House Hunting: Little bit of Country

Back down to South of the city, this place was about five minutes outside of Aylmer (which is a lot closer than I thought it was). This one we had on the list a little while ago, then for whatever reason it fell off the list. I don’t know why I would have ever let it fall off my list!? It just looks so cute. The angle of this picture isn’t the best, it kind of makes it look like the roof is not really level…I assure you, it is. This is another bank foreclosure, so this house is also vacant – good thing neither Jase nor I need a house to be “staged” to get the feel of how it would look. In fact, I think I prefer them to be empty.

The Stats:

• Age: "Older" is all we know, although it seemed to be only around the 60 year mark
• House size: 1.5 storey, roughly 1400 sq ft
• Prop. size: 135 x 200 (almost .5 acre)
• Bedrooms: 4
• Bathrooms: 2 
• Other: Septic & municipal water

The Pros: 

• Very large property, so room to expand if need be
• Needs work, but not everything needs to be done right away
• Double garage - so lots of space to do all those projects we'll need to do hehe
• Outside structure is solid (only one small foundation crack we noticed)
• Layout is good - especially for the additions down the road
• BASEMENT! Not only is there a basement with full 7ft ceilings, it's a large, unfinished basement! Which means we could easily get another bathroom, and a large playroom, or bedroom, or something down there.
• Decent price point (and since it's been listed for a while & winter is just around the corner there could be some wiggle room)
• Heated via forced air (so if we wanted to add central air down the line, it wouldn't be too difficult)

The Cons:

• Very large property - which means more yard work (although that is Jase's problem not mine hehe)
• The slopes in two of the bedrooms upstairs are very extreme & cause a ton of wasted space - could be solved by just adding dormer
• 90% of the windows need to be replaced (although not all of them right away)
• There's a large old oil tank in the basement which needs to be removed
• None of the bedrooms have closets
• all of the rooms are on the smaller size (but that could be changed)
• A large part of the house is wood lath & plaster
• Birds are somehow getting in upstairs (it only appeared to be in the master)

The pro's definitely out-wayed the cons on this place. We both really liked it, and we were both able to see the potential that this house has. We spent a fair amount of time talking about what we would do with it, how we would change things. I didn't exactly get the "it's ours" feeling from it, but it is definitely still on the list. We have a couple more to view, and this one comes down to mainly being able to get it for the right price. We will have to see about this on, but we have definitely like it the best thus far.