June 8, 2008

Thursday I looked at a house in Duxbury on route 53 near the Kingston line. Mike B went with me, we met Peter N from Coldwell Banker who let us in to see the house. It is an old one story cape with an attached garage on almost an acre of land. The neighbor on the south is obscured in the trees, the neighbor on the north is too close for privacy behind a short chain link fence. There is a stump of a very large pine tree in the middle of the back yard. The sound of traffic was very noticeable to me when we were inside the house. The windows are old single pane, the garage door is home-made, and too small for most vehicles. The front of the house is too deep in the ground and the sill may be rotten but there was no access to the crawl space under the house to check it out. The grassy yard sloped up slightly in the back channeling water down towards the building.
Inside there is a living room taking up the front of the house, a bathroom off the living room, and a small, outdated kitchen contiguous with the living room on the other sid. The kitchen has the main entry door off the driveway. There are three small bedrooms off the kitchen with passage through the central bedroom necessary to reach the other two, one on each side of it. There is a pull-down stairway in the bedroom adjacent to the garage which accesses a small attic space. In the kitchen there is a closet with the furnace and water heater. In theceiling of the closet you can see into the main attic area which appears to be sizable but in rough shape. Peter said that a squirrel had died and smelled up the house as well as filling it with flies.
This house is listed for $299,900. It has several advantages, it has a sizeable lot for the price range, it is close to a lot of stores and not far from the commuter rail, it has a relatively new septic system supposedly sized for 4 bedrooms, it has a garage, it is liveable but it needs work so I could move in and work on it as my own residence. This house had been owned by a couple in Woburn and rented out. There was not supposed to be a tenant but someone’s personal things were still there. Some negatives are it’s poor condition, its location next to Route 53 and away from the center of town and the beaches.
The insulation in the attic is messed up and needs to be fixed, the walls may or may not have insulation in them. The windows need to be upgraded, the kitchen needs to be upgraded. There is no garage floor, but that can be easily remedied. The ceilings are homosote, with battens on the seams, the layout is terrible. Some possible improvements are, a wooden fence on the neighbors side, arbor vitae or spruce along the street, clean out the dirt and overgrown plantings along the front. Ideally the house would be lifted up and another row of block added to the foundation. It could use a deck in the back and a new sliding glass door.
I noticed that Mike was keeping his thoughts to himself. So I asked him directly, “what do you think about that house”.
“I think you’re making a big mistake, “ he said.
For me the potential is that with the correct financing it could provide work for the winter, and then become a rental when I move in with Pam. I need to talk to a mortgage broker. But the important thing is not just to finance the purchase but to finance the improvements, the one thing I do not want to do is to put down all I have, take on a mortgage payment in a bad economy and then be stuck for money to fix it up.