchen and usable bathrooms. With only a little preliminary work, you could camp out in this house without too much discomfiture, and bang on it to your heart’s content, or your heart’s failure, whatever comes first.
Taxes, at $200 per month, won’t break you. And Madison, while not exactly Tribeca, isn’t completely nowheresville. It has a sorta downtown with modestly impressive brick buildings, with things like bad restaurants and dope stores. Madison isn’t too far from Skowhegan, either, which has a more or less lively, downscale downtown. You could live in Madison, and almost like it. What’s stopping you?
11 Responses
The outside siding needs some replacement. A hometown friend replaced the wood siding on her 300 year old house. The house was her childhood home. The guy who did the work, a classmate of my sister, was a retired science teacher keeping busy in retirement.
The inside woodwork is beautiful. Much of the woodwork reminds me of my grandparents’ home in the Midwest, which was built circa 1905.
The taxes, at ~2% of value, are about the same as the tax rate where I live in TX. Same appraisal rate, but higher appraised values. Being a senior geezer, I pay a lot less than 2%. No complaints from me.
One point about rural versus urban these days is that the Internet has diminished the difference between urban and rural life. You don’t have to go to the big city for a lot of your purchases if you have the Internet. With the Internet, you have the same access to information in rural areas that you do in urban areas.
You could live in Madison, and almost like it. What’s stopping you?
It being a small town is fine with me. I grew up in a small town, where we had to drive 8-12 miles for a complete grocery store.
As a single person, I don’t need (was it?) 2,246 square feet. The killer is the weather. After four plus decades in TX, I’d rather not experience inland Maine winters– which are also decidedly colder than what I experienced growing up in southern New England. My brother’s place in south coastal Maine also has warmer winters than inland Maine. But in Maine you don’t have to put up with 3-12 weeks of 100 degree weather. And the cucarachas. Each place has its pluses and minuses.
Definitely a good deal for $100k.
Hiya Gringo- Always a pleasure to see you in the comments.
The siding suffered under all the spots I’d expect to see ice dams in the late winter. Water backs up, trickles behind the siding, and then makes a mess on the way back out. I think the house was stained, not painted, too. Many people assume that stain is better than paint because it won’t peel. But UV gets at it and it loses its ability to keep water out, and protect against UV degradation of the wood fiber. I’ve restored house with lots of claps curling away from the house like that because they stain on them still looked like a color, but wasn’t doing anything anymore.
I gotta ask about the roofline on the semi-wraparound porch. From some of the realtor’s pictures it looks like they did a kinda-sorta gable roof on the thing, rather than just a simple shed roof. In other words (I’ve got lot of ’em) the portion of the roof closest to the house slopes backwards TOWARDS the house, rather than away from it.
That resulted in the disaster area where where the porch roof meets the siding and it all disintegrated.
Is that a normal Maine approach to a porch roof?
Where I grew up (Minnesnowta) the porch roof would just be a shed-style and slope straight down and away from the house. That way when the snow got too deep on it and you had to go up and shovel it off you’d simply slide off and land butt-first on the sidewalk, like a normal person. If you were just slightly brighter you had a snow rake with wheels on the bottom with a long extension pole so that you could drag the snow off it from the ground, and only get inundated with a deluge of snow if you weren’t careful about stepping back in time. Much easier on the vertebrae and pocketbook, and kept the shingles relatively intact. Also kept the porch roof from collapsing.
The interior of that house is absolutely beautiful, and makes the exterior work almost (well, pretty much) worth doing. And once you’re done with the rest of it, you can go ahead and nuke the kitchen with that horrific drop-ceiling.
Hi Blackwing- The porch roof slopes away from the house, but it has a hip roof end over the stairs. To keep the porch roof eave from dripping on you as you ascend the stairs, they built a cricket, a crosswise, small gable to send the water left and right, away from the stairs. That’s why the stairs are still there. It also made a shallow valley to the right of the stairs, which prolly fills up with snow and makes the mess of the siding you see there due to ice dams. It’s not a terribly bad design, but the owners would have had to rake the roof once in a while to forestall problems. It snows in Madtown.
That’s beautiful!
I’m too old to tackle a project like that but, I can dream.
Hi Jean. It’s a nifty place, ain’t it? It’s got an oriel on the side. I’ve always wanted an oriel.
*sigh* There ya go again. I had to look up ‘oriel’.
I gotta wonder what that drop ceiling in the kitchen is dropped from.
(I mean, something from a Stephen King novel could be up there…)
Hi Ed- Thanks for reading and commenting.
The drop ceiling kitchen isn’t universal in Maine, but it’s a major minority. It starts back when the house was built. They painted the ceiling with calsomine paint, which is really just paste. It gets all greasy from cooking, so they painted over it with oil paint. Then it peels, forevermore. Then they try gooping textured ceiling stuff over that, which ends up in the stew from time to time. Sooner or later they give up, and do the drop ceiling thing.
What’s stopping me? My better half doesn’t want to live through any more New England winters.
Otherwise I’d be all over that like stink on a hippie.
Hi JC- They got real winter in Madtown, you’re right about that. Like EB White said, in Maine, winter is a full time job.