Okay, so I’m just going to say it. I love the Charlotte Park house. It has a front porch you could set a rocking chair on. It’s got a fireplace (though the Butcher thinks the fireplace is ugly, but I like it. I think you could do what you wanted with tiling it or whatever and not feel like you were fucking up something important.), which isn’t a working fireplace, but it’s got a chimney, and it’s deep so I think it might be fixable at some point in the future.
The windows are the kind with the three long rectangle panes at the top and the solid pane at the bottom. The two bedrooms have these old funky light fixtures. The bathroom is… well, it is what it is, but it has a window over the tub! Light, natural light, in the bathroom. It has an enormous dining area and a great big kitchen. Well, not great big in the grand scheme of things, but great big in terms of the houses we’ve seen.
There’s a basement, with a door you can walk out into the back yard, which is fenced in. There’s a screened in sunporch thingy just off the garage. There’s a garage!
There’s only two things I don’t like about it. One, the basement stairs are scary as hell. I don’t say that lightly. I know I’m a chicken shit about stairs, but this one has a gap between the floor and the top of the stairs you have to cross just to get to the first riser. They are so steep and narrow you feel like you’re really just climbing down a modified ladder. I could see how you’d get laundry down the stairs–just stand at the top and toss it down–but I’d have to go outside and up the side porch (did I mention the darling little side porch?) and into the house with my laundry.
Well, it would encourage the use of a clothesline, since I’d have to go outside with the laundry anyway. Can we have clotheslines in town? Ha, that would be just like Nashville, to have no rules against anything except clotheslines.
And the other thing is the price.
It’s hard because it’s so much better than so much of what we’ve looked at and so you do think, well, maybe that’s the appropriate price for it. But there’s nothing else in that neighborhood for that price that only has two bedrooms and one bath. The realtor told Kathy that she has run the comps and that “it was difficult to find comparible houses in the neighborhood” so she ran them for all of Zone 3.
Well, so on the one hand, she’s comparing that house to houses deep in the Nations (which would indicate that house is priced way, way too high), but on the other hand, it means she’s comparing that house to houses in Germantown/Salemtown, and, yeah, if that house were at that price in those neighborhoods, it would be a steal.
But it’s not in those neighborhoods.
I should have taken a picture of Kathy’s face, too, as she’s recounting this. Those of you who know her know how she goes “Aw, hell, no” and somehow manages to string those words together like one powerful word of dismissal? That was the look on her face!
“We’ll run our own comps.” She said.
Anyway, so we’re mulling. She’s going to run comps and look at tax records. I’m going to sit down with the Butcher and mull, mull, mull.
It’s kind of weird because I love the house, but I know I’m not going to pay that much for it, and I know it’s just come on the market so they’re not likely to take my offer, and so someone else might swoop by and see how cute it is and buy it. And that would suck, but…
It is what it is.
So, I feel okay about that.