In our first outing we looked at two houses that we fell in love with via their MLS listings. Both homes were built in the early 60s, and we were excited to see them. The first one was a well-kept little ranch with an amazing basement. Wouldn't you want to hang out down there? It's complete with the basement bar so prevalent/essential in Berwyn, with a "summer kitchen" just beyond that far wall:
But "little" is the operative word here. The 2 bedrooms were OK, and the basement was pretty enormous, but that didn't really make up for the fact that the kitchen and "dining room" were NO BIGGER THAN 8x8 feet each, with really no room to expand either space. The only other common space up there was a teeny front room.
Oh well, it was fun to see. On to the cute split-level on the great block!
It had a nice yard, three bedrooms, and holy crap, flocked wallpaper. FLOCKED WALLPAPER!
The kitchen was an OK size, but there was no dining room. It started to dawn on us that this might be a dealbreaker.
Then we investigated under the carpets throughout the house and found ASBESTOS FLOOR TILE everywhere. Asbestos floor tiles are fine if you don't crunch into them or otherwise mess with them, so you can always just lay other floor over them, but the ceilings were already pretty low and the thought of all that asbestos tile wasn't too attractive to us.Goodbye, cute split level, it was fun to explore you.
There are a bunch of short sales and foreclosures on the market in Berwyn right now, which we mostly avoided because though there are some RIDICULOUSLY cheap houses out there, the process of buying one and getting a loan for it is a lot hairier, they tend to need a ton of work, and the buyer is responsible for any repairs required by the city (which the seller in a traditional sale would usually take care of). The listing for this house, though, made us want to see it. There were no interior pictures on the listing, and we wanted to see all of the big rooms. Doesn't look too bad, right?
But oh my, look at the steps:
This was an excellent preview of what we found in the house. When we got to the top of those treacherous stairs, we found a sign indicating that the house had been vacant since sometime in mid-2007. Awesome. I didn't get any decent pictures inside because there was no electricity, but just imagine room after room of falling-in walls, stripped-by-overuse wood floors, filthy carpet, and a pervasive cat/rodent aroma. Yum. We saw some bad situations, but I think that house was the worst.
We kept seeing houses that were nice, but that we couldn't live in for one reason or another, like this one in the same great area as the split level:
The finishes were so lovely--the floors, stained glass, light fixtures, kitchen cabinets, nice finished attic, this cool built-in:
But dammit, there was no dining room and thus, not enough living space. Goodbye, cute bungalow.Viewing this house was in interesting experience:
Because it turned out that this single-family home had been converted into three separate, locked off apartments--one on each floor. Now, before we closed on our house we URGENTLY HAD TO sign an agreement that we would not split up our house into more than one residency, under SCARY PENALTY OF LAW. Berwyn, City of Homes, is pretty serious about their housing stock. The house was big and had some cute details, but required too much work. I wonder if they ever sold the house, and how that city inspection went.
This house was nothing special, but they managed to put a full bathroom into an undormered attic:
That possibility, while a little outlandish, pings hopefully in my brain every time I think about how freaking expensive it will be to put a dormer in our attic.
This next house was incredibly well-kept. Like, they clearly remodeled in the 80s, then proceeded to never wear shoes, treat anything roughly, or touch any surface with dirty hands. The listing agent put in the comments section "PRIDE OF OWNERSHIP." I wonder if they were proud of this monstrosity of a long-converted, formerly coal-powered boiler taking up half the basement::
Finally, our odyssey included some houses we could very realistically see ourselves living in. This one was the first:
It had lovely, large rooms, lots of ways we could get creative with it, and the old sleeping porch had been converted into a giant closet for the master bedroom. We saw it early on, and went back to see it again--thinking that if we liked it as much after the second viewing we would make an offer on it. Well, we liked it less, and found several things that we either didn't really want to live with, or feared would be out-of-control repair issues. Oh well.
Later in our search we saw another house that had a whole lot to love, including an amazing basement and this kitchen:
We would have probably thought more about making an offer on that house, were it not for the next house we saw...
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