If the market in Minneapolis is steady, I suspect that you don't have the sort of steroidal land-use restrictions that bid up prices in other parts of the country in the first place.

My favorite was the condo (which would've been easy walking distance to the DC Metro) where not only was the condo dirty, cramped, dark, non-updated, and generally not up to being seen, upon leaving I commented to my realtor that all but one of the neighboring condos had realtor boxes (and the lady coming up the stairs said, "Mine will for sale soon!"). Then the coup de grace came at the mailboxes on the way out, where the County had CONDEMNED notices up for these condos (turned out that the balconies were unsafe).

I live in a charming historical district where the prairie style houses are for the most part very nicely painted with period colors - a main color and a complementary trim color (or two). The people who own the house across the street from mine decided that their house could benefit from a new paint job before it went on the market. The lady of the house was apparently partial to light blue (like one of those 70s blue tuxedos). They had the house painted this one hideous shade from ground to roofline. The walls, the porch columns, the door and door trim, the window trim, the soffet (sp?) support beams. Everything! No architectural detail was spared from being camouflaged away in a sea of ugly light blue. An attractive architectural gem of a home turned into what appeared to be a cheap vinyl-siding clad teardown…

Of course, it’s been sitting on the market for 6+ months. I stopped by the open house last weekend just to do a walk through and chatted with the poor real estate agent (I was the ONLY person who stopped by and he was getting ready to close up). He told me that the painter these people hired had told them how badly the end product would turn out, and argued strenuously for at least a slightly contrasting trim color, but the owners were oblivious and spent thousands of dollars to make the home as ugly as humanly possible. They’ve already moved out of state and they are blaming the agent for not being able to sell their home. They’re refusing to throw in a re-painting credit or reduce the price because “it looks nice like it is.”

Otherwise, houses in the neighborhood typically sell within the first month. Often for more than the asking price! It makes me mad every time I see it. Hopefully a new owner gets in soon and de-uglifies the property…

I've lived mostly in apartments throughout my life. I remember one time when I was looking at a couple of duplexes up for rent near where I worked, one I had to pass on for the following reasons: there was a big hole in the wall right at the entrance from the kitchen, about the size of a person's head, or larger; one of the bedrooms had been a nursery or a young girl's room. Someone had taken a few sponges shaped like a bear, star, and moon, dipped them in different colors of paint, and dabbed them on the wall up near the crown molding, as well as on the light fixture cover, and light switch plate cover; when I went walking around, some of the kids were playing outside, and their border collie began barking at me and almost attacked me. I was not going to live near a vicious dog like that, especially if it was allowed to get loose.

I have several horror stories about apartments, either the color or pattern of wallpaper (Interior Desecrations, anyone?), or the neighbors.

It's funny you posted about the housing market. I received an alert from my local paper that Homebanc Mortgage is filing for Chapter 11.

Link: http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stories/2007/08/10/homebanc_0810.html?cxntnid=bn_2007-08-10_13_14_id226_e

My mom and stepfather rented a house in the house in the early 90s wherein every room was purple. Different shades in each room, but the effect was exhausting. We painted everything a nice neutral hue before we moved in.

Now, the irony: when my husband and I built our house four years ago, one of the first things I did after we moved in was paint the bedroom. Purple. Go figure.

Also, NPR ran a piece from a speech the President made yesterday...he said, and I quote, "The fundamentals of our economy are sound."

The people with the Blue House must have some kindred spirits here in SE Wisconsin. There is a house not far from us that was entirely blue, even the exterior. Not only was the siding & trim all in different shades of blue, but the owners had used blue stain on the deck and had even used blue concrete stain on the driveway and front walk. In the summertime, a small fountain spouted merrily in the front yard, its water colored blue, and lit at night by blue lights. And at Christmastime, the house was lit in... you guessed it... all blue Christmas lights.

When my children were younger, they nicknamed this house "The Blues Clues House."

A couple of years ago, a friend of ours bought this house. The first thing he did was to stain the concrete and the deck a different color. He told us that all the neighbors in the immediate vicinity had thanked him for the changes he'd made to the house they all referred to as "The Blue House."

The owners of this one house had turned the garage into a family room by hanging red shag carpeting on the floor and walls.

Through the first several rooms, it had just about everything we were seeking: great kitchen, nice layout, good updates, the works. Only drawback was that it was only one block away from a very busy street.

