So BB and I looked at a house yesterday. We didnt have any kind of formal thought process going on. It's just that in our walks around town we see "For Sale" and "Foreclosure" signs and out of curiosity we get online to see what the price is.
Well yesterday during our walk we found this house:
And on it is a big fat "Auction 2/6 -starting at $99,000" sign.
This house is 4100 sq ft.
So BB and I go home. BB's best friend who is a realtor stops by and we ask about the big yellow house.
Realtor says "Listen- forget that house- you need to see the Victorian I will be putting on the market in a few days. All original everything. Gamecock you would love it." Asking price is $200k.
Now I know everyone knows I LOVE our house we just bought a year ago. The issue is that our house is a duplex and we are guessing it would be over $50k to turn it into a SFH by adding an internal staircase, move the water heater, enlarge the kitchen downstaires and add a master bath upstaires as well as repair the upstaires plaster walls.
So we were thinking maybe it's smarter to use the $50k as a downpayment for a SFH that already has all that and rent both units of our current duplex. This would collect over $2k a month in rent (paying both mortgages) rather than lose the 1 rent and also start paying the mortgage ourself.
So we decided to see this "steal of a deal":
The house turned out to not be for us. It looks like it could be magnificent- but BB was quickly turned off by the fact that the siding is asbestos. In addition the roof is over 100 years old and NEEDS TO BE REPLACED. The current owner has done patch jobs so no leakage. In addition the owner has not kept up the place. The hardwood staircase and floors were painted (commonly done during some era not too long ago), the plaster is peeling everywhere, and the 2 balconies were enclosed into rooms...and done poorly. The upstaires flow was really bad with odd sized rooms and a horribly narrow and weird hallway.The realtor comes from a construction background and kept saying it was all no big deal but BB and I were sharing ESP thoughts that it was all a very big deal.
Last night we really talked and figured out what we wanted to do. After looking in the MLS we could not find a house that offered more than our current house. Every SFH house listed either had less to offer or was very expensive. We kind of came out of our thought process realizing that if we bought a SFH it would have to be bigger, more updated, on a larger plot of land, in a better part of town to make us move. That might be hard to find in a price for less than the cost of us converting our duplex into a SF.
We decided that I would look around this baseball season while BB is away but more than likely we will stick with our plan to convert our house into a SFH.
Update: So I thought that was our plan. BB just called to tell me we are going to see this house tonight:
For Sale in Savannah
January 25th, 2010 at 07:25 pm
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