So You Can’t Afford a House: Cinco

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.

So You Can’t Afford a House, Quatro Continued

[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.

So You Can’t Afford a House, Quatro

Everyone says they want to buy a house, but can’t. Then again, everyone says a lot of things.

What they really mean is they won’t. They’re demanding that they be allowed to purchase a very elaborate, large, new or newly re-minted, plastic palace in exactly the high-rent metropolitan area they prefer, and at a rock bottom price at that. Yes, we get it. You’d like to live in San Francisco and pay 1970s prices. Good luck waiting for that. You’ll get 1970s crime and squalor, and like it.

Things are changing somewhat, though. We’re entering familiar territory for yours truly. I warned people during the Great Recession that the real estate market would bifurcate. Regular houses would keep selling for regular money to regular buyers, if slowly. Oddball stuff would get gobbled up by real estate Legrees and disreputable flippers and would eventually be sold for regular money to regular buyers again. You’ll end up with nothing if you wait for prices on regular houses to implode.

Well, that all happened. It’s probably happening again now. Interest rates are considered high again. That is, if you weren’t alive in 1980 and don’t have a library card. Sales are down, and the market doesn’t totally consist of Shirk Brothers Realty telling you to write them a check for $5,000 before they change their mind and wait ten minutes to get offers 20% over list. You’re going to wait until a ranch house in Boston is $150,000 again, and then pounce, right?

Wrong. Here’s the National Association of Realtors telling you like it is:

The National Association of Realtors reported a sales price uptick of 2.9 percent nationally last month to $408,000, while sales eased 2.2 percent compared to March of 2024. Regionally, sales figures in the Northeast for March 2025 remained unchanged from March a year ago while the MSP jumped 7.7 percent to $468,000.

So waiting isn’t helping. What to do?

No worries. Staying out of hot real estate markets is the smart play, anyway. If you want a house, go to overlooked places and buy one for cheap, renovate it yourself, and live in it. And maybe sell it later, and move where you want to with your ill-gotten gains.

Here’s where the burgeoning bifurcation I mentioned will help you. There is always a market for houses that have dropped out of the mortgage world. You’ll find out what a structure is really worth when no bank will write a 30-year-fixed for it. The short, cash only answer is: Not Much. Fifteen years ago, repairable wrecks were everywhere in Maine. I bought one. Then the rest slowly disappeared down the flipper rathole. But I can smell it on the breeze again. Houses are appearing on the realty pages again that you could afford, and you could live in while you fixed them.

How about this one in Gardiner, Maine?

I live really close to Gardiner. It’s part of a pleasant strip of towns named the Augusta Micropolitan something or other. There’s about four or five towns in a row along the Kennebec river that sane people wouldn’t mind living in. Gardiner has a small population, maybe 6,000 souls. It punches above its weight class, though. There’s a real downtown lined with handsome brick buildings with twee shops and restaurants in ’em. There are major retailers of all kinds nearby. The state capital is a ten-minute drive. There is no crime in Gardiner to speak of, even by Maine standards, which is about the lowest in the nation.

It’s a 3-bed, 2-bath vinyl-sided mess, but it’s currently only $66,900. If you wait a few minutes, it will disappear, or be even lower. That’s what happens when a house isn’t mortgageable anymore. Let’s take a look at the Price History, a wonderful place to discover properties like this one:

Hmm. Bit of a gap there between 1870 and 2025. But six price drops since it was listed on March 25th? They can’t get rid of it, and they know it. In my (recent) experience, right around 100 grand is the cut-off point for regular mortgages. People will buy houses with borrowed money, but there are precious few who will buy it with money in their hand. The realtor took a shot at around 100 large, and gave up pretty quick. They’ll keep hacking at the number until somebody jumps. The house has to be sold, and it shows.

I’ve never been to this house, and I’m not interested in going. But I’ll offer my ill-considered but somehow dispositive opinions on why you could buy this place, and make a go of it, based on the info in the listing. So come back tomorrow. Wear sturdy footwear.

[To be continued]

So You Can’t Afford a House, Part the Third

We’ve featured sweat-equity palace opportunities in Madison and Sangerville, Maine recently. How about something a little smaller? More manageable. Maybe you’re just starting out, and your toolbox only has a few screwdrivers and your lunch in it. Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Why not buy this place In Byron, Maine, for a relative pittance, and bang on it until it’s livable, and your toolbox is full?

It’s just under 1,000 square feet of problems, so you won’t get overwhelmed. And, not to exaggerate or anything, but it’s kind of adorable. It’s got a jerkinhead roof! A curved, glassed-in porch! Exposed rafter ends!  Original equipment shingles on the sidewalls! Those sort of proto-toboggan shutters that were popular with houses built 75 years ago!

Sorry, I got infected with the realtor flu and started shotgunning exclamation points all over. But my point stands: It’s kinda peachy, ain’t it?

Well, look on the bright side. You’re not likely to get lost in there. It’s tighter than a landlord’s wallet, but it’s just short of livable.

