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?
My wife and I joined a gym. I haven’t belonged to a gym for decades. The last time I joined a gym, I was barely out of high school, and never exercised there. I only joined so I could sit in their sauna when I had a hangover, which was often enough. But since then, constant physical labor has been my only exercise. Our new digs don’t allow for that, so we have to pay other people to let us to lift heavy objects, which strikes me as backwards somehow. Oh well.
It’s a trip, the gym is. The people run the gamut. I like gamuts and like to see them run. In addition to seeing the bizarre sartorial choices of the workout clothes, there are banks of giant teevee screens everywhere, with the sound turned down so you can hear Eye of the Tiger and similar organized noises piped in over the muzak speakers. The patrons double down on the visual and audio cacophony by jamming waxy earbuds into their heads and clutching phones. Everyone seems to want bedlam inside their head at all times.
The teevees are tuned to one of three stations. The first station is some kind of sports jibberjabber. Extreme closeups from a webcam looking up Charles Barkley’s nose with the sound off can be somewhat unsettling. I’m guessing he thought it was turrrble, though, because he thinks most things are. The chyrons crawled across the screen and wondered why a good team traded their good player to the bad team for a bag of balls and a bad player to be named later. I’ll bet Las Vegas and the networks don’t wonder.
The second teevee feed might actually have programming, I’m not sure. I’ve never noticed any, but I’m not sure how many seconds of show you get in an hour of commercials these days. It seemed like an endless stream of pitches for stairlifts, motorized wheelchair things to help you desolate the aisles in the dollar stores, hearing aids, and various pharmaceuticals that promised to give you things or take things away, or both, if you needed it. It struck me as a strange choice to display to people lifting weights and running in place. There but for the grace of gym membership go I, perhaps is the thinking.
The third choice was Chicken Noodle News, something I haven’t seen since the anchor women had big hair and shoulder pads in their dresses. There was no sound, but it was obviously a 24/7 non-stop diatribe against the latest tariffs that were placed on Canada and Mexico (oops, the Mexican ones were removed while I was typing this). As is predictable, this policy was being touted as uniformly bad for God, Country, and Mother, and would of course have us all gleaning straw in the fields to try to make our bread and bricks in no time. It’s par for the course that any major news outlet would beg the question on tariffs, because they beg every question. But the tariff one struck me as funny, because I knew every man-jack of the tariff-haters secretly love tariffs.
The dictionary definition of a tariff is a tax imposed by a government or a supranational union on the import or export of goods. This has been expanded to include things like services and other stuff. This arrangement of funding the government and protecting American industry and residents suited the United States just fine for about 150 years, but somehow now even broaching the topic is verboten. But I can help but notice that the same people who say it’s verboten just call it something else, and wallow in tariffs every chance they get.
The United States is, essentially, 50 different countries acting supranationally. And every time one of those individual governments gets a chance, they raise taxes on the other state’s citizens to avoid taxing their own. Let’s look at my home state of Maine:
About 75% of tolls collected on the Maine Turnpike are paid by out-of-state drivers
Approximately 60% of Maine’s hotel taxes are paid by out-of-state residents.
Around 70% of the car rental taxes in Maine are paid by out-of-state residents
This is not happenstance. When tax bills are discussed, politicians openly and gleefully testify that these taxes are intended to soak people from other states. Because screw them, that’s why. If out-of-staters want in, they have to pay.
We’re pikers, so to speak, compared to nearby New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Turnpike is just a 16-mile section of interstate I-95 that you use to get from Massachusetts to Maine. It serves no other purpose, and it wasn’t built by New Hampshire, either. Upwards of 70% of the tolls collected at the two(!) New Hampshire toll plazas are paid by out-of-staters. That number is kind of a lie, anyway, it’s closer to 100%, because New Hampshire has a program to give you a credit for your tolls if you’re a resident of the Live Free, or Else state.
The tolls aren’t cheap. It costs $2.50 to transit N.H. in a car. About 70 million vehicles stop and pay those tolls every year. A back of the envelope calculation for what it would cost to build a mile of superhighway would be somewhere between 3 and 10 million dollars per mile. So you could destroy and rebuild the entire 16-mile stretch of I-95 in New Hampshire every year, with plenty left over. I believe tearing up the entire highway system every year has been tried in Connecticut, but they never get around to the rebuilding part that I’ve seen.
