I couldn’t make up my mind whether to feature this house on So You Can’t Afford a House?, and/or Great Moments in Maine Real Estate, or keep it to myself. Because heaven help me, I actually considered buying it. But I laid down for a while with a cold compress or two on the palm of my hand and the urge passed.

It’s in Harrington, Maine. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it. It’s nearly as far Down East as you can get, a hamlet with less than 1,000 souls. It’s about halfway between Belfast and Eastport, which is where you either turn left, or end up in Snow Mexico after a short, brisk swim. At one time, Harrington had lots of industries like potato farming and sailmaking and shoemaking and shingle splitting and shipbuilding and various other manly arts, but now the only business of note around there is the company that weaves those Wreaths Across America decorations. Everybody else scratches out a living one way or t’other.

We visited Harrington a couple years back. We liked the little string of towns it’s surrounded by on the nether end of Route 1.  Ellsworth, Gouldsboro, Columbia Falls, Machiasport, and Lubec. The town squats next to the delightfully named Narraguagus Bay. It’s fun to say Narraguagus. Go on, say it. Narraguagus!

The house backs up to a river that runs out to the sea, with a boatyard next door, in case you need to get some serious seafaring cred. And if you look at the picture closely, you’ll note that there’s a brand new roof on the place. That’s exhibit A on why you could buy this house and live in it, if you  really wanted a house to live in. You keep saying you do, but I’m not sure I believe you. I keep showing them to you, but you don’t buy them.

Here’s where the new roof came in. The old roof must have leaked, and caused this and that problem. But there doesn’t seem to by any major structural damage from it. This house is from around 1930, so it has many typical Bungalow style details, like flared sidewall shingles, a curved front roofline, a big shed dormer, and patterned concrete block foundation, porch, and front facade. So being a textbook Bungalow style, this immediately prompts the realtor to call it a Cape, because realtors don’t go to architectural school, if they go to school at all after the fourth grade.

The house has been seriously neglected, which is wonderful. It’s easy and rewarding to deal with neglect. It’s when people watch teevee and get ideas from raccoon-eyed harridans and men who sit down to pee that houses get really get wrecked. You can restore this house. You can’t if everything has been painted gray and covered in plastic.

There are four bedrooms and two bathrooms arranged inside a 2,400 ft2 footprint. As you can see, the roof leaked before it was fixed. I’ll bet that wallpaper is original equipment in the house. All the woodwork in the house is intact, and probably is the original shellac/varnish combo, easily refreshed. Almost all the floors could be refinished. There is some form of forced hot air heat ducting visible in the walls and floors, so you wouldn’t have to tear the place to pieces to update the heating system, probably just the furnace.

There are two bathrooms. One of them is a screech. It looks like it was added or updated in the fifties, and is quite an eyeful:

If you’ve never experienced it, there’s nothing quite like plastic tile. It was only popular for about ten minutes in the fifties, but somehow I’ve managed to be asked to renovate every bathroom that ever used it. The red sink and toilet is just a bonus. And I don’t know much, but I know that a roll of toilet paper placed in that holder will have more water in it than the river out back after the first shower, But I quibble. I’m not certain, but I imagine that the rag stuffed in the drain pipe conveys with the property, so you won’t have to bring your own.

Among all the other rooms, it’s got this bitchin’ den, complete with a bump out, a fireplace, Pickwick pine paneling, an inlaid floor, wall sconces, and even a piano.

Since the house was built in the 1930s, it’s even possible that the electrical wiring is safe-ish, instead of old knob and tube stuff, although good luck plugging in anything that needs a ground plug. The house needs plenty of plaster work, of course. But it’s not all that hard to patch in drywall, or simply demo large areas of failing plaster and drywall over the whole thing. And if you don’t need the space, you can close off the upstairs rooms and not heat them in the winter, or work on them one by one as you renovate the whole place.

So they wanted $129,000 in March, and woke up and smelled the coffee in May and dropped it by $4,100, and then got religion in July and knocked it down to $99,000. You could play chicken with the realtor, and wait for them to panic again, but sooner or later someone will bite, and a house for under a hunny will disappear.

So I’d love to buy this house, and put it to rights, and skip the gray walls/grayfloors/gray counters/gray cabinets/gray vinyl siding extravaganza this place is going to get. I’d like to put it to rights, more or less like it was when it was built. But I won’t, because no one much cares about stuff like that anymore. An American house is abused to destruction because it’s either a simple shelter to watch teevee in, or turned into a bland, expensive, plastic wasteland. And while I’d like to save every damsel in distress I meet while out skirmishing, they all seem to have nose rings and purple hair these days, and I’m no monument to justice.

But there you go, you could do it: a house for under a hundred grand.  I’d bring a deck of cards with you. There’s generally ten months of winter in Maine, and two months of tough sledding.