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So You Can’t Afford a House: Seis

June 7, 2025 5 Comments

We’ve already belabored this point, but here goes: Many people say they want to buy a home, but it’s too expensive. Many people say many things. The truth is usually something different. What they’re really saying is that they’re incredibly fussy about where they want to live, and how they want to live, and how elaborate and expensive the house they want should be. And no matter how elaborate and expensive it is, it’s gotta be cheap.

So I get it, I do. You’d like to live in a $149,000, newly constructed split level ranch on the beachfront in Maui, with a 1.5% seventy-year mortgage. You’ve decided to wait out the market to get it. I wish you well.

Relying on statistics about affordability are only going to get us so far if I’m going to talk you out of this mindset. You’re going to need some common sense. Since you want a $50,000 master bathroom with a giant plastic soaking tub placed in front of a wide expanse of plate glass windows, I guess I’ll have to supply the common sense. Here goes: The houses you want are not going to plunge in price. The market will bifurcate, same as it did fifteen years ago. Regular houses will continue to sell to regular people for regular (high) prices. Everything else will be plunged into the pay cash or else market of un-mortgageable houses. I’ve offered several examples of this phenomenon here already.

So if you really want a house, I can help you. Not fake want. Really want. I’ll show you another house you can buy for way under $100,000 that most anyone could afford and turn into a decent place to live. One that’s ultimately worth way more than you paid for it. Today’s example is in Readfield, Maine:

Readfield isn’t the sort of place that’s in the headlines every day. It’s out where the trolleys don’t run. That’s a good thing. It’s safe and quiet. And unlike most of the examples I’ve offered, people continue to want to live in Readfield, although few people currently do. There’s only 2,600 people in Readfield, but the population has been rising steadily, if slowly, every census from 1940 on. That’s more than most of Maine can claim. Large areas of Maine are becoming more or less abandoned. Readfield is not.

Readfield isn’t to-hell-and-gone Maine, either. It’s only about fifteen or twenty minutes drive from the state capital, Ogguster. You could make it to Lewiston/Auburn, the second-largest commercial area in the state, in about 40 minutes. You wouldn’t have to become a lumberjack or a potato farmer to live in Readfield, although I suppose you could. There are worse things to be. I live in Augusta, maybe twenty minutes away, and I don’t mind it here. Take that as a recommendation, or a warning, to taste.

Back to the house itself. It’s hard to tell right off, but the house is very old. Someone who hates me, themselves, and humanity has covered it inexpertly with vinyl siding, but there’s an 1810-vintage big-ol’ Cape Cod house inside that plastic carapace. I much prefer old houses over anything built after WW II. Even if you don’t, you could put up with this place. A Cape Cod house is a sensible design for New England.

As if to illustrate the point I’ve been making, the house was originally listed for $110,000. Less than a month later, they dropped the price to $85,000. It will grind ever lower until they unload it. It’s entered the bifurcated market I outlined above. Straight cash, homie, for the homey.

What can we tell just by looking at the exterior picture? It sits on a little ha-ha, so the drainage is probably pretty good. The roof is at least new-ish, if not brand new. There’s a roof jack still on display on the back roof, for instance. The roofline is straighter than I’d expect on a new spec house down the street. It’s a solid structure, at least for its age.

If you’re “from away,” as Mainers call everyone who’s from anywhere else, the ladder lying on the roof might be a mystery. It’s quite common in Maine. You see, no one in Maine has any idea how to season (dry) firewood. They all believe a million wive’s tales about how to handle firewood, and then they set themselves and their homes on fire trying to burn their unseasoned wood. They get so used to chimney fires from creosote buildup that they leave a ladder on the roof to climb up and try to smother it from the top down. It’s funny, this place has a chimney in good shape, and it looks like it’s lined properly, so the two woodburning stoves inside should be pretty safe. But in their heart, the last denizens knew that no matter what they told the other guys down at the VFW about their logpile, they knew they’d set the place on fire with dreary regularity.

The dormers are bit of a mess because the roofers had to strip off some siding to run the flashing up the sidewalls, and no one on earth knows how to fix vinyl siding, only how to install it. You could pull it all off and patch up the clapboards and paint the place. But that would make it more valuable and attractive. No one alive wants that anymore. They want to “update” it.

We’ve seen enough out here. What’s inside?

This is the most orderly area of the interior. The owner must have had what my wife and I call a “suddenly,” and everything, like golf, will have to be played as it lies. But I can tell things right off. The house is a literal dump, but it’s amazingly free of remuddling disasters. Those are wide-plank pumpkin pine floors, aching to be refinished. The original woodwork is there, and unencumbered with generations of bad paint jobs. Even the wallpaper isn’t painted over, making it a relative breeze to remove and start over. And there are beer mugs on the mantel to drink out of while you work. Er, I’d wash them a lot first.