Scratch a free-trader, find a protectionist. Simple access to the population of a polity is definitely tariffable, and quite popular. If you want access to our ticks, our slush, our black flies, our $20 lobster rolls, our red hot dogs, and all the other fine things Maine has to offer, be prepared to pay. But since Maine is the only continental state that has only one state on its borders, be prepared to be held hostage by New Hampshire first.
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?
So, everyone says they want a house, but they can’t afford one. Various explanations for this unaffordability are proffered. Interest rates are higher than they were for a short period a few years ago. That isn’t helping, although anyone who lived through the 1980s would snicker at you if you mentioned it. Wages haven’t kept up with inflation very well. But in general, what I hear, no matter what is being said about the topic, is that everyone thinks they should be able to live exactly where they prefer, and the houses should be cheap there. Uh-huh.
Good luck with that. I’d like to roll a different ball out onto the field. If you’re modestly intrepid, you can find a house for a relative pittance and live in it while you fix it. Then sell it, take the dough, and live where you want, or maybe do it more than once if you’re young and nimble. I’m living proof that it can be done. All you have to do is adjust your way of thinking about owning a home.
Everyone from realtors to talking heads on teevee refer to a home as “an investment.” It isn’t, at least in the way they’re blabbing about a roof over your head. A home is an expense. It may or may not be worth the money you spend on it, but it’s not an investment. For the most part, all the money you’ll gain if your house rises in value is just inflation rearing its actuarial head. Money is worth less, so the house eventually sells for more. You’re going to have to have an amazing nose for real estate to find a place where property goes from worthless to expensive without relying on inflation. You could have bought some bombed out property in many places in New York City back in the early 80s, and made a killing on it later. However, you’d also have to avoid someone making a killing on you in the interim, in a more direct way.
So, you’ll get no advice to buy rock-bottom real estate in murder capitals from me. But you can still find interesting and potentially valuable houses out in the sticks. And you can turn them into real investments, if you turn them into a part time job for yourself. I did it recently, and made a 900-percent profit on the deal. Tax-free, too, because as long as you live in it for at least two years before you sell it, you can make $250,000 before capital gains taxes kick in. Or $500,000, if you’re married, which I highly recommend. One of you can make peanut butter sandwiches while the other holds up the kitchen floor with a post jammed under the floor beams.
Someone already thought they could make a killing with no effort on this place. They bought it four years ago for fifty grand, never touched it, and the town took it away from them this year because the house was unlocked and unattended, and they never paid their taxes on it.
It’s a 2,500 square foot, 5-bedroom, 2-bath Shingle Style wonder. Big old barn, too,
It needs some serious work, but so what? The more work it needs, the more money it will bring when you’re done. Unlike a lot of houses this age, the entire fabric of the place hasn’t been defaced with vinyl siding and gray plastic floors. Viz:
Sand the floor, replace the wallpaper, and put a fresh coat of clear on the wood work and you’ll be dining in style in no time.
The kitchen and baths won’t make it into Architectural Digest or anything, but so what? I’ve seen people ripping out ten-year old kitchens because they watched Better Homes Than Yours on teevee and noticed that everyone had quartz countertops instead of granite. Might as well plan on replacing everything in there. But I’ll bet those appliances still work. You can use them while you’re banging on the place.
Everyone is looking at this sort of project with the wrong idea. House flippers would love to wreck this place in their inimitable gray everything style, but the numbers won’t work. Not many people want to move to Sangerville, Maine from places where the trolleys run. It’s a tiny town in unfashionable Piscataquis County. You’ll have to be your own first customer. Buy it from yourself, as it were. When you’re done working on it, you can sell it to someone else in Sangerville whose house is still a mess, and doesn’t want to put in the work. Banks will lend them the money to give you a big return on your sweat and purple thumbs.
The smartest way to look at a house like this is to add up what it would cost to produce the same mess you see in the pictures. You’d have to find a 3/4 acre lot, then get town water and town sewer and electrical service to the place, and basically build a half-million dollar, partially completed structure to get the same value. Taxes? A hundred bucks a month. Crime? Well, there really isn’t any anywhere in Maine. If you’re willing to live in any city in the US, this place should hold no terrors for you.
There’s nothing to do in Sangerville. On Yelp!, the first two things to do and see are a farm stand, and sled dog excursions. The town’s only claim to fame is that the man who invented the machine gun once lived there. But then again, why would you need something to do in Sangerfield? Your house will be the biggest something to do in Sangerfield. If you need a hobby, you can stop trying to fix the wallpaper in the living room and fix the floor in this room for a change of pace:
So, you want a house. Sangerville is over there. It’s only a matter of going.
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