House the Heck Are You?

For over a month Keith & I had been house hunting online. Last Sunday we started our search on the ground. With a realtor leading the way, we saw four houses. The first, in Winthrop, had an interesting, twisty floor plan and a nice porch and front yard. The problems I had with it were a lack of closet space and the master bedroom was in the basement. It had windows, but being at ground level in winter they would be covered! Keith had a problem with the lot. It was 5 acres, but it was long and narrow so the neighboring houses were rather close.

Here's a neighbor. He didn't hang around long.

The next houses in Litchfield were both rejected without debate. The first was cheap, but it was cramped for space, needed a lot of paint and repairs, and there was a smoker in the family so it just plain stank! The lot look like a tornado had hit it: not much by way of trees close up and what there was was ragged and weedy. The second was an 1800s farm house. Someone had tried to upgrade it: there was new carpet in two rooms and the bathroom had new features, but the barn and the connecting structure were in advanced states of decay with rotting boards in the walls and floors. The connecting structure even had a two-seater outhouse! Now how the Hell do you remodel around that?!

The last house was the show-stopper. It was wonderful: stone walls at the perimeter, granite counters, an open floor plan, a soaking bathtub, a seven foot round window in the living room, a spacious walk-in basement, a studio/library with built-in shelves. and it own maple forest. The drawbacks were a rather steeply pitched drive way and the fact that it's in Bowdoin, off in the middle of nowhere. We're currently exploring options to see if these are insurmountable problems or if we could indeed make this work. And, of course there are other houses out there...