I posted this about fifteen years ago. So sue me. I think that moose are pretty interesting animals. They ain’t pretty, but they are pretty interesting. I don’t know why, but I remember their scientific name: alces alces. A moose is just the biggest kind of deer, when you get right down to it. And by big, I mean 1,500 pounds big, occasionally. Tall, too. Sometimes 7 foot at the shoulder. That’s why you don’t want to run into a moose on the highway. It’s lethal to the moose, but it’s a suicide pact with anyone in the front seats, too. The vehicle hits their legs, and the moose’s big ol’ body flops right in through the windshield. It’s about the same as having a Harley thrown at you.
Like most of the more intelligent animals, they eventually figure out that the weird pink creatures mean them no harm, and let them poke at them without taking too much umbrage. Some animals can even remember a kindness done to them. Your house cat, can, for instance. It doesn’t cut any ice with them, but they do remember it.
It’s that time of year again. The snowbanks in Maine have receded to a distant memory instead of a salty spring puddle, and have long since released their pent up cargo of urban jellyfish (plastic bags from convenient stores) to drift on the sultry, room temperature breezes. That means it’s Ironman time!
Well, I guess that’s what it means. I’m new to the city of Ogguster, our state’s capital. I’m pretty new to cities, period. Apparently, they have this sort of Bataan Death March of Fun every year, and they have it in a lot of places. It attracts contestants from all over the world, but it’s a very American idea to my eye. “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” should be stamped on our currency and added to the National Anthem. The last three verses are really weird and you could slip it right in if you have a rhyming dictionary, and no one would notice.
I’m a stranger to Facebook, so I’m a stranger to most current happenings like these. It’s pointless to opine on such matters, but I shouldn’t have to have a Facebook account to look at a police department’s or any other government cabal’s information. But everyone assumes that’s where the squares go for their info, so that’s where they put said info. Oh well. But I honestly didn’t know that they held an Ironman competition in our city. Until I won it.
I’m so ill-informed about the topic that this morning I had to go to the Ironman website to verify exactly what the three portions of athletic misery technically consists of. Apparently, you’re supposed to swim for 1.2 miles in the Kennebec River, past a modest crop of signs that inform you of the wet weather sewer overflow discharge pipes that dot the shoreline. Then you’re required to haul your soggy bottom out of the river and plant it on a bicycle seat and pedal for 56 miles. After that thorough, but no doubt enjoyable chafing session, you’re supposed to trade your $10,000 carbon fiber streamlined bicycle for a wedge of orange to chew on and a cup of lukewarm water (about the same amount of water you still have in your shorts, I’ll bet). Then you run for 13.1 miles, which I noticed is exactly half the length of a marathon. I think they should totally call that a “half marathon.” I’m not on Facebook, so maybe they already do. In any case, I’m sure they all run the whole way while wondering if that guy they left their bike with actually had anything to do with event.
On a morning after basis, that sure sounds daunting. But in the heat of the moment, I just sort of got carried away with the zeitgeist and entered the contest without even trying. And get this, I did it in my pajamas, and my wife did it while naked. Of course this will require some explanation. Here goes:
You see, I don’t think it’s possible to “win” a contest that requires you to swim, bike, and run that far. Don’t get me wrong. In my younger days I was as foolish as the next guy, and ran around like a dog on the 4th of July, and biked like a Tour De France also-ran. Fitness freaks can’t just pull rank on me that easily. I came in 13th in a small town marathon once. I could average 20-25 miles per hour on a bike back in the day on a flat circuit. I’d be accused of cheating on the swimming portion, of course, because of the water wings. But other than that, pointless exertions like this event hold no terrors for me. I’m just not that interested.
Entering the event has many requirements I’m also not that interested in. First, it appears you have to buy all your garments at some kind of trapeze artist unitard store, and we don’t have one hereabouts. These Barnum and Bailey leotard onesies are covered with more slogans and logos than Don Draper’s desk, and I don’t know how exactly you’re supposed to get on that kind of gravy train. I think you have to drink Brawndo while skydiving with a GoPro on your helmet, then land in the bed of a vegan’s electric monster truck, or some other heroic deed, to catch the typical sponsor’s eye. I’m willing of course, but I can’t remember my YouTube login credentials, so the whole scheme would fall apart at the end there.
