Incrementally Diminished

Regular reader and commenter and interfriend Gringo has apparently pointed out our little hovel project over at the Chicago Boyz website. I’m always grateful for this sort of attention. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Chicago Boyz before, but I recognize the names of some of the contributors. The title of the post in question is The Most Wrecked House on the Market, and to my semi-delight, the house in question is in Frankfort, Maine. I’ve been in Frankfort, Maine at least once, and I’m quite familiar with the larger burghs that surround it. I’m familiar with the General Grant style of the house in question, too. So the author has my nose, as they say.

Now is generally the juncture in the proceedings where I disagree, of course. I’ll try to avoid becoming unintentionally disagreeable. I am a serial failure at that, but we do try. The most wrecked house on the market? I think not. Actually, I know not.  Not even in Maine.

It’s vanishingly easy to find much worse than that in Maine, and in much less desirable locations than Frankfort. Viz:

Of course, if you need more examples of arson-ready domiciles, you can always refer to Great Moments in Maine Real Estate.

Now let’s take a look at what they think is “The Most Wrecked House on the Market“:

Hmm. I said, let’s look at it. Bah, there’s a tree in the way. Let’s try again:

Well, now we’re getting somewhere. The tree is clearly a maple. Probably a sugar maple, but it’s hard to tell.  Dadgum it, fortune favors the bold and ill-informed, so I’m going to stick my neck out and say it’s an acer sacchurum. There may or may not be a house behind it.

No, I mean it this time. Let’s look at it:

For crying out loud, where is that door? Why is it pictured in a vertical letterbox? Are you trying to sell this house, or aren’t you?

Well, you see, you can’t really tell anything, because realtors refuse to do their jobs. Their only job is to convey information, and open the door if it’s locked. It doesn’t  matter if they can or can’t do these things, they won’t, so there’s no difference, really. There maybe one useful photograph of the exterior, and none of the interior. Hell, I’m pretty sure the only picture of the front of the house is taken without getting out of the car.

Never mind, I’ll do a driveby and we’ll see what we can see:

Now we’re getting somewhere. According to my new best friends at Chicago Boyz, this house needs nothing short of gasoline and a match. I’m not qualified to argue about arson with people associated with Chicago in any way, but I don’t see any cows or lanterns in the yard, just an old Sunfish sailboat. I’ll cut the author some slack. Both she and I are laboring under imperfect information. That’s the primary tool in the real estate agent’s toolbox, so we’re cooperating nicely by drawing conclusions without knowing much of anything. But the author says her daughter is an agent, and she says houses like this one aren’t worth saving. In internet yelling, that’s called an appeal to authority. It’s also like waving a red flag at a bull to say it within my earshot.

I’m trying to avoid snark, because we’re talking about relatives here. But in my experience, which is voluminous, real estate agents are the least competent person to offer input on the renovation of a house. Any house. They have no idea what things cost, how to go about fixing them, or what is dangerous as opposed to plain icky. They don’t know a cape from a split level. In Maine, their advice usually consists of informing you that can install ceiling fans in every room, paint every room gray, and vinyl side the place. If that won’t do the trick to double your money, you can always knock the place down and put a double-wide on the lot.

Let’s go around the side:

There’s a junk removal sign by the stop sign. There’s one problem solved. The authoress has made an assumption that the interior must be a total wreck because the realtor refused to enter it. That assumes facts not in evidence, your honor. Your typical realtor thinks they’re participating in a very, very unfashionable fashion show at all times, and they don’t draw any distinctions between icky and dangerous. They’re wearing open toed shoes and won’t go inside.

So I’m a pro. What can I tell from looking at the Google Maps images and the listing?

1. The house is architecturally interesting and significant. It’s worth saving for its own self.

2. Previous owners listened to a realtor, and put a big addition on the back, even though the main house is probably 3,000 ft2. As is usual, they thought construction was like going mall shopping for cute tops, and ran out of money before they finished. The addition has a solid roof, however, and modern windows and doors. It also has stainless steel chimneys galore, for wood burning appliances. There’s nothing much visibly wrong with it, except it’s a dumb idea.

3. The eaves are quite rotten. The authoress assumes that means it’s been raining indoors for decades. Not so fast. It’s a General Grant house. The eaves project from the sidewall of the house. They need beaucoup work, but it’s not raining indoors from the eaves.

4. The (granite) foundation is OK, at least as far as I can see. The sidewalls are perfectly flat and don’t sag anywhere. This is a big, big plus.

5. The glass is still in the windows. That’s a good sign. It’s probably not full of vandalism and raccoons.

6. The front porch is in great shape, which is miraculous. Even the balustrade is complete and restorable.

7. There’s very little paint left on the siding. It makes it easier to repaint. And there is no evidence of water getting in the sidewalls. The paint weathered away, it didn’t jump off because of water leaks.

8. The original wood sashes are there. They have a curved top, which is kinda wonderful. All the trim around all the windows (but one) is in really good shape.

9. It’s only $79,000. I’ll bet you they’d jump at a lot less than that, too. The house probably has a well and private septic. A lot of land nearby with those would probably cost way more than that.

10. Bangor, which is a plenty big metrop to find a job in, is only 30 minutes north of this place. Bucksport, which is lovely, is a few minutes away. Belfast, which is in the running for the prettiest town on the eastern seaboard, is twenty minutes south, hard by the Atlantic Ocean. My children performed at the Belfast Harbor Fest once. Taxes are low, and Frankfort is a nice place to live. Hardly anyone lives there to prove my point. I gather that everyone wants to step over bums, syringes, blood and shell casings, and human excrement to get to their crummy apartment building in a big city. You’ll have a hard time amusing yourself like that in Frankfort, Maine.