Back patio had been walled in. Ok, another room. The realtor called it a bonus room. It had indoor jacuzzi, projection TV, black naugahyde wallpaper and a mirrored ceiling. And a "progressive" aroma.

We ended up living four blocks away. Someone bought that house, but I never see them outside.

When we were looking for a house, 20 years ago now, one we looked at was a concrete box, no trees, peeling paint all over the interior. The listing said new appliances; most were '50s vintage. The realtor hadn't seen the place before showing it and kept apologizing. Curiously, another place we looked at had some problems as well - had been vacant for some time, cats had taken up residence in the living room, most rooms had two kinds of wall covering -- that was the one we bought.

When I was a kid, we moved to a house that the previous owners had decorated every room with wall papers straight out of your own [u]Interior Desecrations[/u]. There were the marbleized mirror tiles in the living room, the black and white optical-illusion wallpaper in the bathroom, the orange bedroom, the kelly green bedroom, and the hot pink bedroom. Hideous “wood” textured vinyl tile in the kitchen with “timber” post and beam construction made of styrofoam. There was a fire hydrant (purely decorative) in the backyard for their dog to pee on. Of course, my parents did buy the house... didn't redecorate til they decided to sell the place, either.

Any St. Paul residents remember the house on Charles that was covered with shoes? Not pictures of shoes, actual shoes, nailed onto the siding. Tennis shoes, boots, pumps, heels . . . the entire outside covered in shoes. It was frankly astonishing.

I can't find it now, so I assume somebody bought it and took down the shoes. Too bad, it was my favorite landmark when I was giving people directions to the neighborhood bar.

Joe Doakes
Como Park
.

Years ago, my dad took a job transfer to a new city. Mom and Dad toured a nice house in a subdivision where all the streets were named after dog breeds. Dad refused to buy, saying he would never live in a house on Poodle Drive.

Here's an example of what the media is not telling anybody:

My parents live across the street from a house that some bank granted a mortgage to a woman on about 4 or 5 years ago. The woman never did anything to the house, except declaring bankruptcy a couple months after securing the mortgage.

A year ago, we discovered via public records that the house sold to a man in another town who owned a variety of properties, but the woman and her teenage kids kept living in it.

Not long after, another public record showed that she had bought the house "on contract" from the man.

It was clear what happened. The woman quit paying her mortgage and the bank, instead of foreclosing, decided to mitigate risk by selling the mortgage off to some guy (sucker).

You can see why the bank would want to hand off the mortgage to another person. Foreclosure is long and expensive for the bank and mortgage company.

9 months after the Contract was signed (likely a 6 month contract), the woman and her kids moved out in garbage bags. The house had been trashed.

At first the house went up for sale "by owner" and was not on the MLS. Strictly amateur hour. Now the house is for sale with some cheapo small town real estate firm located 40 miles away. The owner guy finally got around to mowing the yard this past week. The price is about $20K more than it should fetch because the owner guy likely didn't get paid toward the end of his contract, and now he doesn't have much equity because he's worried about realtor fees.

Now you've got a glut of FSBOs and low-commission shacks on the market that are priced way too high and these suckers/investors holding the bag for the banks because of their rotten decision making about who they've funded in the past few years.

We've been house hunting in SW Minneapolis for two months, and just finally had an offer accepted. Yep, we made some lowballs, I have to admit. But the houses were mostly overpriced dumps. Sellers in SW Mpls have their heads stuck in 2003, and won't admit their blah tudors/craftsmans/foursquares are not as highly sought after as they have been in previous years. We have seen dozens of uninspired/uninspiring ~2000 sq ft, 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath DUMPS, all holding steady in the 425k to 499k range --- and they just ain't worth it.

The nice older homes have been picked clean in this stale, aging inventory; and the remaining sellers just won't come into reality. We finally found a seller with both realism and motivation AND a house the was maintained and improved with good sense and wise choices. That's ONE house in the entire SW metro inventory. ONE realistic seller in two months of looking as "ready willing and able" conventional, non-contingent, loaded-for-bear buyers.

We are thrilled this "buyers market" nightmare if finally over.

My folks are ranchers. The house is part of the pay.

At the new house we went to, mom and dad showed up three weeks after they were supposed to be gone-- they still had most of their stuff in the house.