I would also apparently be required to purchase very elaborate running shoes in electrifying pink or lime green neon colors I haven’t seen since Cyndi Lauper stopped recording. I probably can’t afford those. Everyone was wearing those Randy Savage sunglasses, too, that looked like you could weld with them, or run through gamma rays or something. Maybe it was to protect you from going blind from the radioactive pink sneakers. I dunno. But while I used to own a welding helmet, I don’t remember where I put it. That’s another investment I don’t need to make, and I don’t think getting a beef jerky sponsorship logo on my unitard would impress the other contestants anyway.
I also noticed that some of the female runners had a male trailing them on a bicycle, exhorting them to keep going, with encouragements like, “You can do it!” and, “Keep up the pace!”, and “You got this!”, mostly to women who manifestly couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep up, and didn’t got this, so to speak. I imagined how many stab wounds I’d wake up with the next day if I tried this with my wife. Besides, as I mentioned, she was naked, and being naked, there would be no place to display any logos of energy drinks or energy bars or energy potions, so there would be no point in her competing.
So as I mentioned, I feel as though I’m the only real winner of the Augusta Ironman competition. It’s just that the events in my version of the race varied slightly from the swim, cycle, and the “sorta run, sorta walk fast” final leg. My version of the competition did have three amazing portions of exertions, and I nailed them:
Get woken up at 3:30 in the morning by the neighbor across the hall pounding on our door. The air conditioning unit for our apartment is on the fritz, so my wife was sleeping naked. She woke me up and sent me to the door in my jammies, (gym shorts and a t-shirt). Luckily for me, I used to be a professional musician, so I was used to naked girls hanging around while people hammered on my door telling me the cops had arrived. It’s part of the job description, I think. At any rate, the neighbor told me the cops were towing everybody’s cars out of the parking lot, mine included. That’s where the Ironman race was starting, and we were supposed to move our cars out of there. We had it on our Facebook page, I don’t know how you could have missed it.
The second leg was going down three flights of stairs. I did it in seventeen seconds. I’m sure that record will stand for a while.
The third leg was the most difficult, and I believe my performance was one for the record books. There were about a dozen policemen and about the same number of tow trucks in the parking lot. One wrecker was backed up to our car, and the driver was standing there holding the hook. And get this: I somehow convinced a tow truck driver and several policemen to move the tow truck and let me drive out of there instead of being towed. I talked ragtime faster than Joe Isuzu on meth. I’m still not sure how I managed it. As far as I know, it’s never even been attempted, never mind accomplished. Everyone else got towed, and a $350 bill to get their car back.
So we sat in our living room and watched the cyclists and the runners pass by our front windows, serene in the knowledge that no matter how you tote up the results, we won the Augusta Ironman competition, going away. And we got a spray of flowers to commemorate the victory.
Well, that was confusing. I had a Three Stooges flashback, and thought Saturday was always bath day. But we went to Bath, Maine, on a whim on Sunday, and it was Bath Day all over again. It was lots of laughs, even without the eye-gouges.
It was plenty hot. Around 90F. But while Bath isn’t technically oceanfront, it’s on the Kennebec River, which wends its way down from where we live in Ogguster, and then continues on past Bath out to the Atlantic. So there was a nice almost-ocean breeze, and 90 felt downright pleasant, at least if you stayed on the shady side of the street. Like this:
The picture is somewhat deceiving. We had just walked up Center Street, and were banging a left onto Front Street. That was where the action was, primarily, but it looks sparsely thronged in the photo. But there were a lot of people out. Perhaps they got a good look at us, and kept their distance while I took the picture.
You get a good feel for the place in that picture. Bath is a paean to brick. Real bricks, too, not awful concrete simulacrums. The sidewalks and the buildings and even the alleys are all bricks. Maine towns had a habit of burning down from time to time, and eventually the locals got tired of it and built the whole town over again with bricks. Portland is like that, too. Sometimes it was Indians, and sometimes it was Canadians or Brits, and occasionally, it was just the Know Nothing Partyburning Catholic churches. They got their comeuppance eventually. Besides barbecuing Catholic churches, I gather they were also big into women’s rights. As soon as women got the vote, they outlawed liquor. Imagine 200 shipyards and zero grogshops. Fate worse than death, that.
