Begin the Beguine: the slow dance of a property search

When looking for a house, most people consider these important things:

• number of bedrooms
• age of the roof
• soundness of windows
• total square footage
• layout on each floor

Or these inane things HGTV has taught us to consider:

• wall color
• rug choices
• furniture arrangement
• bathroom fixtures
• flower boxes

Looking for a tear-down is a different matter. Enter Zak Szmansky, a local realtor and Most Patient Man on the Planet. 

With Zak, we started looking two years ago, in October 2012, competing with would-be landlords for property near campus (where we work) that fell outside various historical districts. Zak walked us through every conceivably workable structure.

Here are the questions this kind of house hunt entails:

• how far is it from campus?
• is the foundation solid and the basement dry(able)?
• how old are the furnace, AC, and water heater?  
• what's the 1st floor square footage?
• what's the set back from the neighbors' houses?
• how hard would it be to get a backhoe in here?

Simply put, we looked for location, location, location, and whether or not the foundation would hold up the Lean-to. For Zak, we were probably the weirdest clients ever. At some points, perhaps all three of us despaired of ever finding a suitable property.
 
Then one morning in March, we got this phone message from Zak with an MLS listing:
     "THIS is your house. Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it."

"THIS" was a ranch we'd walked by many times despite its being out of our price range. The 30% in price drop that morning, however, put it right in our zone.

Stable foundation. Lovely lot. Great neighborhood. And all the things that you don't want to see in a house for sale:

• a 50-year-old kitchen
• 1980s paint and wallpaper
• mismatched hardwood flooring
• inoperable bathrooms
• low ceilings
• dark paneling
• termite damage
• a basement reminiscent of "The Silence of the Lambs" (minus the corpse)

It was, truly, our house. No one would buy it with the intention of simply repainting, and no landlord would have thought the basement suitable for an income-generating habitat for undergraduates.

Here it is, its larval stage, the future site of the Lean-to: