So You Can’t Afford a House: Ocho

Well, just checking in with the “I can’t afford a house” crowd. I’m sure you’re living in a cardboard box behind a dumpster right now, but it’s got good wifi, so you don’t mind. You’re waiting out the market. In many ways, it’s a sound strategy. Prices for houses are slipping right now. If you wait long enough, I’m sure you’ll be able to buy that 4,000 ft2 Midcentury Modern house in perfect condtion in downtown San Francisco you’re imagining, as long as it’s priced at around $150,000, with nothing down, and a thirty year fixed mortgage with a negative interest rate that pays you to live there. Those happy days are bound to be just around the corner.

Or maybe not. I’m not sure you’re going to enjoy shuffling out to the mailbox to pick up both your Social Security check and your mother’s at the same time, because you’re still living in her basement. So maybe I can help. I’ll find you a house you can maybe afford to live in. You’ll have to live in Maine. I do. I can assure you it’s not all that difficult to chip the ice off the well in February to fill your Keurig. The bull moose are very friendly in rutting season, and you can walk right up to them and pat them on the nose. Well, that’s what I tell people from Massachusetts, anyway. In any case, Maine has everything from lobsters to maple syrup. While I’m not suggesting that you combine those two, you can use them with the other items we have in abundance. You just might be happy in Maine, who knows?

So you’re going to need a house, because tenting is a bit of a challenge for about seven months a year. And to get back to the topic at hand, you’re going to need a cheap house. How about this one, in Rockland, Maine?

Sorry for the fuzzy wuzzy images. The town “tax-acquired” this house. That means the real estate agent won’t even get out of his car to take pictures. They probably don’t even have keys to get in. But this is Maine, so I figure all the windows and doors are unlocked anyway. If he wanted in, he would have gotten in. The realtor knows he isn’t even going to make a car payment on the sale, so he might not have even stopped, just rolled down the window and rolled past slow enough to take these pictures. So we’ll have to guess about the inside. The price? $39,000. I’ll guess it’s a wreck.

Now, what do you get for about the cost of a Hermès Shiny Porosus Crocodile Birkin handbag? Well, it’s a two-bed, one-bath, 1,262 sq foot Cape Cod house on about a quarter of an acre. Built in 1850, and abused some since then. It’s probably some kind of disaster inside, but it looks fairly solid for how old it is. It’s got a new roof, and new-ish windows and doors in most of the openings.

It’s got a little addition on the side that probably was a summer kitchen, or a pigpen, or both way back in the day. It could use some window glass. I have no idea if the Seadoo conveys, but I’ll bet it does. If you’re crazy enough to go into the Atlantic Ocean in Rockland, I’m sure they’ll let you do it.

Those are asbestos sidewall shingles on the house. They were probably added around World War II. They were the eco-friendly never needs maintenance wonders that preceded aluminum, and then vinyl siding. They’re fairly indestructible, and you can paint them pretty easily, so you can roll with them if you want to. If you wanted to take them off, you’re allowed to do it yourself if you’re the homeowner, or you can hire it out. Probably cost about 15 grand if you hire it out. Asbestos is treated like toxic waste. However, asbestos shingles are like concrete. If you remove them carefully, and they don’t crumble, patting strange cats is more dangerous. And the wood siding underneath is probably fine, anyway. Just peeling paint, and a lot of nailholes from tacking the shingles over it.

The house has town water and sewer, so there’s not likely to be any five-figure problems lurking underground. There’s an electric meter on the house, so you could probably have running water, a flushing toilet, and lights burning inside the house on day one with a few phone call’s-worth of work. Real estate taxes in Rockland aren’t cheap exactly, but they’re not the end of the world, maybe $1000 a year per $100,000 of valuation. And speaking of the end of the world, Rockland is near the end of the US world, so there will be no HOA fees or anything. You could do what you like with the place. And you know — live in it.

Rockland is fairly nice, actually. It has US Route 1 wending it’s way through it, so it’s not off the beaten path’s beaten path. About 7,000 people, a cute little brick downtown, a lot of artsy fartsy stuff to do in the vicinity, and various seafaring things like lighthouses and ferry boats and so forth.

So there you go. Financially, it’s a Hyundai with a lawn out front. Downeast Maine is about the safest place in the country. There’s things to do, and you might even be able to find a job around there if you’re not drooling on yourself when you apply. Or even if you are drooling, if you work for the asbestos abatement company.

Buy this house! But remember to bring tools, and a certain lack of judgment. The lack of judgment isn’t mandatory, of course, but it is helpful.

Great Moments in Maine Real Estate: Harrington Edition

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.

