[If you just tuned in, we’re continuing a diatribe from yesterday on why you could buy and live in a cheap house in Gardiner, Maine]

So what are we looking at here?

I can tell all sorts of things just by looking at the pictures. Someone who hates me, and themselves a bit, have disfigured this house with vinyl siding. Ho hum. If you really cared, you could yank it all off and find perfectly good wood siding underneath it. It would just need a coat of paint. In a way, vinyl siding is like suspended animation for the siding underneath it. The house itself is sorta like Ted Williams head. It’s frozen in there somewhere. Frozen from October to May, anyway. Whatever. It’s not important.

The rooflines are about as straight as any house built in 1870 has any right to be. Back then, houses were built with framing in odd sizes and spacings. They were plenty strong enough, but prone to creep. They’d deflect over time, and get deformed into permanent sags. I don’t notice anything structurally wrong enough to make give me the willies.

They’ve done the usual stupid things. The back porch was enclosed. It was probably once a nice spot to stand in out of the rain while you fumbled for your keys. Now it’s a plastic elevator car that doesn’t move. The big satellite dish is a distinguishing mark of the breed of people who rent these sorts of places.

There’s a little fascia damage. That’s because imbeciles put up a plastic rain gutter. This collects rain and snow, freezes hard in November, and causes ice dams to crawl up the roof. Luckily they were so flimsy that the spring thaw took the middle section out. Rainwater should be handled on the ground level in Maine. The back of this house looks like a later addition. It will be less interesting than the front, and harder to remodel.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The house has a power line strung to it, and still has meters. It has town water, and town sewer. A couple of phone calls and you could conceivably live in it. People completely underestimate the value of these conditions. I’ve built new houses. You can’t believe what it takes to get a power pole, or get a septic system approved, or how chancy and expensive it is to drill a well, or pay to have a new structure added to the water service in the street. This house is time and money saved just sitting there.

Let’s look at a downstairs room:

Hmm. The floors are wide plank pine. There’s still some carpet pad stuck on them. Carpeting over floors is like vinyl siding. In a lot of cases, it shields the floor from you, not you from the floor. They’ve probably never been refinished and would look great.

The ceiling strapping is a tell. Horsehair plaster over wood lath loses its grip after decades of people bouncing on the floors above it. It starts to sag and crumble. People do silly things to avoid actually fixing the problem. The strapping was nailed up to make a grid to staple cardboard tiles over. That’s why it’s spaced on 1-foot intervals. I fixed the same problem in my last house: The lasagna of layers. I counsel you, if you attempt to pull down the strapping (called firring, or furring, in some places), you’ll pull down the whole ceiling. Those things were nailed hard back in the day. Just leave it and drywall right over the strapping.

You can run electricity in the gaps between the strapping, if you need to, or smash holes in the ceiling above to run stuff. You will have to. That light fixture’s backing screams knob and tube wiring to me. You’re going to want to run a lot of electricity in this place. Just plan on smashing it in and fixing the walls and ceilings. It’s not that hard.

Note the grating on the floor. There’s forced hot air run all over this house. Awesome. Even if the furnace is junk (it is), the ducts are in place already. I had to run all the ducts in my last house. Doubles the HVAC work.

Let’s look at another room:

Maybe oak, probably maple strip flooring in good condition. Refinishing floors is hard work, but ultimately not complicated. You can see plan B for dealing with the ceiling falling down: drop ceilings. You’d have to get adept at stripping off wallpaper after it’s painted over, putting up a drywall ceiling, punching in some electricity and patching up after, sanding floors, and painting some trim. All easy stuff that won’t cost a lot in the scheme of things. Simple effort is the cheapest part of home remodeling, and the scarcest in my experience.

There are bathrooms in the place already:

That’s a cast-iron tub you can’t afford to buy, but you can afford to clean, can’t you? There’s another one in another bathroom, too. There’s a plywood floor aching for tile. Rip out the tub surround and tile that while you’re at it. It’s not that hard. If I can do it, you can do it.

There’s no usable kitchen in the house, but there are two kitchen rooms. The place was a two-family at one time (two meters is a tell, too). This place will probably get wrecked (flipped) for a two-family. You could have one big house, or two crappy ones. You’d have to dump a lot more money into it as a two-family. The rules and headaches for having tenants are way bigger than fixing a place for yourself.

What good would a usable kitchen be, anyway? I see women on the shelter shows tearing out ten year old kitchens to “update” them. Get a stove and a fridge delivered and make the sink faucet work, and you’ll be in business on day 1. I did it, so can you. You can remodel the place at your leisure.

I’m getting too far into the weeds here. You could probably make an offer on this house below where it’s listed, and they’d jump. They’ll probably lower it again anyway. If you dumped a total of maybe $100,000 into the place, including the sales price, and put a lot of sweat into it, it would be worth triple what you paid for it. Crummy condo-houses as big as this joint are selling for $450,000 across town. And if you live in a house for at least two years while you fix it, there’s no capital gains tax on the money you get from selling it.

So, you want a house.  Gardiner is right over there. It’s only a matter of going.