Househunting report.

[rivka]

We looked at a house today that we really, really like.

It's on a quiet block lined with three- and four-story Federal-style rowhouses and lots of tall, leafy trees. The street ends just past the house, at an intersection with an alley. Across the alley is a little pocket-size park - more of an elaborately landscaped courtyard, really, with a fountain. The park has modern-built condos on both sides of it.





A little entry opens up into a hall with stairs up to the tenants' apartments. The owner's unit opens into an enormous, high-ceilinged, long living room (12x30 feet; unfortunately painted pink) with two narrow floor-to-ceiling windows on the street side. The living room leads into a beautiful, bright dining room (12x16 feet) with a fireplace and big windows. Both the living room and dining room have crown moldings and a chair rail, and hardwood floors.





Behind the dining room is a little area that has a staircase to the owner's part of the second floor, an under-stairs storage pocket, and a tiny powder room. The kitchen is two steps down from there, and is unfortunately painted the color of cheap mint chocolate chip ice cream. It would be unspeakably tiny for a suburban kitchen (12x14 feet) but is quite large for a Baltimore row house - big enough to eat in, if your table is small. Tons and tons of cupboard and counter space (including a... do you call an island that's attached on one side a "peninsula"?), nice-looking, fairly new appliances including (alas) an electric stove, granite countertops. Behind the kitchen is a tiny, closetlike laundry room with a glass sliding door covered by the kind of metal folding grate you might see over the entrance to a closed shop.





The sliding door leads to a mini decklet (really just a stoop with pretensions) with broad steps down to the tiniest little walled courtyard you have ever seen. The brick wall around it ranges from about 5.5-7 feet at various places, and has an alley on two sides of it. On the third side, the neighbors have a higher deck which would allow them to look down in our yard at ease. The decklet would be an incredibly convenient place to put our charcoal grill.





Upstairs: two smallish bedrooms, 13x12 and 11x12. Both have large walk-in closets, and there's a linen closet and another large closet on the landing between them. The closet in the master bedroom is more than large enough to hold a crib, in case at some point we had a Hypothetical Future Baby too old to cosleep but not a sound enough sleeper to share a room with Alex. The master bath is off the master bedroom, and fairly small. The upstairs bedrooms have nice windows, but no fancy architectural features like downstairs. They have white walls and ugly wall-to-wall carpet in a sort of a greenish grey.





That's it for the owner's unit. There are also two one-bedroom apartments, each containing a living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchenette, walk-in closet, and bathroom. All of the rooms in the apartments are quite small, but the apartments themselves seem good-sized because of the high ceilings, big windows, and beautiful proportions. The second-floor apartment is renting for an amount that's ludicrously below market value (the guy's been there 15 years), and the top-floor apartment is empty. Market rent for the apartments is probably around $700-$800 each.

There's a basement, unfinished but full height, that one enters from the entrance hall. It has what I can only describe as stalls, with padlockable doors, meant for tenant storage, plus two biggish empty storage rooms and a boiler room. The boiler is only seven years old. There are separate electric and gas meters for the apartments, but everyone shares the one boiler and the two apartments share a water heater. Currently, the apartments rent with heat and hot water included.

It's a really pretty house, and beautifully maintained. The downstairs is so large that I really don't think we'd be cramped with just two bedrooms - or at least, not for several years. If the time came in the future that we needed more space, we could knock a door through the wall into the second-floor apartment and annex that. I think we could be very happy there.

We're waiting for Laura to talk to her tax advisor and financial planner about the proposed arrangements. We've sent her the pictures and description. I'm not setting all my hopes on it or anything, but I really do like this house - we both do - and I think it would be very workable for us.

More pictures at my Flickr page, in case this doesn't already seem excessive.

Comments

[stevendj.livejournal.com]

Good luck.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I like!

[ckd]

That looks and sounds great! I hope that it truly is as great as it seems, and that everythig works out for you.

[melebeth]

It's gorgeous! I saw a lot of houses when I lived in Baltimore, and that kitchen is fabulous.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

oooh, pretty pretty!

pink is fixable. ugly green carpet is fixable. woo!

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Fingers and toes crossed!

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Very nice!

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

It's beautiful, though I share your concern about that deep pink and that minty green. Still, paint is your friend. Hope it goes well.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Yes, we had a peninsula with a butcher-block top in our former kitchen.

Is that 1.5 bathrooms, or 2.5?

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

It looks gorgeous. Damn, you're lucky living Back East. Here anything from before 1920 is considered heritage and hopelessly out of regular people's price ranges. I'll cross my fingers.

So, is it in Mount Vernon or Bolton Hill?

[jinian.livejournal.com]

The green is a little scary, but otherwise it looks lovely. Nice to start off hunting so positively.

[tassie-gal.livejournal.com]

REALLY NICE. That pink isnt Bad, though the green has GOT TO GO! Overall its really a lovely looking place, and I hope that it all works out for you. Where is it in repect to where you live now?

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Goodness. Lovely.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Paint and carpets are the easiest thing to fix. The potential for extending into one of the apparments if necessary is pretty useful; and if it ticks all your other boxes - go for it.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

That's a really lovely place. I'll be thinking good thoughts for you.