So You Can’t Afford a House: Siete

Well, we’ve got a doozy for today’s version of So You Can’t Afford a House. This one’s in Millinocket, Maine. Take a peek:

There’s a 4-bed, 2.5-bath bungalow in there somewhere, behind the sumac and the aluminum siding. I’ll bet you it was a snug, pleasant little place 100 years ago when it was built. It used to have a pleasant porch, I’ll bet, before someone enclosed it to make one more room to watch television in. The jerkinhead roof is kinda neat design touch that was almost popular back then.

Let’s go inside:

These are the only two pictures of this, ahem, gem. So we’re not flying blind, exactly, but we are flying with coke-bottle glasses and a light bulb out. Let’s look at what little evidence is on offer. The exterior shot indicates the building is not currently on fire. That’s one for the plus column, there.

The interior information, while scant, is invaluable. There’s my favorite light fixture, the “landlord’s halo.” The pull chain assures you that you’re getting the real McCoy. The later reproductions have light switches. And this one is the coveted “double halo,” with two, hard to find fluorescent rings that buzz a bit and whisper, “rental property” forevermore. So far, so good. There’s a harvest gold range, in the Les Paul sunburst finish. Very nice. I can picture Carol Merrill standing next to it right now. Of course there are two reefers in there. Another good sign. One for food, the other for eight cases of Natty Ice, with a few sixpacks of White Claw on the door shelves. I don’t want to disappoint any potential buyers, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the walls are not actually covered with solid furniture-grade wood boards.  Just a hunch really. And the Congoleum might need a little more than some Mop & Glo.

There’s scant additional information about the property. It appears to have been turned into a duplex somewhere along the line. You could roll with that, or turn it back into a single family pretty readily, I’ll bet. I would, because finding two sets of people who want to live in Millinocket is a tough ask, as the realtors say. The joint has public water and sewer, so no problems hiding under the lawn to haunt you, but lord knows what you’d find in the basement.

So how much does it cost? Go ahead, guess. I’ll bet you miss. For fun, I plugged the number into LLM Chad and asked it to make a list of things that cost the same amount as this Millinocket marvel. The list was long and amusing, but one entry took the cake. I was so surprised by it, I asked Chad if he was fooling, and to break it down for me:

Yes, a top-tier gaming setup could easily cost around $12,000, depending on the level of customization, brand, and peripherals you choose. Here’s a breakdown of what a high-end, professional gaming setup might include at that price point:

Total Estimate Breakdown:

PC: $5,000 – $6,000

Monitor(s): $1,000 – $2,000

Chair: $500 – $1,000

Keyboard & Mouse: $300 – $500

Audio Gear: $800 – $1,500

VR Setup: $1,000 – $2,000

Streaming Gear: $1,000 – $1,500

Desk & Accessories: $500 – $1,000

Total: Around $12,000 (with some variation depending on brand, features, and customizations).

So I guess the cartoonish diss that you’d rather stay in your mother’s basement in your underwear in a gaming chair covered with Cheeto dust playing Half-Life, than live in your own house could become a real life meme, because this house is only $12,000.

What’s wrong with Millinocket? Well, how much time do you have? It was one of the many towns in Maine that relied on the local paper mill for sustenance, and the paper mill closed in 2008. The town has been hemorrhaging population pretty steadily since 1970, down to its current 4,104 souls. You can find out something about Millinocket by watching American Loggers on Discovery if you want to. I have somehow resisted the urge to do so. I even resisted the urge to have the urge.

If you’re a single guy who is willing to pawn his gaming setup and head off to Penobscot County, you’ll be glad to know the local environment is salubrious enough to produce a Miss Maine winner. Unfortunately, that was in 1966. She may still be around, although she may wear her hair differently nowadays, and be hard to spot.

There’s not much crime in Millinocket. The latest year I could find stats for, 2019, reported 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 robberies, and 1 assault in the town during the year. People shoplift and break into houses occasionally, so I’d keep an eye on that range in the kitchen if you move there.

So there you go. A house for less than a used car. 18 Birch Street, Millinocket.

Good luck. We’re all counting on you.

So You Can’t Afford a House: Seis

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.

Great Moments In Maine Real Estate: The Real Estate Fandango

Can we say a word about the real estate agent fandango?

That’s my term for the interminable balderdash stemwinders that real estate agents vomit on their victims over every property, no matter how fair or foul the structure is. I’ve been subjected to it now and then in the flesh, and literally tens of thousands of times on real estate listings. It’s my considered opinion that the accuracy and the honesty demonstrated by real estate agents would make a used car salesman blush.

