When one buys a house these days, they usually look at information about it online first. To that end, it behooves real estate agents to present the property, through pictures in its best light. Therefore, the following gallery will give you an idea of what a buyer would see of the house when considering purchasing it.
I will remember these photos nostalgically, as they are the first glimpse I had of the property that would become my November house.
The backyard facing attic room. This faces the lovely tree and the alley. When researching the house and prepping for purchase, the neighbor directly across hid his dogs, and the house less than a few feet away next door was empty and supposedly not liveable. Turns out that both were a lie. But at the time, this side of the house was very, peacefully quiet. This room was to be my office so I could record courses. Oh, how wrong I was. It is now incredibly loud. Screaming children, Barking dogs. The front of the house was loud due to traffic, the back of the house would have been perfect...
The front yard facing attic room- became my office. Later was renovated for better sound proofing.
The alley side of the house, looking at the back. See how very, very close the road the house is. That gets worse when the alley is "repaired." The borough dug further into the yard.
Backyard. Note the covered door. That later is truly covered inside so we could enlarge the kitchen. Someday it will be covered with brick so it matches the rest of the building.
This is the small den on the other side of the wall from the kitchen in the addition of the house. It had a separate entry door, but it was closed off and insulated when the den was made into a bedroom for the ailing owner. This is the room where the foster father of the guy who sold us the house died. No ghostly happenings have been experienced.
Picture of the dining room. The dining room and kitchen are pictured from several angles. These are the best rooms in the ENTIRE house (except, maybe the foyer). The entire house. Think about that a second and they don't seem that great. Also- note that orange color. The whole house, except two bed rooms, are done in shades of orange....
Also note the large shelving/cabinet/hutch unit. That ended up staying with the house because it was too large for the owner to take with him. It is made in Mexico. More on that later.
View of the living room from the dining room.
Another view of the dining room. You can see the tiny, tiny kitchen just beyond. Notice the chandelier over the table. That is after market, and mostly plastic. It is not centered, because the original hole in the ceiling for the original light is still there. This light is slightly over and back. In the room above there is a huge hole cut into the floor and then left by the electrician. We paid to fix it when we bought the house.
This is the fireplace of the upstairs equivalent of the dining room on the first floor. the lovely mantle is second hand, and like all the mantles in the house, not actually attached to the chimney...
The foyer of the house. Notice all of the butternut squash color. The wood behind the squares is plywood. Looks really nice in the photo. Impressive.
Front door to the house.
View of the house from the road. Again, see how close the house is to the alley road. The yard is a steep hill. However, not that big to mow...
Two car garage behind house on alley. Looks worse than it is. Roof is actually in good shape.
According to the deed on the house, it WAS NOT established in 1902. This was put in by the guy who sold me the house. He could not give me proof as to why he chose this date. The house was built in 1899.
The original tiny kitchen, about 8'x6', with a 6'x4' sitting area. The bump in area next to the stove was probably where the fridge should have gone. Instead the small fridge is in the sitting area. there is a small pantry closet next to the fridge. The door leads to the tiny backyard.
Kitchen view from the dining room doorway. Over to the right is the little area where you could have a banquette, but there is a fridge there.
(what they don't show with this photo, exactly, is how small the kitchen actually is, and what they extra part on the right actually looks like. Here it is the day after we bought the house:
(the open kitchen door can show you the scale. The fridge is taking up most of the space that the counter on the left behind the door isn't taking. There isn't much space there. We did keep the meat grinder though...)
View of the living room with books. Those books were really moldy, it turns out. I used a lot of borax to clean the mustiness before I put my books in. The fireplace mantle is not attached to the fireplace. The fireplace is wide open to the sky, the chimney is not/no longer covered. Great wind tunnel. Currently covered with plastic until we can make a bigger fix.
Another view of the living room. The builtins are nice. Sad that we're missing that balancing window on the other side of the fireplace. The transom glass matches the stained glass in the foyer over the front door. The chandelier is after market, and was put in by an electrician who took advantage of the elderly foster father by just cutting a hole in the ceiling just off the original one for the room, and a BIG hole in the 115 year old hard wood floor in the room above it.
Upstairs master bathroom. It is okay and functional.
Master bedroom. There was obviously water damage, likely from the roof. This bedroom is above the kitchen in the addition. The addition has a low slope roof, so rain is loud despite insulation. It does afford a nice view of the backyard tree. This room does have a nice sized closet.
