Friday, August 25, 2006
The Hunt
Click the picture of my would-be backyard or here for Quicktime--works best with Firefox!
You can also watch in Flash here at blip.tv!
If owning a home is the American Dream then looking for a home must surely be the American Nightmare. Great house? Bad street. Bad house? Great land! Nice yard but no porch. Big lot but no fence. Good house, good land, but no town. We've seen all manner of house/land/town combinations and we've only been at this for two weeks. We're exhausted and drained, our heads hurt and we squabble constantly. He wants acres and I want to be able to walk to get a cup of coffee and a newspaper. We still have a lot to figure out.
That lovely parcel of land you see in that photo was nestled by a small creek in Catskill, NY. The drawback? The house was a total re-do, and not just the insanely painted rooms and scuzzy 70's carpet, either! Both the bathroom and kitchen would need to be completely replaced, the second floor wasn't heated properly, the pink insulation had been installed upside-down and there was a half-assed joist in the basement that may or may not have been holding up the whole house. To top it all off Brian noticed a man surveying the creek as our realtor gave us the grand tour. Apparantly he was gathering information for the condos that were being built there. So much for that. The other House of Horrors featured in the video had more skylights than you could possibly want--it was almost as if the whole roof was transparent. In August? Oppressively hot. It was like being in a big glass pizza oven with bad carpeting.
There was one house in Hudson that was very nearly perfect and I fell madly in love with it even though I did not fall madly in love with Hudson: a cute little colonial with perfect wide-slat wood floors, vintage light fixtures, a nice back yard and a barn.
Of course it's on a truck route.
"busted frog"
.22
Courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network
That lovely parcel of land you see in that photo was nestled by a small creek in Catskill, NY. The drawback? The house was a total re-do, and not just the insanely painted rooms and scuzzy 70's carpet, either! Both the bathroom and kitchen would need to be completely replaced, the second floor wasn't heated properly, the pink insulation had been installed upside-down and there was a half-assed joist in the basement that may or may not have been holding up the whole house. To top it all off Brian noticed a man surveying the creek as our realtor gave us the grand tour. Apparantly he was gathering information for the condos that were being built there. So much for that. The other House of Horrors featured in the video had more skylights than you could possibly want--it was almost as if the whole roof was transparent. In August? Oppressively hot. It was like being in a big glass pizza oven with bad carpeting.
There was one house in Hudson that was very nearly perfect and I fell madly in love with it even though I did not fall madly in love with Hudson: a cute little colonial with perfect wide-slat wood floors, vintage light fixtures, a nice back yard and a barn.
Of course it's on a truck route.
"busted frog"
.22
Courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network