Small might be good, because you’re going to have to heat it, and if you haven’t noticed, the United States gets winter once a year. Byron gets it plenty. You’ll need beaucoup heat. In the last picture, you can see a version of a Franklin Stove to heat the main part of the house. Believe me, there’s no thermostat on the wall you can turn to get anything out of that thing. But firewood is easy to come by in Byron, Maine. You spend all your time at the gym lifting weights. Why not lift some firewood instead, and save on the gym membership fee?

There’s a more traditional fireplace in the back, and some form of direct vent furnace on the wall somewhere. Probably burns propane, or maybe kerosene. As far as utilities go, Byron is out in the landscape, and many people go “upta camp” around there. Camp can require pooping outdoors in that vicinity, but this little house has a well and some kind of septic in place. And while the meter’s not currently on the place, it can have regular electrical service turned back on. Practically luxurious.

A cooking stove is currently MIA, but there’s room for one in the kitchen-y area. The house probably wouldn’t seem so small after you cleaned out some of the junk:

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

There are a couple of bedrooms, and a sleeping loft area for your manservant.

Byron Maine isn’t overcrowded just yet. There are 103 residents as of 2020. It’s home to Coos Canyon, a picturesque and popular spot to go swimming in the summer and to shiver in the winter. If you keep wandering north, it’s not too far to Mooselookmeguntic Lake, and one of my favorite spots in western Maine, the Height of Land.

So it’s sixty grand. You could live in it right away, more or less, and fix it up. It’s not a dangerous place, unless you decide to fight with the bears over the trash you left outside. You could hike and hunt and fish and birdwatch and snowshoe and ski and snowmobile in Byron. What say you? Feeling Byronic?

So You Can’t Afford a House, Part Deux

Just a few years ago, it was pretty easy to find an old fixer-upper in Maine, priced at a pittance. A lot of it is gone now, swallowed up in the gray floor-gray walls-gray vinyl-siding maelstrom that has infected the flip this house world. But there’s still some out there. I showed you a shingle style palace for fifty grand last week. If you’re not in a Sangerville, Maine mood, I thought I’d show you that it wasn’t a one-off. How about this brown study, in Madison, Maine?

Madison isn’t as far-flung as Sangerville, so the cover charge is a little higher: $99,000. Madison has nearly 5,000 people in it, which makes it damn near a metropolis in Somerset County. At one time, the town was teeming with factories making things like horse carriages and window sashes and doors and coffins. Just about cradle to grave employment, there. The Kennebec River ambles through the center of town, and it served as the power company and the highway out of town. It helped make Madison into a lumbering town, which supplied the wood for all the factories. There was a paper mill in town, too, but it closed in 2016. I think it’s been re-purposed to make some sort of boondoggly eco-friendly something or other, but whatever they’re doing in there, it doesn’t smell like a paper mill any more when you drive by.

Back to the house. It’s got 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. As far as wrecks go, it’s not all that wrecked.

It’s a Victorian, but a very late Victorian. They banged the last nail in this thing just before banging the last nail into Old Vickie’s coffin. It’s more or less a Queen Anne Cottage style. Asymmetrical, multiple rooflines, clipped corners, bays, wrap-around porches, and lots of things to collect spider webs. It rambles out towards the back and has a nifty attached barn, which is in good repair and neat as a pin inside. That’s quite unusual around here. In general, people in Maine put things into their barns, and leave them there to age for fifty years or so until they figure they can throw them away without feeling bad about it. At my last house, I watched out the window while the neighbors, who had sold their house, cleaned out the garage. Everything but a car came out. My wife and I amused ourselves identifying the vintage of the stuff as it emerged. Hey look, it’s Burt Reynolds’ bachelor pad crushed velvet orange sectional sofa! We were dumbfounded at last, though, when an entire airplane came out of there. Only curse words would do it justice. A f@#$%ing plane!

Back to business. This Madtown fixer is the best kind of neglected. You can fix a house that’s been neglected. It’s constant remuddling that wrecks everything, and eventually makes houses worthless. This house isn’t worthless:

Everything needs a little attention, but nothing is ruined. The dangling outlet hints that you’ll be fishing new wires in the walls eventually, but honestly, after you steam off the wallpaper, you can bash away at the plaster, put in what you need in the way of Romex and plumbing, and patch it back up easily enough.

Holy cow, this place is just short of a palace inside:

OK, maybe not a palace. But you could cock a snook at your friends when you invited them over for dinner. You know, after you spent 10,000 hours fixing the place. C’mon, it’s got pocket doors and wainscotting!

Right off, it’s got a workable kitchen and usable bathrooms. With only a little preliminary work, you could camp out in this house without too much discomfiture, and bang on it to your heart’s content, or your heart’s failure, whatever comes first.

Taxes, at $200 per month, won’t break you. And Madison, while not exactly Tribeca, isn’t completely nowheresville. It has a sorta downtown with modestly impressive brick buildings, with things like bad restaurants and dope stores. Madison isn’t too far from Skowhegan, either, which has a more or less lively, downscale downtown. You could live in Madison, and almost like it. What’s stopping you?