Well, just to prove that yesterday’s cheap house wasn’t a one-off, here’s another house for around the same price, and with a similar look out below pricing pedigree. Currently priced at (don’t blink) $64,900, it’s a 3-bed, 2-bath ramshackle wonder in Skowhegan, Maine.
The house is smaller than yesterday’s hovel, but it does have a garage/barn thing to its credit. The denizens have worked their usual plastic magic on the exterior, and put tiny windows here and there where the big Victorian sashes used to reside, but the place isn’t falling down or anything. They’ve also embraced the Welcome to Costco, I love you ethos, and tested themselves against the how many dogs do I need to hold my own against this many cats conundrum, but the place would be habitable if they disinhabited it.
Skowhegan is a less desirable exurb than yesterday’s Gardiner example, but just. It’s bigger, with 8,600 overweight Maine starvelings roaming its streets. It has a real downtown lined with more shops than empty storefronts. You could live in Skowhegan, and say you like it, and some people might believe you.
My kids had a lot to do with Skowhegan when they were younger. The town punches above its weight class for civic functions. Our boys performed at the Opera House, and for the River Fest, and at the Pickup Cafe, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. There are plenty of nice people in Skowhegan. You could add or subtract from the total if you bought this house.
The house has also descended into the unmortgageable world, and it shows in the price history:
I can smell it on the breeze. Enter the downscale housing market now, or wait forever for first-rate stuff to plunge in price. Good luck with that.
7 Responses
You can’t have Cinco on Tres de Mayo.
Es No Bueno.
Lo siento
I can’t really imagine anybody bothering to MOVE the contents of that house.
So my only question is, “How many dumpster loads will it take to clear it out if they ever manage to sell it?”
Well, Blackwing, I can only infer that you’re somewhat unfamiliar with Maine. Oh, they’ll move all that stuff, and stop on the way to their next place at the dollar store and buy more stuff. Fifty percent of everything built in Maine in the last five years is dope stores, the other half is self storage places.
You might be interested in this home upgrade video. Brothers Buy An Abandoned House In Portugal 18 Months Start To Finish Timelapse.
IIRC, they used both wood plank and composite wood flooring.
Their putting utility lines into the concrete reminds me of a project a family friend did. The 1938 hurricane had toppled many trees on his property. In the “if you have lemons..” mode, he decided to build a log cabin from those toppled trees.
He installed radiant floor heating in the concrete floor. In the 1930s, radiant floor heating was rather unusual, but he was quite often a step or two ahead of his time. Unfortunately, the metal pipes he used eventually corroded, resulting in abandoning radiant floor heating. If he had installed plastic pipes under the floor, perhaps the radiant floor heating would still be usable. I don’t know how available plastic pipes were available at the time.
At his suggestion—and supervision–my father installed a concrete floor above our kitchen, in preparation for turning the attic into an apartment. For over a year, my father added metal junk to the space between the kitchen and the attic to give support to the concrete.
It worked.
Hi Gringo- I hate all TooYube construction videos.
I loved that video, and love the people for making it, and you for posting it in the comments.
This video was about 100% timelapse, which is another way of editing it. Too many construction videos are not edited–or not edited enough. IIRC, I ran across one construction video sequence that had 67 postings. So, 30-60 hours of viewing. Little to no timelapse. Much better to timelapse those 30-60 hours into 20- 45 minutes. The brothers plus a wife put 18 months into the project, which would be an estimated 6000-9000 person-hours. Because they cut those 6000-9000 person hours into 45 minutes of viewing, viewers were interested into the end.