OK, so I’ll admit that Ray Charles could tell this house has been neglected. I say thank god for that. You see, that house can be restored because it’s been neglected. Neglect is the optimal situation. The former denizens no doubt exhausted their Home&Garden ceiling fan/slipper tub/gray floor urges on the crazy addition, and left the real house alone. Neglect is always preferable to active, flipper malice. I can fix neglect. As they say, I can’t fix stupid.

Let me give you an example. In 2022, someone bought a house down the street from this one for under a hundred grand. It looked like this:

There’s an iconic Maine house under the plastic carapace. It was an end-entry Greek Revival farmhouse that the realtor no doubt would call a “cape-style home.” It has a small version of the “Little House, Big House, Back House, Barn” that Mainers used to build to work the land. It was defaced with vinyl siding and plastic shutters and so forth, but the bones weren’t bad.

Well, they’re (trying to) flip it for $260,000 now. Here’s what you get:

The interior is a ridiculous incoherent gray mess, like someone ate a Home Depot and vomited it in the house.

So I can assure you that I could probably fix that pale yellow wreck of a place, and wish I could. And it would probably be worth a half a million when it was done. But I couldn’t fix the second house. How can you explain to a realtor that you’d have to rip out $160,000 of plastic crap and start over again? That is the house that’s not worth anything anymore, because it’s fixed. This is the house that should be bulldozed. But it won’t be, and the other one will, and the world will be incrementally diminished.

The Flip Side of the Maine Real Estate Coin

OK, now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve convinced the rest of the country, and a goodly portion of the world, that people in Maine live in either derelict shacks, or Garage Mahals, like the Camden Architectonic Apocalypse. Not so.

All in all, Maine is pretty nice. Its got a seaside, and mountains, and sylvan glades full of bullwinkles, and primeval forests full of wanderers in REI  gear, or carrying a chainsaw. It’s lively in the big cities, which aren’t big at all, and few and far between. It’s quiet out among the fleas, trees, and disease if you go west or north. Canadians have inherited a reputation for being polite and inoffensive, but it’s Mainers everyone is really thinking of. I’m not sure there are any Canadians left in Canada, and I’m cold enough already, so I’m not going to check. You could do worse than Maine, and you probably have.

So on today’s special edition of Great Moments in Maine Real Estate, we’re going to throttle back on the snide remarks, and show you what you could buy in Maine if you had way too much money, but more taste than our Camden compadres. You’re going to have to pony up an extra half-a-mil, but once you’re over two million, it’s a rounding error, really. You could move to Portland:

Portland’s not the capital of Maine. Ogguster is. Portland is the largest city, but it ain’t large, really. There are about 70,000 people milling around in it. In its general aspect, it’s a miniature Boston. It has a waterfront that is currently duking it out between fishing boats and condominiums. Condos always win, guys. It has a rabbit warren of streets nearby everyone calls the Old Port. It’s nothing but bars and restaurants and tchotchke stalls as far as the eye can see, at least if you have myopia. Lively.

It all pretty pleasant, but it has neighborhood called the West End, that most people covet for an address. This brick wonder is smack dab in the middle of it.

A lot of Portland is made of brick. The whole town burned down a couple of times, and people got tired of carrying water buckets around, and put up brick piles to save trouble. This house was built in 1868, “commissioned by Maine’s Governor Washburn.” That’s an inelegant turn of phrase, but real estate agents are veritable wizards at concatenating sentences that raise more questions than they answer. Commissioned? Did he build it but not live in it? Did he die before it was finished? Is it a spec house? (I doubt it). At any rate, Washburn was a founding member of the Republican Party, also according to the realtor. If you’re trying to sell a house in Portland, Maine, these days, I woulda skipped that. While the whole rest of the state is Alabama with snow, Portland Maine tries as hard as it can to be Portland, Oregon politically. Luckily, they’re bad at it, so the place is still quite liveable.

It’s a handsome looking place, innit? It’s got a better garage than the Frank Lloyd Wrong place in Camden, too. You could sell it for way more than the half-a-mil difference in price, and just between you and me, I’d rather live in this garage than that other house:

Of course I’m committing an architectural abomination by calling it a garage instead of a coach house, but time marches on and we must acknowledge it.

Unlike every other house for sale everywhere, the current owners of this house have avoided the siren song of modern farmhouse chic, left the place alone, and simply took care of it. It’s still nice in there, instead of a gray floor, gray wall, barn door, live-laugh-love featureless monstrosity.

Yeah, I could just about put up with this place:

These poor benighted souls put the Roman columns right-side up.

The kitchen is nothing special, thank God. It looks like normal people could cook food and clean up in there, which is more than you can say for the fussy quartz counter Home&Garden TV abattoirs you see nowadays. And the bedrooms just look like a pleasant place to sleep, instead of “spaces” you could have dirigible races in:

The en-suite master bath is posh. The guest bath isn’t too shabby either:

I’d rather live in the au pair suite on the top floor than the house in Camden. It’s pleasant. Pleasant is underrated these days:

So move to Spring Street in Portland. You won’t be my neighbor, which is a plus for you. You’ll have to bring money, but that’s true in places like Oakland CA, which looks like a war zone to me. Only dogs crap on the sidewalk in Portland, and their owners pick it, too. The property tax is only $2,500 a month (!). I’m sure the town will spend it wisely.

I suppose, unlike the realtor, I should be completely honest, and mention something about winter.

See all (54) the pictures here.

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