Here’s the kitchen:

The average homeowner (female variety) has completely lost their mind over what a kitchen is. If you watch Better Homes than Yours on teevee, you’ll see what I mean. The kitchen is just a target rich environment for spending money like an oil sheik on acres of semi-plastic countertops and appliances that will never get much use. Look at this kitchen. Fix the ceiling, fix the floor, bring in three new, inexpensive appliances, replace the counters with new laminate (or granite if you can find a convenience store in Readfield to rob), clean the (solid knotty pine) cabinets and spray some fresh clear finish on them, and cook food in there.

I’m pretty sure the peanut oil conveys with the house. There’s more savings for you.

Here’s what looks like a public room downstairs. I also spy with my little eye a toilet in the far beyond, so there’s a working bathroom.

The whole house is filled with junk like this. There’s a fancy ductwork contraption in one of the upstairs dormers that might partially explain how you could be stoned enough to leave the house this way. Dude, did you pay the rent? I think we forgot to pay the rent. Dude?

To sum up, the house sits on almost two acres, but in one of the photos you can see a neighbor’s house, so it’s not out in the landscape enough to give off Clutter family vibes. If you dropped a 30-yard dumpster in the front yard and tossed everything but the peanut oil in it, the house wouldn’t look so bad inside or out. Taxes are a pittance. There’s a well and a septic system, which would require some checking, but then again, no water and sewer bill, either. You could commute to any number of semi-urban centers if you needed a job. You could, more or less, live in it while you fixed the place permanently. I’ve lived in worse. And right across town, they’re building $650,00 single family monstrosities by the dozen. If you really put this house to rights, instead of vinyl siding it some more and laying down vinyl flooring and painting everything gray, I bet the place would sell for half a mil eventually.

So what’s stopping you? You told me you want a house. You just have to roll up your sleeves. Readfield is right over there. It’s only a matter of going.

 

 

A Paradigm Shift

June 5, 2025 4 Comments

We live in an urban area. For most of the people who inhabit places that are not Maine, that description might elicit a snicker. Ogguster Maine is the state capital, but honestly, it’s a tiny town with slightly taller buildings than the hinterlands. Fewer than 20,000 Oggusticles inhabit the place.

Still, it feels urban compared to the far-flung western Maine podunk we recently left. We live on a street lined with turn of the (twentieth) century brick and stone buildings. The street we’re on is a mixture of shops and restaurants and apartments, with a few disreputable establishments like tattoo parlors and government offices mixed in. Mixed use, they call it.

We’re up off the ground, with big windows that overlook the street. We sit by these windows and eat our meals. We’re treated, if that’s the word I’m looking for, to a steady stream of passersby, and car and truck and motorcycle traffic. There is a large state gummint office close by, so the majority of the foot traffic comes and goes from that direction. You can always tell who works there. They wear lanyards with their name tags depending from them. If you made them pin a name tag on their clothing, they’d all quit en masse. It’s not a name tag! It’s a lanyard! Don’t call it a name tag!. It’s one of those weird tics a certain kind of person favors these days. The same kind of people work in office parks, but will come at you with knives if you call it that. It’s a campus! I wouldn’t work in an office park! It’s a campus! At any rate, the supply of humanity on my street makes me think B. Kliban was an optimist.

Back to the gummint building. I’ve been involuntarily watching for months now, so I’m sure it’s not a small sample size, or a fluke. I have never seen such a bizarre aggregation of people enter and exit from anything short of a tent flap on the back of a carnival sideshow. I could try to describe them for you, but I’m afraid my descriptions might accidentally concatenate into some kind of incantation that summons devils from another dimension. Then again, by the look and the number of them, it appears that the incantation is already known, and widely used. My personal favorites are the legions of morbidly obese women who no doubt work in the health department, dispensing eupepsia advice to the rest of us. I have made a solemn pledge to listen to this sort of nutrition advice the moment it is offered by someone who is not the same dimension in every direction, and not a moment sooner.

Meh. The parade of porcine pedestrians isn’t nearly as interesting as their parking predilections. Parking is free and easy everywhere around here, another indicator that it’s a city in name only, and the street I live on is no exception. But you have to parallel park. And man, oh man, no one can do it.

I got curious and wondered if Maine requires you to demonstrate parallel parking technique to get your license. Indeed they do. I found a video where they go through the various steps with an examiner and a victim license candidate. I couldn’t help noticing that the parallel parking portion was performed against miles of curb with no vehicle behind the spot you’re pulling into. I also noticed that this was the only maneuver shown from a bird’s eye view. I could also tell by the color of the shirt and the shield on the sleeve that they’d thrown the driver candidate out of the driver’s seat, and the test administrator performed the maneuver. I also noticed the driving inspector casually spun the wheel with the palm of his hand, which would have got you a hard fail back in the mists of primordial time when I took a driving test. Six and nine, and hand over hand, or else.

