Adventures in Real Estate: Context is Everything

How did we get to the point of putting our little all into a pipe dream based on sentiment?  It's a long story that starts when yours truly was 10 years old, helping Dad clean out his mother's house in darkest Washington County, Maine.  The house was part of a family compound that seemed like a lot of fun at the time, with three houses so close to each other that shouting really did work. At the bottom of the lane where these three houses were located was a country store that supported the families in the three houses. There was horsehair furniture, a soapstone sink, gleaming wide board floors, a pump in the kitchen, and an outhouse.  I was told that it was an upscale outhouse because it was in the shed -- poor people had to go outside. There were blackberries and a brook that gurgled as it wound down to the tidal river below. There was a barn with a swing, just like Charlotte's Web.  It was magical.

My mother had convinced my father that he should not own the house.  It's a long way from Massachusetts, she said.  Whether he really agreed I will never know, but the house was sold.  Fast forward a few years to another house in the compound, for sale by an uncle.  Tempting, but the town had just been accidentally sprayed with pesticide by the paper company that owned most of northern Maine.  With small children around and more on the way, we thought that relocating to this part of the world, if only for the summer, wasn't the most sensible idea.

Many more years elapsed, and we went to look at the house in the pouring rain, just for fun while on a very damp vacation for which we rented a nice, brand new house about 40 miles away. We walked around in the wet grass that had not seen a lawn mower all summer, but I got the bug even though the house was not for sale.  This past Labor Day weekend, OLGS spirited me away to look again, because it was for sale.

We got to the house at the appointed time and waited for the real estate agent to show up. After almost an hour, he arrived, angry because the owner no longer had a key. After climbing on the roof, trying to jimmy the shed lock and open the cellar door, we broke a window.  OLGS crawled in, opened the door, and there we were.

It was heartbreaking.  There was a hole in the roof and there was no electricity because Bangor Hydro had cut the wires due to non-payment, according to a neighbor.  There was white mold on the massive beams in the cellar.  "At least it's not black mold," said the helpful agent. The pocket doors had been replaced by some truly ugly see-through plastic.  The soapstone sink was long gone. The porch was falling off the main house, the shed was listing to one side, and there was paint splattered all over, a sign that the owner had been trying to spruce things up.

I left very discouraged. But I've been obsessing about it for 50 years, and am not going to be deterred, although I am also not willing to pay very much for my obsession. We made an offer on it today.

What we learned about the house between our visit and the offer will be the subject of the next blog post.