When we crossed the street to get our ration of un-awninged July solar radiation, which resembles Venus a bit, I took a snap that shows the brick-y facades of the shops to better effect. As you can espy in the next picture, the street has remained mostly unchanged during the last 100 years, except for the Great Awning Blight of 1937:
There are plenty of relatively monumental brick buildings mixed in with the wee shop-downstairs-a-few-floors-of-apartments-above. Like this gem:
Even the more modest bank buildings are pretty elegant:
Bath has a nice mixture of federal, Greek revival, and Italianate buildings. It’s got a hell of a city hall for a burg with fewer than 9,000 people in it:
The town has been known for shipbuilding since they chased the Abenaki Indians out. At one point, there were something like 200 companies making boats in Bath and environs. There’s still one big one, hulking over everything in the town: Bath Iron Works. They make destroyers for the navy:
Well, Prohibition is over, and Bath has numerous places with liquor licenses, and they even serve guys that went to Catholic school. We went in one, the Bath Brewing Company, and had some pale ale to go with their back deck river view:
Food was good, too. We watched over the railing as all the regular folks walked along the riverfront and got fried dough and fried skin in the afternoon sun as they sauntered on the road by the park, where a carnival had set up shop:
The park had one hell of a view of the mighty Kennebec, and the new Sagadahoc Bridge, which helps you continue on Route 1 without getting your feet wet. The old railroad bridge is behind it.
Bath was pretty normal, all in all, which is anything but normal these days. The park was filled with families, and a bandstand where yacht rock covers were served. The local wildmen was just mildly off-beat:
So we had a good time in Bath. I think I could live in Bath, and like it, although whether Bath would like me back is another story. I know it’s dangerous to judge a place on a single, out of the ordinary day, but all I needed to see was three good bookstores on two blocks of Front Street. Case closed.
And the monkey chased the weasel ’round the flagpole.
Not really. I’d have loved to see marching bands in uniforms, desecrating some Sousa while trying to remember straw foot, hay foot, but it was not to be. No matter. It was a very Maine parade. The Augusta July 4th just passed by my window, and refreshed my opinion of my fellow man a bit, even if they couldn’t hunt up any baton twirlers.
Since we’re living the vida loca in the city, we get certain perqs to go along with the lack of peace and quiet. We were smack dab on the parade route. I got to sit on my couch and watch it roll by. I was expecting a perfunctory affair, but it took a full hour to traipse past me and my cup of coffee. It was gratifying to see the street lined with families to see the parade. Children are, after all, humanity’s opinion that life should go on. There were lots of them along the sidewalk under our windows, doing toddler things and generally wearing out their parents in amusing ways.
The parades of my youth are long gone. I think that’s because parades used to be more crypto-military. It was never one of those soviet things with missiles rolling by a bandstand filled with guys about to get airbrushed out of photos or anything, but the vague outlines of the military were always there. Uniforms, marching in step, playing martial music, and waving flags. The pennants of the various marching groups were like battalion identifiers in the army. But that was because our parents generation still had world wars and police actions on their resumes. It was familiar to anyone who had marched in step, but completely devoid of any menace. The military used to be general. Now it’s niche.
So the parade was more like a giant, charming paramecium blobbing its way down the main drag than phalanxes on the march. It consisted of quite the agglomeration of the local gentry, and a heaping helping of just plain stuff, somewhat festooned with bunting and flags, and suitable for waving from, and waving at.
I don’t keep up with the Marvel Comics scene, but even to my eye, Captain America has let himself go a bit.
It was pleasant that the parade hadn’t devolved entirely into off-topic scene-stealing by the usual suspects. Here’s a nice bunch of folks on their way to sew flags or shoot a redcoat from behind a tree or sign a document in florid cursive.
I’ve performed in Fourth of July parades, and been dragged through the streets on a giant flatbed trailer, so I won’t make any mordant remarks about marching bands that don’t march.