My wife and I amuse ourselves by rooting for people when they try to parallel park on our street. Come on, you can do it! We’re looking down on them (every which way), so it’s easy to see why they’re going to come a cropper before they realize it. Pull forward! Too Shallow! Turn the wheel! Straighten it out! Throw out the gangplank, the curb’s over there! Of course our encouragements and advice fall on deaf ears. They’re in their cars with the windows up, and we’re in our apartment with the windows closed. So they’re all on their own. A solid minority leave after several failed attempts. I assume that they’re going to pick up their driving test administrator to bring him back and park it for them, but I might be wrong on that account. I don’t have the kind of attention span to wait that long.

So I remember when the majority of people who drove could parallel park a car. My mother could do it in car made with more sheet metal than a battleship, and smaller parking spaces. Hell, when I was a kid, many cars didn’t have power steering. Let’s see you spin the wheel with your palm when it’s not moving then, tough guy. So I guess the ability to parallel parking is a lost art, now. That’s a paradigm shift of a sort, but it’s not the paradigm shift I referred to in the title.

You see, because we’re up a floor, we can look down into cars as they pass by. It’s a two-way street, so we get to see 50 percent drivers and 50 percent passengers. Of course like everywhere else nowadays, it’s a very rare person, driver or passenger, that is paying any attention to their surroundings. They’re all fiddling with their phones. I’ve recently gotten used to this new normal, but as is often the case, by the time you inure yourself to the New Stupid, it’s superseded and becomes L7, daddy-o. My wife spotted the coming new normal yesterday, and I recognize a coming trend when I see one. A fellow drove by, piloting a large U-Haul truck. He was driving with his knees, while holding a huge bong in his left hand and lighting it with his right.

He drove right on by, so I have no information whether he could parallel park. But honestly, I doubt he could do any worse.

Planet Fatness Again

June 3, 2025 3 Comments

Went to the gym again this morning. I don’t have any heavy physical work to do anymore, for the first time in decades, so we exercise like people do. Except it’s not like people do.

Wifie and me go together. We row, and lift weights, and cycle, and she uses the bingo wing machine while I do what are called woodchoppers. Honestly, I should just get a job digging ditches, and my wife should take in laundry.

It was later than usual when we got there, so we got to see a different crop of human flotsam and jetsam. No matter what time it is, everyone just sits on the machines and fiddles with their phones instead of doing much of anything. Then they drink out of giant binkie bottles, which I’m sure are filled with some form of stupid water, or that cough syrup stuff mixed with caffeine that makes people skydive and race motorcycles or maybe kitesurf with logos on their spandex.

The crowd today was much younger than we’re accustomed to earlier in the morning (it was nine-ish). It’s mostly girls who travel in little packs. Earlier on it’s old farts and gay men and people who want to shower in strange, redolent places before going to work. It’s nearly warm out these days here in Maine, so the young girls who sleep in and exercise later are finally able to shed their yoga pants and display their voluntary port wine stains to the best effect.

The teevees are everywhere, spraying us with visual sludge while we row and bike. The sound was off, thank the savior. A weird man was taking a tour of John Cougar’s bass player’s house, which for obscure reasons qualifies him for celebrity, I gather. They were very specific to call him John Cougar, not John Kroger Kruggerand, or Jack Kennedy Melonballer, or whatever he was calling himself there for a while. In any case, Jack Catamount wasn’t present.

I intuited that our F-clef hero and his consort wanted to sell their house and move to other quarters. By the look of him, it occurred to me that he might want to shop for a bed with a lid instead of a ranch house or similar crash pads. The outside of the house in question was the usual faux-colonial, bland, featureless white vinyl box somewhere in St. Louis or Kansas City or another place I’ve never been.

Then they toured the inside. Every surface on every room on the interior had been decorated with garish paint colors and defaced with alleged artwork by this shortbus polymath, and lavishly garnished with acres of ghastly mosaic tile, until the whole house looked like an extract from a drunkards’ nightmare.

The homeowner was wearing a shirt with his high school picture printed on it dozens of times in a pattern, kind of a weird flex for a guy nearing judgment by more substantial deities than cable TV hosts. After an excruciating tour of his lair, he eventually went off-camera, and then came back playing a washboard with various kazoos on bendy straws and other apparatuses for making unpleasant noises appended to it. It looked like Hannibal Lecter had designed his own bagpipes. I’ll drop to my knees this evening and thank my creator that the sound was off.  The whole time, this guy’s wife stood next to him and looked dazed, which I gather is her signature move.

I eventually wandered off to lift heavy things, and push objects that didn’t want to move, and so forth, and when I returned, the real estate circus was just finishing up. The chyron informed us that for some strange, inexplicable reason, the house hasn’t sold. Yes: causes unknown, a stark mystery wrapped in an enigma and buried in a Folger’s can in the yard. Unknowable.

It occurred to my wife and I, on the way home, that we’re the last sane people on earth. It also occurred to us, that by the dictionary definition, that makes us the weirdos. I think we can bear up under the shame of it.

[Update: Thanks to Gerry for his continuing support of this website. It is greatly appreciated]

{Additional Update: Thanks to an anonymous contributor for their kind words and their generous donation to our tip jar. It’s greatly appreciated]

Month: June 2025

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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