Today is moving day! In honor of our first house, I thought I’d share the stories of the oddest houses we saw in our search.
The top five, from least strange to most:
-One house had a lot of things going for it (location, size), but we couldn’t help being turned off by the cheap laminate flooring they’d redone the whole place in. The odd part: even the bathroom floor was laminate! And water is very bad for laminate. Not sure what they were thinking there (other than maybe that tiles would cost more).
-Another house sounded too good to be true: three bedrooms plus a second-floor study and sunroom, yet very reasonably priced. What was the catch? We went upstairs and saw only three doors: two bedrooms and a bathroom. But wait! On walking into one bedroom, we found a door leading into another bedroom. And that bedroom had a door leading into the den. Which had a door leading into the sunroom.
Yep, four rooms all strung together in a row. That could work in certain circumstances… but not ours.
-Just around the corner was a house much more typically laid out–on the main floors, at least. The basement was another story. It was all one big room, and against one wall, about a third of the way down, was a toilet with only a translucent shower curtain offering any privacy. Even weirder: the washing machine was located at one end of the basement, and the dryer at the other end, about 30 ft away. You’d get a lot of exercise doing laundry in that place! But at least, if necessary, you’d be able to stop for a bathroom break along the way. 😀
-One bungalow we were skeptical of as soon as we stepped inside. Musty carpet covered the whole living room floor, and a peek underneath revealed bare construction boards. Then we walked into the kitchen, and it just got worse. They’d used unpainted, OSB plywood to panel the entire room from the floor to about halfway up! That place definitely won the ugly award.
-The weirdest award, though, goes to another bungalow that was a mystery before we arrived (there were no interior pictures or even room measurements given in the listing), and remained a mystery afterward. We had our doubts from the start, when we found the porch was so slanted you had to hold onto the door knob to keep your balance while opening it. Then we stepped inside, and found a gigantic wooden canoe stretched across the living room. The thing must have been 20 ft long; it only fit in the room diagonally. And it was the only furnishing in the place! I guess the owners just didn’t have anywhere else to store the thing for the time being.
(To be fair, it was the slanted porch and the small bedrooms that made us dismiss the place, not the canoe. And it actually had very nice hardwood floors!)
So it is with much happiness today that we will move into the house we did buy, which is free of laminate bathrooms, chained bedrooms, long distance washer-dryers, plywood paneling, and giant canoes!
It’ll be a little while before we have internet again–but I will be back and responding to e-mails as soon as I’m able. 🙂
