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So I was on a real estate website the other day, and I came across a really really cheap place....as in, cheaper than my condo, and more than twice the square footage. It looked like a fixer-upper, but i was intrigued.
went over to check the place out, it's a couple miles further from work, and right near the train tracks, but those aren't deal breakers. especially with the size of the place, I can imagine what I can do with it.
I set up a meeting with the realtor I used for my condo, and went over there last night, it definitely needs a lot of work, and would pretty much need to be completely gutted and redone, but I think I might be able to handle it, especially if I can pay someone else to do most of the actual work and I can continue being lazy :)
I took a few pictures and came back to the condo to ponder....
hmmm, if I can get the financing to buy it, plus money to renovate it, I could make the house exactly the way I want it! Yeah, you know what, what the hell, I'll go for it!
Now, a little about the place: it is a foreclosure, bank owned, and the configuration is really really REALLY weird. When first entering, there's what appears to be a waiting room, complete with counter/desk on one side, and a bench along the opposite wall. There is also a bedroom on the first floor that has a closet with a door that leads back out to the hallway. There are a couple of other rooms that I have labeled as "??? rooms", because I have no idea what the fuck they are for! Otherwise, it seems like a partially normal house that someone was also using as a partially commercial store/office, etc.
For anyone who I talked to about the condo when I was working on buying that, you know I created an amazing Microsoft Paint drawing of the layout of the condo. Well, now I present my awesome MS Paint drawing of the house:
So that's what it looks like....now, keep in mind, the rooms are really weird, so I would definitely want to redo most of it. Now, here's my artist's conception of what I think I would want out of the place when the renovations are done:
The upstairs would be the "man cave" area, with (eventually) a pool table and arcade machine, and would probably be where I put my treadmill. The library/den would have a gigantic bookshelf with enough room for all my books. The living room would have the tv/video games, etc. and I would even have space for a real dining room table in the dining room, instead of having an eat-in kitchen. and of course, my bedroom would have a walk-in closet big enough to hide all the illegal stuff I own (j/k mom!!)
Oh, and I also didn't mention the outside of the place, there's a couple of weird areas, one which has cinder blocks placed out in a rectangle which has pipes/faucets sticking up out of it, I have no idea what that is for, I would definitely need to hire a landscaper to fix that...there's another area that has a chain link fence around it, and has a paved area in the middle. I have a feeling it may have been a doggy area because of the fence. I think I would want to pave that whole section and put up a basketball hoop so I could get some exercise outside once in a while. It wouldn't be quite a half-court, maybe more like a 1/3rd court, but it's a perfect area for it.
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EDIT: pics I took the other day uploaded to: http://techsupportisnopicnic.blogspot.com/p/house-pics.html
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