OMG…. We bought a fixer upper
Let me start by saying we love to vacation in summer in Vermont around the Londonderry area and have for well over two decades. It is the go-to spot for all of us when we want to relax and enjoy many fine dining experiences, shopping, hiking, kayaking, reading a book on a shaded porch. It is where we have often rented a house that allows us to bring the dogs. Emotionally, we have been shopping for at least 10 years with an eye on buying a house. I like to look at properties online because I am a daydreamer. In 2014 we started actually looking at a few houses. Hoping a property would come up within our parameters.
We kept checking on the realtor sites watching for possible properties. We found this house a good two years before we actually walked through it for the first time. It was way, WAY outside the budget circle but inside the location circle on the map. We bookmarked the house, so we could track it. We have had many properties that came on the radar and, we watched until they were sold, to someone else. This house remained on our list, was bank-owned for a while. Then investors bought it, and it still remained on the market. Since sites want you to buy a property they allow you to set up alerts. Gosh, I love alerts. So the alert arrived in the email box, and it had dropped in price. My heart skipped a beat, a small one but still. The price was now just outside the budget circle. We can bid lower, get it into the circle, my mind raced. We need to go see it right away.
So it was discussed, looked at on the internet; realtor.com, Google Earth.. so many ways to stalk a property. We watched some more, too soon we told ourselves, needed work we told ourselves, still too much we told ourselves. All the reasons to not buy that house were there and then the price dropped… by lots. We owe it to ourselves to go look we said, we should go soon we said, we have a holiday we said, let’s go we said. So the adventure began in February 2015 on Presidents Day weekend. We called Ali Cummings the realtor who had shown us a few places over the past two years and an appointment was made to see the house. We also decided we should look at a few other possibilities so as to not jump at this house since it was the only one we saw.
This adventure in life starts with what we did not figure out right away. Presidents Day weekend, which was also Valentines’ Day weekend, in Vermont, in a good snow season means there is not a hotel room available within miles of where we were going. Another who knew, we ended up an hour roughly from the house at a Hampton Inn in Massachusetts. KS and I were the ones doing the looking while CC stayed home with the pets. Arrived at the hotel in a snowstorm, in the dark, too tired to be over-excited.
The sun came up at 5:45 AM and we were up, scheduled to meet the realtor at 11:30AM… so long to wait so we left to go look at the outside, have breakfast, and meet the realtor.
And here it is when we arrived with lots of snow. We worked our way around the house looking in the windows, climbing through the snowdrifts. It looked perfect to us, well if you define perfect as needs a list of things done but all things we felt we could do. Off to get breakfast and warm up while we waited to meet. The local country store was a great find, friendly owner with lots of local information about the house and area local.
KS climbed up over the snowdrift to check out the shed. The cool shed we can make a fun playhouse for our grand-kids, great-niece, and nephews. Eventually, that is when we buy the house and do ALL of the projects we have in mind.
Inside the house, all the rooms are at different levels, umm OK. Apparently, the house was a trailer that the previous owner added rooms to one at a time. The structure seems solid, the paint colors are atrocious, the floors are cheap, very cheap, laminate, and do not even get me started on the carpet…Ewww smelled even in an ice-cold house. But still, it was the house for us, the live edge log countertop is awesome. It has three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Every house needs a Jacuzzi tub in the master bedroom.. I mean IN the bedroom, with carpet. This so has to go. Sometimes you need to go with your gut. We put in an offer on Monday after we got home and the bartering began. Ultimately we had inspections and water testing and more bartering and hoops to jump through to get the mortgage approved. We finally signed the papers Memorial Day weekend.
The advice here is to have the tests done and a house inspection done, be there when that inspection is done. You get lots of information from the inspector that may not be in the report as clear. we did not have inspections until spring so the underside of the house could also be seen. And we discovered that the plumber that the seller’s realtor had used had taken out the broken water pipes but never replaced the pipes. That would have been a real mess if we turned on the water and had no pipes just gushing water in the walls.
Oh yes, that countertop in the rest of the kitchen has to go, along with the nonworking dishwasher. The cabinets are good and the hardware is cute metal tree branches. The floors are wide plank wood installed with square hand-forged nails.. stellar. These floors we will have refinished and sealed
Dried blood wall colors are way too dark but the built-ins are wonderful. Wainscoting all around the room. New floors and fresh paint on the walls will make this room special. The house had carpet and the cheapest laminate flooring money can buy. The laminate is basically plastic and is very loud when walking on it and slippery, very.
French doors to nowhere. We envision a large screened-in porch room that we can put a nice table and some comfortable reading chairs. Turns out when we had the septic company come do the cleanout, the doors open to directly over the septic system and leach field. There will be no building over the septic system. Ugh
Guest room… Grey walls that had lots of tape on them. Really dirty smelly burgundy carpet, they had a wet dog sleeping on it and you could tell. The best thing about before pictures are when you are looking for the baseboard to reinstall, you can see there were none. So advice on doing a fixer-upper project, take pictures, lots of them.
The third bedroom, complete with a door to the outside. Clear evidence the room was a teenager’s room. Who puts a door outside in a teenager’s room? Fun fact the door into the bedroom was a linen closet door, all of 24″ wide. This room is 20 feet long, and 9 feet wide in part of it, and 13 feet in the back part.
Small bathroom off the master bedroom… you know the one with the big tub in the bedroom.. with the only closet for the room. The problem with the closet is you need to go in the another 24″ door and shimmy sideways to get to your clothes. This will become one large bathroom in the near future.
Laundry room…bonus.. paint, new floor, and new appliances are all this room needs.
Built-ins that show great craftsmanship. It will become a data center for our home which will be very much remote controlled. Or that is the plan once we can get good reliable, fast Internet. Ahhh country living!.
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