The reason I call it the fandango, is because while it’s often offered to the public in writing, the plan of all real estate agents is to get you trapped in their car, being squired (dragged all over the landscape) to a series of inappropriate structures that they think they can sell to you by waving their arms around and saying things like the following, from a listing for a house for sale in Perry, Maine:

It’s important to note that many real estate listing are written by chatbots. It’s possible that this one is at least partially written by Chad, as we call him. Um her. Er, it. Well, anyway, there are several telltale signs that this listing was written at least partially by a female human. First, there is mystery capitalization. “Its” in the middle of a sentence. A comma or a space has been elided between “roomideal.” “Plus a generously sized living room” is a sentence fragment. If I had a gun to my head, I’d say Chad wrote it, and then the agent decided to work her magic on it while cutting and pasting it into the listing.

Now if you’re unfamiliar with Maine (who isn’t? I live here and I am), I’ll fill you in on Perry. It is literally the ass end of nowhere. You can throw a rock in Perry and brain a Canadian if you’ve got a strong arm. It’s north of Lubec and Eastport, places I’ve visited during a Donner Party-worthy journey. Eastport is the easternmost city in the continental United States, if you can imagine that. You could swim to New Brunswick, Canada from Eastport. Well, you could if you were a very strong swimmer, and you wouldn’t die after four minutes in that water, which you would. I suppose someone in Chocolate Cove, N.B. could stamp your passport when they fished your body out. At any rate, calling Eastport a city is generous. The population is less than 1,300 people. The appellation of “city” is a vestige of days gone by. Eastport has lost population in every census since 1910, sometimes as much as 24% in a single decade. And Perry is less popular than Eastport, so do the math that the real estate agent won’t.

So in keeping with our suspicion that Chad is involved here, let’s ask Chat AI to produce images of the house in question simply from the description that is offered. Here’s the prompt I gave it:

Here is the description of a house for sale in Maine. Based on the description, can you produce an image that shows a generic picture of what is being described? The image should be photographic, and horizontally oriented:

Here’s how Chad pictures the exterior of a house in Maine that might fit that description:

So far, so good. That’s a five-bay Adam colonial with a console hood over the front door. You can find thousands of those in Maine. I kept going:

Can you make another one, based on the same description, that shows an interior view, of say, a kitchen and dining area?

Say, that’s pretty good. It’s got old sheet vinyl on the floor. There are built-in china closets, like an old house might have. The cabinets have 50s-70s-era hardware, and look like built in place plywood stuff that’s been painted over, very typical of a fixer-upper. The furniture looks like abandoned grandma stuff. We’re on a roll. Let’s press on!

Can you make me a third one, that shows a bedroom on the second floor?

Aw, man, you gotta love the boob light. Chad’s nailed that, and the six over six sashes, the backband trim, and the six-panel doors. Let’s tempt fate, and ask for another exterior shot:

The house has a single car garage, attached to the house by a shed addition on the back of the house. Using the description that began this chat as a guide, can you make a picture, using your impression of the state of the house?

Great stuff, Chad. You are rolling, brother. Peeling paint, lower on the sidewalls where rain splashes, end of useful life asphalt shingles on the roof, a modestly punky fascia, and a dirt driveway.

So now that we’ve got Chad in our corner, using the property’s description to guess what we’re in for, let’s look at the property itself. Ladies and germs, I give you Perry in the flesh:

Exterior:

Ah, asbestos shingles. Before vinyl siding there was aluminum siding. Before that, there was asbestos. It’s fairly harmless as siding, although it’s awful compared to the wood bevel siding it covers. Your house is an instant Superfund site if you ever want to remove it, or even cut a hole in it. And unlike the real estate fandango in the listing, no one has ever used the word “charming” within mortar-shot range of asbestos shingles.

Well, let’s be fair. Maybe the charm is on the inside, like a tubby girl your friend is trying to fix you up with. Let’s check out the kitchen:

Oh, this is definitely a “gem in the rough,” ain’t it. Very, very rough. Like, a lump of coal kinda rough compared to the gem of the description. Perhaps the charm is hiding in the next room. I know I would.

Well, there’s nothing more charming than that light fixture. We used to call that the landlord’s halo. It’s the only halo you’ll ever encounter hanging over a landlord’s head. But let’s be fair. Maybe if we go upstairs, the bedroom “off the bright and open hallway” will have some of that charm we’ve been promised:

Well, this bedroom is, ahem, commodius, but not in the usual sense. And by “bright and open,” I guess they mean open to the elements. But the “welcoming and functional design” is here in abundance. Even bodily functions are included over there in the corner.

The garage is our last hope. Let’s see:

Hmm. I wonder if this garage was originally designed as a trapezoid, instead of a rectangle. Hard to say.

Well, if you’re the real estate agent, and you’re reading this, I’d like to remind you that taking people to places under false pretenses and holding them against their will is considered kidnapping. It’s probably against the law even in Perry. In the unlikely event that they can afford a police department, you might even get into trouble. Other than that, start dancing.