The various dance studios from the area made appearances, and the gaggles of young girls certainly added to the festive and un-martial air of the proceedings. Here’s one set, performing their patented synchronized handstand maneuver, which was synchronized about as well as a helicopter evacuation from a fallen ally’s roof, but much more charming.
Holy cow, Shriners! They had Shriners like Nigeria has princes. They came in drove after drove, and drove little motorcycles in figure eights like madmen. They had oversized gas-powered big wheels, and drifted in crazy loops. Then there were little NASCAR wildmen bombing around, and even spicing things up by occasionally turning right, too. I have no idea how I got tilt-shift to happen on my wife’s phone, but I did:
The Shriners had an awesome bunch of antique cars and trucks, too.
You’re officially old when cars you once rode in while new are currently antiques. Dad! He’s looking at me!
After the legions of Shriners wore us out with their frivolity, some regular old commerce reared its head a little. It’s very Maine, though, to parade things like logging trucks. The little boys wander out to the edge of the parking lane, and make the international mime motion for yanking down on a cable, and the drivers cooperate nicely and blow their air horns. And honestly, is it really an Independence Day celebration until someone cruises by towing a Japanese excavator? I think not.
The parade lasted over an hour. it finished up with every fire engine from five towns around filing majestically in a line, and sending the toddlers behind moms’ skirts with their sirens. Lots of people threw candy to the kids, and someone even had a trolley full of free children’s books they handed out as they passed along the route. I noticed them on the way back, completely wiped out of books.
And this being Maine, when it was all over, and everyone had gone home to get properly sunburned and full of hot dogs and craft beer, there wasn’t so much as a candy wrapper left along the parade route.
We live in an urban area. For most of the people who inhabit places that are not Maine, that description might elicit a snicker. Ogguster Maine is the state capital, but honestly, it’s a tiny town with slightly taller buildings than the hinterlands. Fewer than 20,000 Oggusticles inhabit the place.
Still, it feels urban compared to the far-flung western Maine podunk we recently left. We live on a street lined with turn of the (twentieth) century brick and stone buildings. The street we’re on is a mixture of shops and restaurants and apartments, with a few disreputable establishments like tattoo parlors and government offices mixed in. Mixed use, they call it.
We’re up off the ground, with big windows that overlook the street. We sit by these windows and eat our meals. We’re treated, if that’s the word I’m looking for, to a steady stream of passersby, and car and truck and motorcycle traffic. There is a large state gummint office close by, so the majority of the foot traffic comes and goes from that direction. You can always tell who works there. They wear lanyards with their name tags depending from them. If you made them pin a name tag on their clothing, they’d all quit en masse. It’s not a name tag! It’s a lanyard! Don’t call it a name tag!. It’s one of those weird tics a certain kind of person favors these days. The same kind of people work in office parks, but will come at you with knives if you call it that. It’s a campus! I wouldn’t work in an office park! It’s a campus! At any rate, the supply of humanity on my street makes me think B. Kliban was an optimist.
Back to the gummint building. I’ve been involuntarily watching for months now, so I’m sure it’s not a small sample size, or a fluke. I have never seen such a bizarre aggregation of people enter and exit from anything short of a tent flap on the back of a carnival sideshow. I could try to describe them for you, but I’m afraid my descriptions might accidentally concatenate into some kind of incantation that summons devils from another dimension. Then again, by the look and the number of them, it appears that the incantation is already known, and widely used. My personal favorites are the legions of morbidly obese women who no doubt work in the health department, dispensing eupepsia advice to the rest of us. I have made a solemn pledge to listen to this sort of nutrition advice the moment it is offered by someone who is not the same dimension in every direction, and not a moment sooner.
Meh. The parade of porcine pedestrians isn’t nearly as interesting as their parking predilections. Parking is free and easy everywhere around here, another indicator that it’s a city in name only, and the street I live on is no exception. But you have to parallel park. And man, oh man, no one can do it.