This is the small room beside the master bedroom in the addition. One side faces the alley road along the house. As you can see, it has floors covered with old glue, and a hole in it covered by a plywood board. This room also had a capped gas line, and water lines for an illegal kitchen. This building had been chopped up into unregistered, unpermitted apartments several times in the last 50 years. It has a nice sized closet.
This is the stained glass window on the stairs. It is pretty badly damaged, and may well be original.
This is the upstairs room above the dining room.. Note the plywood square covering the hole left by the electrician when putting up the chandelier for the dining room.
This room is an office (the equivalent of the living room below). The fireplace mantel is not attached but looks nice. The after market closet is there as an attempt to make it, technically, a bedroom. Notice the painted floor on the perimeter. That's period, because they would have had a rug in the center. Note the square of plywood. This floor, too, was cut into and then left in order to have the chandelier in the living room.
This is the only picture of the second, upstairs bathroom. The shower leaked, and beyond it is bare subfloor and rough walls where they didn't finish up the install of the shower stall. This was an illegal bathroom made by chopping the original second floor bathroom in almost half, making both too small. This was to probably accommodate the illegal tenant apartments.
What is not shown:
Baby room next to the front bedroom, second floor
(the only photo I can find of it, after electricians cut a grove all around the walls above the baseboards and radiator- yes, I know that is very bad. They were very bad. Note the hold in the wood floor- again plywood square covering it, again made by previous owner's electrician to put in a light in the foyer before he ran off with the money and didn't finish)
The "baby's room" to the right of the upstairs room above the living room. This room is above the foyer, and has damaged floor, walls and ceiling. No closet. Overlooks the front porch.
Room off the kitchen, through the foyer, past stairs. First floor.
The pantry. Was the bedroom of the guy who sold us the house. It was directly below the two bathrooms and had no ceiling. The plumbing leaked so much, they simply left bare joists, and all wiring and plumbing exposed. This allowed the inspectors and the bank to insist we pay to sister all those terribly cut into, dangerously weak joists, causing us to pay to cut out, and replace plumbing, electrical, and radiator lines. There was also a vent to the roof (the only one working in the house, it turns out), that was open to the sky, right over the guy's bed, that leaked regularly onto his belongings. The room previously had some nasty carpet. The whole place smelled strongly of smoke, and everything, especially on the first floor, was covered in a layer of tar. I had to wash the walls of the pantry several times before they stopped running yellowish-brown when sprayed with cleaner. We took out the carpet the day after we got the house. It has a closet by virtue of putting plywood over the old stairs that went into the basement. The foyer floor was cut open and stairs put in to give a more public access to the basement, so this room could be cut off and made into an apartment/tenant room. Eventually we made this room into a pantry off the kitchen, made the ceiling faux tin, because the smaller, light tiles would be cheaper and easier than dry wall to remove and replace.
The downstairs bathroom
(not many pictures of the downstairs bath before demolition, first one is from the hall with the large sink and toilet showing, small cast iron tub to left of toilet, second picture is of the bathroom without the sink. Note the cheap tiles- they hide a multitude of sins. The bathroom entrance has a cupboard closet that matches the pantry closet on the other side in the sitting area of the tiny kitchen. These closets and bathroom were obviously cut out of the kitchen, which would have been doable. The closets created a false "hallway" making the bathroom barely legal, as you cannot have a toilet in a kitchen)
The downstairs bathroom. This bathroom is right off the kitchen. It was probably put there to make the downstairs into an apartment. It was too small for a tub, toilet, and full size sink, but it had them. The bathroom sink was not working when we bought the house, and the floor was "soft". Turns out that the sink pipes were broken and it was leaking into the crawlspace below (the kitchen and bath are in the addition, so no basement beneath). The toilet was not set properly, so it was leaking nastily, and the bathtub also leaked into the crawlspace. The room had an "odor". The guy who sold us the house had the entire house completely empty except for the kitchen, little den next to the kitchen (where his dad died), and the pantry room. He also had a dining room table in the dining room. He was using the kitchen and bathroom to live. The crawlspace beneath the bathroom was soaking wet all the time. There were termites, considerable termites. They had done serious damage to the joists and floor of the bathroom. We had to gut the bathroom and the floor in the sitting area of the kitchen from the damage, and sister the joists. The bathroom could not pass inspection because of the replacement tub and old sink (they did not fit). It is understandable that no photos were taken.
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