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

Beautiful! I hope it works out.

[zanawake.livejournal.com]

*tries to figure out where the Westminster Abbey (?) tower connects to the roof line*

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

I like the pink (and I don't generally like pink) but am definitely in agreement about the minty green.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this one was built in 1880, but it's not considered especially old.

It's on the far south end of Bolton Hill, about seven blocks from where we now live in Mount Vernon.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

You mean my "Baltimore" icon? That's the Bromo-Seltzer tower (http://www.spearsvotta.com/photos/bromo_seltzer2.html), my favorite Baltimore landmark.

"Bromo-Seltzer" was a very popular tonic drink which contained bromide, a mild sedative which was also mildly addictive. Eventually the drink was banned. (Bromo-Seltzer still exists today as an antacid-painkiller combination, but there's no bromide in it.)

It seems somehow fitting that the Baltimore skyline should have a prominent monument to an addictive substance.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem with the pink is our living room furniture, which is in shades of beige, gold, and brown.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

It's about seven blocks northwest of where we live now, and a block from Alex's nursery school.

[telerib.livejournal.com]

I found it kinda scary how quickly the home-buying process can go. So good luck to you!

(We had a home inspection done on our possibility... the furnace is probably as old as the townhouse (31 yrs) which does not bode well. Trying to figure out what to do about that...)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

1.5, which is not precisely ideal. We would need a lock on our bedroom door. ;-)

[timill]

You're thinking of Big Ben, which is part of the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, across Westminster Square from the Abbey.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I hate the pink. But that's a temporary problem. Other than that, it's beautiful. And possibly you could colonize the other apartment one room at a time, as you needed them and could afford -- people rent "studio" apartments all the time.

Best of luck with it.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Hm. I thought it was the name of the bell inside the tower, but apparently people call the tower that as well.

Rivka, it's a swell place. I expect you could keep looking and maybe even find something as nice. Do you like the location? The little park?

[ailbhe]

Looks fantastic. Bet Alex enjoysainting walls as muc as Linnea does.

[timill]

It is, and they do. IIRC it's properly the Albert Tower, but such neepery is out of place in an LJ comment...

[selki.livejournal.com]

It's so pretty! I love the cheerful colors! (even the minty green). But if they're not to your taste or don't match your stuff, as others have said, not too tough to change.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Are you ready to be landlords?

Nice!

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

Paint is easy and inexpensive to change, and that wouldn't be much carpet to replace.

[windypoint.livejournal.com]

I've got two kids three years apart in age in a two up two down townhouse. It can be a little cramped at times, particularly the feeling that the whole house revolves around the central stair well.

But it obviously must be do-able... because I'm doing it rather than selling up and taking us out to the 'burbs.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

When you block out the colors, it looks great! (I shouldn't complain too much about colors, one wall of my dining room is park bench green (mirrors the duettes on the sliding glass doors), one bedroom is soft pink (to show off a quilt made by my grandmother) and my bedroom is lavender.) That kitchen is bigger than mine and you could put a small table in mine if you didn't need the space for storage (I can't put stuff on the top shelves of the cabinets).

(Erk! We just got a tornado warning! They're clearing the Mall, too.)

[curmudgn]

Dang! That's barely a mile and a half from where our formerly-Austinite friends, bunrab and squirrel_magnet, live. They're on Calyn Road, up Independence Avenue and just past the Pike.

[curmudgn]

Also, if you would like to hear first-hand experience from someone who has been an owner/landlord, talk to bunrab. They had part of their last Austin house (a HUGE 1919 Dutch Colonial Revival) converted to an apartment--originally for her mother to live with them, but rented out after her mother's death. (Full disclosure: K talks a LOT. Serious case of Long Guyland motormouth and somewhat self-absorbed, although she's a nice person otherwise.)

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

I think so. I spent a fair bit of time talking with Laura about what's involved over this past weekend, and she has several resources she's sending me. She's also been doing this for about twenty years herself, and is happy to provide support, although it's likely to just be the sort of support you get from three thousand miles away.

I'm most concerned about keeping a reserve to handle large repairs. If a roof needed major work, or a boiler went belly-up, that would be difficult. Until we can talk with Laura's finance people, though, to see what we can arrange, we're not sure what we'll be able to handle.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Would you guys be eligible for a revolving line of credit? The interest is a hell of a lot better than on a credit card (I'm paying prime plus 2%, although I imagine that varies depending on many factors) and you don't have to borrow the money unless you need to. There's paperwork involved in setting it up, obviously, and you have to get approved (I'd say that's the easy part but who am I kidding), but having that money available on short notice at a reasonable interest rate saved my bacon a few years back when I suddenly developed catastrophic plumbing problems to the tune of three grand. It's worth asking the finance people about it.

[zanawake.livejournal.com]

Wow. Yeah. It looks as though it might be a distant cousin of the skyscraper in Nashville that looks like the head of a bat (http://www.pbase.com/deadelvis/nighttime).

[zanawake.livejournal.com]

Nah, no neepery is neepish for LJ... :)