I have a tendency to fixate on something and then not being able to move on. So in order to exorcise the ghost of this house that I’ve been staring at for two weeks, I will post the pictures here. Tell me what you think.
It’s a slideshow, so keep clicking or give it a moment to move through the pictures.
Clarissa's Blog 
Nice!
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I love it!
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Seriously, though? Because I was prepared to have it criticized.
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I also like it. Can you get rid of the bedroom carpet? How much land is with it?
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It’s 0,5 acres.
And yes, we will have to tear out the carpets but the expense scares me. Also, for people from my culture anything in the area of home remodeling is traumatic by default.
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The expense is going to be a tiny tiny part of what you’ll spend on the house, most likely. By the way, why is remodeling traumatic? Could the trauma be minimized if you get it done while you’re not yet living there, so you can just pay the money for it and then not think about it until it’s done? Also, what’s the area like? Will it mean a long commute? Asking because otherwise the house seems gorgeous.
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We usually say that if you have a budget for a remodeling, multiply it by 20, and you’ll get its real price. 🙂 Maybe I need a new cultural experience to pave over this bad one.
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Heh. Good luck!
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What’s to criticize? Does it have a good basement? Do you like the location? Are the roof and furnace both in good shape (it looks like new relatively new construction, so I’m guessing “yes”)? If so then why are you trying to exorcise this ghost instead of buying it?
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This was literally the first house I found on Zillow. The way this should go is that one hunts for a long time, struggles, and tortures oneself. or so I thought. . . 🙂
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What Stille said. As home improvement projects go, pulling up carpet can be pretty minor, depending on what’s underneath it. If the carpet was laid down over wood floors like the rest of the house has, then you can probably do most of it yourselves. If the flooring needs to be finished in some other way, it’s a much bigger job.
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“If the carpet was laid down over wood floors like the rest of the house has, then you can probably do most of it yourselves. ”
– No, that’s out of the question. N. works until 10 pm every day (part of it at home.) And as for me, as we say in our culture, my arms grow out of my ass. 🙂
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The only thing that strikes me as odd is that weird ledge above the arch that is between the dining and living spaces. I can’t tell if that is a wall with ledge for displaying stuff (okay hard to dust) or if there is no wall above the ledge (just weird).
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Yes, it seems to me like the arch was installed much later than the building was built to separate the kitchen from the living-room. I’d need to examine this much more closely to see what is happening there.
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Amazing! I love it!
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It has the cutest grumpy=friendly “face” in the front view, land, light, wood floors, new fittings – what’s not to like?
When I moved to Northern City, it was winter and I was broke and in a hurry – I spent a day there in which I did a quick wander around of two neighbour-hoods recommended by my to-be colleagues, got my car keyed whilst I was buying a coffee in area one which put me off so at lunchtime I visited a letting agent in area two, booked to visit the total of three rental places available in my price range, signed up for six months in the first one. Several years later, when I was ready to buy, I was still in the same rental place, and despite weeks looking at houses didn’t find anything as good and ended up making the landlord an offer… and I still live here. Sometimes the first house is a really good house!
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“It has the cutest grumpy=friendly “face” in the front view’
– At first, I thought you were describing me. 🙂
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I love this house. I like it that it has a good amount of land without a big part that you have to mow. It’s also very open and airy. If you’re up to putting in a new floor yourself, you could replace the carpet for a lot less. Wood floors are not particularly difficult.
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“By the way, why is remodeling traumatic?”
Get an apartment remodelled in Romania and get back to us.
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Again, I don’t see the problem.
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Typical scenarios in Poland,
you hire someone, work out a plan of action, give them a deposit and…. never hear from them again.
or
once they reach the point of no return (everything’s torn up but not yet put back together they ‘discover’ that the job will cost a few more times what they originally said,
or
they stop working for long periods (weeks at a time is not unheard of) because they’re shuffling you between other jobs despite assurances that you would be their prority (a colleague of mine is undergoing this one as I write)
There’s more, but all those are very common and I doubt if things are better in Ukraine (or Romania).
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I love it. But if you visit the house you will realize that you may have been fooled by how big the house looks like. As you probably know the camera has a lenses that makes a room look bigger than it is. In your case this is especially true with the kitchen/liviing room picture.
I really really like the main entrance. And I love the vegetation in the backyard.
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It’s beautiful inside, but I can find things to criticize, if that’s what you want to get unfixated.
The driveway may be downhill from the road — notice the retaining wall in front and the slope in the back. If it is, when it rains, pools of water will form in front of the garage.
The open ceilings will be cobweb collectors. They will be hard to clean because they are so high in some places. The window above the front door also will be difficult to clean. The ledge between the living room and the kitchen and the open tops of the kitchen cupboards also will be a nuisance to dust.
Pictures of the lower level are missing. If you regularly enter through the garage, you will see the lower level every time you come into the house, so how it looks matters.
The house has a lot of stairs: stairs to get to the front door are followed by stairs up to the living room or down to the lower level. Most of the time, you’ll be able to stay on the main level, but every load of groceries will have to be hauled up the stairs. If the laundry is downstairs, every load of laundry will have to be hauled down the stairs.
As far as I can tell, the kitchen doesn’t have a way to vent smoke out of the house. I think smoke vents through a filter by the microwave, but then the air goes back into the kitchen.
With all that said, I like it.
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Good points, Paranoid. House has to be seen in person and scrutinized, and inspected by an expert. But I like it, and it is not a problem at all to buy the first thing you see if you like it.
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I like it. I’d remove the carpet though. What I like most is the size of the bed. It will keep you both together FOREVER.
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This isn’t our bed, of course. But ours is beautiful, too. 🙂
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To devils’ advocate a little.
Stairs, for a person who’s not always… entirely graceful is that a good idea?
No fence (can you build one or are you comfortable with various dogs running in and out of your yard at odd times?)
Is their a space between the house and the slab? It looks like it could attract varmints (esp snakes).
Washing those window above the door is going to be a major ass ache.
Do those trees i the back yard separate the yard from a neighbor or some kind of wooded area?
Plus (if case no one’s mentioned) you want to analyze the location in terms of the whole town, noise sources, movement patterns etc.
If that’s a two car garage how much space is there between cars (no, I wouldn’t dream of criticizing your driving ability, but…)
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“Stairs, for a person who’s not always… entirely graceful is that a good idea?”
– We have a staircase in our current place and I’m good with that. I was climbing the stairs easily 2 days after my C-section. And I haven’t tumbled down once in all these years, although I confess that I was close a few times. 🙂
“No fence (can you build one or are you comfortable with various dogs running in and out of your yard at odd times?)”
– Yes, this is really something to think about.
“If that’s a two car garage how much space is there between cars (no, I wouldn’t dream of criticizing your driving ability, but…)”
– Yes, this is an important consideration that I hadn’t thought about. 🙂 Thank you for bringing it up because it is something that might become important.
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