#RudyVallee | Marilyn's Room

Yes, well. My new house doesn’t look exactly like this, but I’m sure that, in essence, it will feel the same! I’m so excited.

Yes, the darn bank appraisal finally came back the other day and the house passed with flying colors! The only negative thing the report pointed out was that the house “fronts to railroad tracks which is considered adverse due to traffic &/or noise”. [See post below somewhere, wherein I discovered the startling and quite sobering sound of the train barreling into my soon-to-be new living room during the home inspection. – Ed.] [Also, I should point out that it is an old coal train, with few cars, that passes by in under a minute. It’s not some long, drawn-out, train with a zillion cars that takes 20 minutes to pass. – Ed. again]

Yes, the house I’ve been laboring over, for over 2 months already, is finally going to be mine! It is a really old house (1901), in the tiniest town you can imagine (well, population around 1300, so you can probably imagine towns tinier than that, but still…). I am going to be, pretty much, extremely far away from everything, however, I’m seriously up for the new adventure.

When I say “laboring over,” this is what I mean: I saw the house listed on Realtor.com and, even though it was in a town I had no real interest in, it was in my price range so I decided to investigate. The house had been on the market for nearly 500 days, and had been in & out of contract twice. My realtor said, “I don’t think you want to see that house; I took a client through it when it first went on the market and it was a disaster.”

Oh well, all right. Onward.

But I just kept coming back to it, and I asked my realtor, “Can’t we at least go see it? The photos online don’t look that bad.”

Realtor: “They aren’t going to post photos of the really bad things.”

Oh well, all right. But… “Can’t we at least go see it?”

Then, because it was the holiday season, it was like pulling teeth to get the seller’s realtor to respond and then to arrange for us to go in and see it. And, true, the outside grounds need a lot of work. Some siding & gutters needed fixing, the picket fence surrounding the backyard is rotting in huge sections, and an old tree had fallen on the roof of the shed/garage/barn-thing out back. But inside the house — wow. Big rooms. Sunny. All new plumbing, new wiring, 22 brand new windows with screens, a totally dry old basement for storage, new furnace, new water heater, new counter tops, new sinks & toilets, great closets with plenty of storage there, too; a big kitchen with lots of cupboards, and new carpeting throughout most of the house.

My guy-friend, who had come out to see the house with me, took me aside and said, “This is a sweet little house; you ought to buy it.” And I said, “I know. I’m planning on it.” And then it took 6 more weeks to finally get the A-Okay from the lender, but I did. And now I couldn’t be happier.

So, be on guard, gang; trust your gut. If you keep getting the feeling that something is better than everyone’s saying it is, follow up on your hunches because you could be right and everyone else might all be misinformed.

By the way, here are 2 photos of the shed/garage/barn-thing that appeared to be in horrible shape.

Everyone said it was going to have to be torn down. I took these photos to send to a wood-salvage company that was going to come out and tear it down. But as I got closer to the building (I can’t go inside because it’s locked up tight and the roof is severely damaged), I realized that it was a really COOL old building. The windows were filthy but I could still see inside and it looked awesome in there. Really well constructed. Built in 1910, it was obviously more of work space than a garage. And it probably did start out being a barn back in 1910.

My guy-friend went out to the house recently to check on the rotting fence and he texted me and said, “We should just fix the roof on that old garage. It will be easy to do. It’s really cool inside there, and would make a really great work space/gardening shed.”

I immediately got very excited and halted the plans to deconstruct the old shed.

So now I am buying a really cool, completely updated, old house from 1901 that nobody wanted and keeping the old shed that everyone said had to be torn down. Of course, my guy-friend has a lot to do with this. If he hadn’t built his own house from scratch, out in the middle of nowhere, I wouldn’t feel quite so uplifted about the challenges connected to This Old House and living alone in that seriously remote old town…

All righty!! Well, have a great Saturday, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, gang. We’re supposed to get more snow today. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I leave you with this! Another Rudy Vallee ditty– this one from 1934 — that I’ve been playing nonstop in my car!