I don't get it. Doesn't everywhere have huge bunches of cheap houses?
The woodwork in modern houses is shit compared to these old places. I guess old-growth lumber is harder to come by these days.
I think the issue is labor costs and availability, not wood.
Some of these would be great for anyone planning to make a low budget horror, ghost or haunted house movie.
Those are nice, though having renovated by own old home (which I love) looking at them it feels to me more like PTSD than house porn/fantasy life material.
North Country New York State unsurprisingly seems like ground zero for beautiful old home for no money and is also an actually attractive area, though damn remote from everything. You could drive to Montreal though. Living square in the middle of rural Illinois or Iowa or Alabama seems less attractive even in a cheap old beautiful fixer. Douglas AZ might not be so bad. Obviously the common denominator of these places is that there are no jobs and you are far from everything.
6 - some of it is wood. You just can't buy the old growth stuff that gives you really beautiful Craftsman/early 20th C woodworked interiors anymore.
And also lost skill. My house was put up by an amateur working partly out of a kit bought from Sears, but it is incredible how well it is built. To get woodworking like that now or even to replace or modify that stuff you need a degree of woodwork/carpentry skill that are really hard to find now.
I know. I've built houses and I suck at carpentry.
3- No, those would be at least 2M around here.
I'm a sucker for anything Craftsman, cherry-colored wood, pocket doors. My first house in Austin was a two-bedroom bungalow with a beautiful wood interior. (And was rented to me on a handshake deal that I would show up with 3 weeks later with a moving truck and a first rent check. I don't think they ever charged me a security deposit.)
M/tch honey, how would you feel about living in Iowa?
My parents bought a 4 bedroom house for under 50K. It didn't even need that much work, though it had been very poorly treated by the previous tenants for a while. Not as fancy as any of these, though certainly somewhere I'd rather live than any of them (brick row house right downtown in a dense small city in southcentral PA).
In college, I paid $100/month to live in a house with craftsman wood like that. Everybody yelled at the guy who was using the doors for knife-throwing practice.
AIHMHB, my now wife/then girlfriend lived in an old house like those her senior year, I stayed with her over the summer. A previous resident decided to paint the dining room by coating her naked self in paint and throwing herself against the walls. We painted over this and the landlord kept our security deposit using the excuse that we hadn't asked for permission to paint. (Apparently those in the know don't pay their last month's rent to this guy because he's notorious for never returning anyone's deposit, he rents a bunch of student housing and knows no one will ever stop him.)
That sounds like it would get paint on the floor.
To get woodworking like that now or even to replace or modify that stuff you need a degree of woodwork/carpentry skill that are really hard to find now.
With the advent of CNC milling, I feel like this is something that should be changing. Its a lot easier to craft a nice dovetail joint if you have a robot that's programmed to do it for you.
Can the robots come into your home to fix a bookshelf? Asking for a friend.
I think R2D2 got cast in Star Wars because he was building a bookshelf for Lucas.
Can the robots come into your home to fix a bookshelf?
In theory, the way it should work is that you take a bunch of pictures of the broken bookshelf, upload them to the web, then some AI figures out exactly the piece you need, sends the CAD instructions to the CNC mill, and then you get the right piece in the mail and it just slides right in to place.
Seems reasonable but I also want a personal roboinstaller.
Can't you just call Norm Abrams and offer him dinner and some weed?
If you have his phone number, please post it on the internet.
Just email to Norm420@thisoldhouse.net.
The trouble is that Norm Abram's weed is already much better than whatever Halford has to offer.
That's no knock on Halford's dealer, mind you - but there is weed and there is Norm's weed.
Speaking of extremely calm men with lots of hair and shows on PBS, you can now buy a board game called "Bob Ross, the Art of Chill".
Bob Ross spit on weed to increase its THC content.
The Camp David Accords happened because Bob Ross had a flat tire nearby and Carter invited him in to use the phone. And after the agreement was reached, his tires inflated themselves before AAA showed up.
The trees weren't happy until Bob Ross painted them.
Some houses there that were once (early 20th C.) beautiful and even "high class." Now you'd pay at least the price of the house to renovate them. Where I live you'd pay far more than $50K and still double that to fix them up. I lived in a house in the Boston near-suburbs when I was younger that looked a lot like those: lots of gumwood, the required-by-law built-in china cabinet and bookcases, the never-used (since 1930) front porch, no garage, etc. Lots of nostalgia in them for we boomers, I think. In the Boston area, they were the near-suburban houses you lived in when you were in a first-time not-a-bunch-of-roommates rental, or your first cohabiting-or-married house.
Halford is right about the locations probably being the main reason they are $50K. Also, a lot of them look like no one has maintained them for decades. (Some look pretty decent, though: in the Boston area they'd go for $500K, not $50K, in the right town.)
OT: It's like a Dickens novel except he would reject it as to on the nose.
He can't even design a coin without fucking up the whole "being round" part.
9 is why we strenuously avoid calling the landlord to fix anything. we'd rather live with rundown and "artisanally"-"fixed" original 1930's fixtures than the cheapest possible crap the landlord will replace it with, in the process of which ripping out a huge amount of still serviceable surrounding-ness.
I have maintained one of my two plantar arches and have a prominent posterior tubercle. Laydeez.
My house was not substantially more than 50K and there are ten in my town listed now under 50, none anywhere near as nice as mine. I've put in new appliances and gotten painting done inside and out and that's really all it needed, which I hope continues to be the case since I've blown the rest of the money from the job I no longer have on a (very nice) used van. None more midwestern mom!
Nothing but the finest airbrushed eagle.
My basic rule in old houses (this is an 1881, the two I lived in with Lee were 1903 and 1915) is to do anything in the world to avoid opening a wall, because no good can ever come of that and it's guaranteed to create expensive new problems. This is why I'm fine with my bedroom that has no heat or AC, though I really will eventually install a lockable door. I'm just as scared of something like this that someone in recent memory halfassed presumably not up to code as I am the really old stuff.
40 is not my rule on ankles, which is why mine are clearly sexier (and in one case more scarred) than Moby's.
A friend who studies tenements got a tour of this former shoe shop and said it's amazing, also completely full of decades-old shoes. I wish there were more photos!
Yes. My x-rays came back pretty clean. I think I'll get some inserts and, hopefully, an unlimited-refill, PRN prescription for Oxycodone.
I've been off oxycodone for weeks now, though I don't remember how many weeks because of the oxycodone. At least a week and a half but I think close to two. I've been home in my house a week yesterday. I was sick and did nothing but sleep at the beginning of this week but I seem to be better now.
North Country New York State unsurprisingly seems like ground zero for beautiful old home for no money and is also an actually attractive area, though damn remote from everything. You could drive to Montreal though.
Yeah, this. In summer, I spend a fair bit of time driving back and forth between northeastern NJ and the Adirondacks, and I often notice these beautiful old houses in the towns that border the ADKs to the south. In, e.g., Gloversville, NY, where they used to make, well, gloves (and other leather goods), and which used to be quite a thriving town with, obviously, a lot of money circulating through its main arteries. But Gloversville is now one of those post-industrial wasteland upstate NY towns, and you could pick up a really nice old house there for well under $100K. Lakes and mountains just to the north, and you could drive to Montreal. Not sure I'd want to live in Gloversville, NY year-round, though: a lot of pro-Trump, MAGA signage is what I recall from the summer of 2016.
I'm supposed to use this topical gel. I've tried crushing and snorting it, but nothing happened beyond learning what it feels like to put cold snot in your nose.
The affinity of the human nose for warm snot is one more proof of intelligent design.
Gloversville, NY
Richard Russo's town. The fictional "Mohawk" in his first two novels.
Am pretty sure "North Bath" in Nobody's Fool is mostly based on Ballston Spa. I am guessing it may have gotten Saratoga gentrified a bit in the intervening years.
Recently saw Russo give a fairly interesting talk mostly on his writing over academics origin story which involved Gloversville, Arizona St. and Penn State Altoona (which is rendered as West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton in Straight Man).
40 is very right. Round here they built in the 19th/early 20th century using a plaster made with slag from the coal mines. After a hundred years, if you disturb it it falls into a powder which is essentially soot. Decorators have developed techniques to catch most of the stuff, but it still gets everywhere.
40: This is a good rule, I think. Our house has some knob and tube and plaster walls, and AJ is talking about having the electrical replaced, and the conversation makes me very nervous!
There are a lot of charming old houses here that were used as college rentals. The college built more dorms and the downtown area is becoming more desirable. We looked at a few, but the cost of reconfiguration (like, back to one kitchen or removing the separation into a duplex) and proper restoration was daunting. We probably couldn't have managed getting a construction loan that big. Average cost seems to be $60-80,000 for the house itself. Oh, and no garage and no room to build one. But so tempting!
Every time I try to hang something on the walls I'm reminded that horsehair plaster does in fact have horses' hairs in it.
And here I was thinking they only shaved the horses for some kind of pron-thing.
Shaving Boxer was simply a hygienic measure, to control lice, and he was quite satisfied once he understood the necessity.
Hark! The herald angels sing!
Ekranoplans are now a thing!
Off our coasts they now collect
Airborne thanks to ground effect.
Joyful all ye 'viation guys,
as we fly the very low skies.
They brim with joy our Yule tide cup
From slightly under ten feet up.
Who wrote the link in 51? Are they one of us?
62 I don't think so, the only mutual follower with an Unfogged connection that we share is Felix G but it does make one wonder.