House Hunting

Almost two years ago, I moved with my boyfriend into a charming little rental house smack in the middle of Charlottesville. Our neighborhood is a pleasant walk away from both the University of Virginia and the Downtown Mall, the city's pedestrian center and home to the farmer's market and many of our favorite restaurants. We're a few blocks from the best coffee shop and a huge park with plenty of room for the dog to play.

Our neighborhood isn't the nicest, at least not right now. But it is the most conveniently located, which to me means that it's only a matter of time. The pressures that had renovated and reinvented other parts of town are already coming to bear. I immediately became an authority on the real estate market in our 12-square-block enclave.

The housing stock in our area dates to the early 1900s, and is almost universally in disrepair. Most listings were obviously going to require so much work that the price plus renovations put them way above our budget. But suddenly this February a spacious, quirky home in apparently decent condition turned up, not half a block from our place. We wanted to see it. So we got a realtor.

That home turned out to be a little too quirky for us—an awkwardly-converted former duplex with "four" bedrooms (one tiny, and two accessible only through other bedrooms) and a small kitchen. I could have lived with all that, but the fact that the only bathroom was downstairs was a deal-killer for me.

But now we had a realtor, so we went looking at houses elsewhere.What quickly became apparent was that listings within our budget ranged from tragic to terrifying

 One modest cottage had clearly been added on to as finances allowed, culminating in a haphazard, unintelligible assemblage of tiny rooms. The dark wood-paneled den walls hid a secret door to the basement stairs, which led to a little concrete cave of a room dominated by a gorgeous and hugely out-of-scale stone fireplace. Okay, you wanted a top-secret hideaway. But you spent a fortune putting a showpiece hearth in a dank little dungeon when your kitchen is too small to turn around in, and now no one will buy your house. (This one is still on the market, list price recently dropped by $19,000.)

One home preserved all the stately charm of its turn-of-the-last-century pedigree—gorgeous wood floors, miles of original molding, a clawfoot tub—except in two key rooms. A hideous furnace crowded the toilet and sink in an otherwise spacious downstairs bathroom, and the water heater in the kitchen was positioned such that you had to wedge yourself between it and the wall to reach the sink. And why, really why, was the washer in the kitchen, and the dryer in the bath? This is also the home where the otherwise empty, unusually large and light-filled bedrooms each had a spacious closet filled with the clothes of the former owner. It was creepy.

Now, I have plenty of scope for reimagining layouts and “seeing the potential.” But when it comes to relocating HVAC and problems that can only be solved by moving walls, a home quickly starts to look like more trouble than it’s worth. And those were just the tragic ones. It really does sadden me to see a sloppy retrofit or slapdash addition sucking the charm and beauty out of what was at one time a delightful and elegantly designed home.

We also saw a basement apartment (Yay! Income!) with a walk-through closet—as in, you could walk into the closet in one bedroom and walk out of it in another room (not Narnia). Upstairs, the kitchen appliances stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, to allow access to the laundry area via a giant scary hole floor covered by a giant heavy door. In another house the second bedroom was a converted porch—six feet deep and running the entire width of the house—and absolutely every surface needed to be replaced. For health reasons, not just because of the ugly.

As someone who has been fantasy house-shopping for the past ten years, actually shopping for houses  was turning out to be a lot less fun than I had imagined.

Then we saw this place.

This is the photo from the listing. So, probably belongs to Nest Realty.

It was not scary. It was not sad. The wood floors were in fair condition and the rooms were a very decent size. The kitchen sported an unfortunate late-80s remodel, but behind the wallpaper and the drop ceiling there was plenty of space and a whole lot of cabinets. It had central heat and air, a fenced yard, and a giant back deck.

It was clearly as good as we were going to get. A week later we went to see again and made an offer.

A thousand scans, emails, faxes and phone calls after that, we had a house.