I got curious and wondered if Maine requires you to demonstrate parallel parking technique to get your license. Indeed they do. I found a video where they go through the various steps with an examiner and a victim license candidate. I couldn’t help noticing that the parallel parking portion was performed against miles of curb with no vehicle behind the spot you’re pulling into. I also noticed that this was the only maneuver shown from a bird’s eye view. I could also tell by the color of the shirt and the shield on the sleeve that they’d thrown the driver candidate out of the driver’s seat, and the test administrator performed the maneuver. I also noticed the driving inspector casually spun the wheel with the palm of his hand, which would have got you a hard fail back in the mists of primordial time when I took a driving test. Six and nine, and hand over hand, or else.
My wife and I amuse ourselves by rooting for people when they try to parallel park on our street. Come on, you can do it! We’re looking down on them (every which way), so it’s easy to see why they’re going to come a cropper before they realize it. Pull forward! Too Shallow! Turn the wheel! Straighten it out! Throw out the gangplank, the curb’s over there! Of course our encouragements and advice fall on deaf ears. They’re in their cars with the windows up, and we’re in our apartment with the windows closed. So they’re all on their own. A solid minority leave after several failed attempts. I assume that they’re going to pick up their driving test administrator to bring him back and park it for them, but I might be wrong on that account. I don’t have the kind of attention span to wait that long.
So I remember when the majority of people who drove could parallel park a car. My mother could do it in car made with more sheet metal than a battleship, and smaller parking spaces. Hell, when I was a kid, many cars didn’t have power steering. Let’s see you spin the wheel with your palm when it’s not moving then, tough guy. So I guess the ability to parallel parking is a lost art, now. That’s a paradigm shift of a sort, but it’s not the paradigm shift I referred to in the title.
You see, because we’re up a floor, we can look down into cars as they pass by. It’s a two-way street, so we get to see 50 percent drivers and 50 percent passengers. Of course like everywhere else nowadays, it’s a very rare person, driver or passenger, that is paying any attention to their surroundings. They’re all fiddling with their phones. I’ve recently gotten used to this new normal, but as is often the case, by the time you inure yourself to the New Stupid, it’s superseded and becomes L7, daddy-o. My wife spotted the coming new normal yesterday, and I recognize a coming trend when I see one. A fellow drove by, piloting a large U-Haul truck. He was driving with his knees, while holding a huge bong in his left hand and lighting it with his right.
He drove right on by, so I have no information whether he could parallel park. But honestly, I doubt he could do any worse.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
A few months ago, we had to move house. I put the arm on my sons. Show up or mom won’t make you any more lasagna. They both did come, and toted and carried without a whimper. It’s a wonderful thing to have grown sons. You all should try it some time. You can buy a dog instead, but be warned, it’ll never grow up and shovel the driveway for you.
My older son Milo brought a friend with him. This was a bit of a surprise. People who volunteer to move furniture they’ve never sat on for people they’ve never met aren’t common in this quadrant of the galaxy. But friend Sam grabbed one end of most everything. The three of us rode in the rental truck to the storage units a couple of times. Milo told me Sam was a musician, too. He was a lively guy, and full of good humor. He found out I was a musician in eons past, and teased a lot of war stories out of me. All in all, we had a ball.
I learned that Milo’s been playing duos around central Maine with Sam. They’re good friends. They and their friends all seem to play in ad hoc combos on the spur of the moment. The size of the stage and the paycheck generally decides how many guys are doing what. They have about fifty names for themselves, further confusing the issue
So Sam and Milo and my Spare Heir moved furniture and a couple thousand hardcover books across town, and ate lunch and dinner together, and had lots of laughs. Milo mentioned to me that Sam was a great guitarist, and a great singer, too. And his performance name, sometimes, is Hambone. This was him in the video, playing the guitar and singing. Holy cow, he’s terrific, even when he’s recorded half frozen on a camera phone. I have no idea why he’s not famous.
They all play great, not just Sam. Half the time, these guys (I don’t know the rest of them) play meandering jam band stuff. The rest of the time, they surprise and delight an old timer like me and tear off a heaping helping of Curtis Mayfield from 1970. Here’s the original:
Just move on up Toward your destination Though you may find, from time to time Complication
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?
Tag: Maine
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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