Rabbits in the living room. We're talking a half-dozen rabbits in real hutches.

Goats on the front porch.

The prior guy had been fired because he ran his cows with the ranch's, and amazingly every single one of his cows had twins, and a huge number of the ranch's calves died. For two years running.

When we moved in, the mice would come out at meal time and watch you. They even lived in the oven-- as we found out when we figured on a simple meal and started to warm it up for pizza. (It's a mouse explosion!)

Needless to say, we got a cat, and mom rented one of those soaking vacuums. We took a LOT of loads of ink-black water out of that living room!

Years ago--decades actually--my husband and I looked at a small home in Capitol Hill. The master bedroom had a big closet with a mirror on it which faced the bed. It was a two way mirror. In the closet which was large enough for several people to fit in nicely along with camera equipment it was a see through window.

Like, for instance, here in San Francisco, where you cannot do anything to your house without huge hassles and costs. Talk about land use restrictions. Single family homes are not that different in price per square foot than condos, because you will never get to expand them.

I just saw a 1200 s.f. condo on the market for 900,000. They were already in contract, they just wanted a back up offer. Meanwhile, the bums sleep on the sidewalk on that street.

Still crazy expensive here, but I always wonder when it will "collapse like a wet taco", to quote one of my favorite movies.

We were looking two years ago and saw a very nice two story house. Ground floor looked great- yard looked great. Couldn't understand why the house had been on the market as long as it had been- remember those were the days when things sold in a week with multiple offers. Then we got upstairs to the master bedroom. There was a toilet in the middle of room. No walls or screening- just this toilet sitting there. That was enough to veto that house for me. My SO tried to argue we could fix it but I stuck to my guns.

During the year+ I looked at houses before buying our current one in the early nineties, I saw plenty of jaw-dropping things. My analog of the blue house was one just like it except done in pink. It was nauseating just to walk through it.

But the oddest thing I saw was a house that had been expanded by adding a long room on the back. They simply threw up walls and roofed it over. The result was that rooms that formerly had windows looking out on the back yard now had windows looking into another room.

The bedroom tried to cover it up by having really nice drapes. Somehow the idea of having nice drapes on a window that looked into another room didn't seem to fit.

We bought our first house a year ago and there were several homes that we toured where the renovations/expansions made no sense. In one home they had added another bedroom to make the house about 2200 square feet, but the kitchen had about 2 square feet of counter space total. You could put a microwave on the single counter and that was it.

The other interesting renovation was at a different house where they had added a large bedroom, but you could not get to the bedroom via a hallway. You had to walk through one of the other bedrooms to get to it.

Then there was a house that they had not bothered to clean so that I could not even enter into one of the bedrooms because there was junk piled up to the doorway. That house also had a dryer in the middle of the kitchen instead of a dishwasher and the house smelled like dog.

I used to live accross the street from "Pink Pants". This guy had pink everything - trim, door, garage, and plastic flamingoes in the garden!

425????

Anywhere in LA it would bring 900 minimum. You should all feel so lucky that your real estate prices are only a little crazy. In my neighborhood, that house would be over 1 million. In my parent's neighborhood, it would bring 2 million.

Imagine foofy fake cottage brick-a-brack and placards placed in the most perfect and sterile arrangements, with a geometrically patterned pink and pastel carpet, something between a chess board and a Candyland board. Image this house set at the end of a cul-de-sac RIGHT NEXT TO THE FREEWAY.

Imagine hell as designed by the real fantasy land owner of a foofy cottage brick-a-brack and placards store.

I was left dizzy and sickened as I struggled to excape the house with my wife in tow. It was so horrible it was not even funny.

The market here seems to be fairly steady. In a way, the Valley is fortunate that real-estate has always been massively expensive here; sub-primes haven't been that common. Real estate ran up, but not quite as much percentage-wise as in other parts of the country, and the "millionaire shadow" of Google and other companies seems to be holding prices up. Frankly, even though I own a house here, I wouldn't mind if prices fell a bunch since I could buy a bigger house and not get reamed by resetting my "Prop 13" property tax basis.

I got my house relatively cheap in 1998: when I saw it, the carpet was soaked with kitty pee, and it had no less than eight different styles of floor coverings in a 1300 square foot house. It also had had a fire recently, and repairs weren't quite done. Since I was going to rip out the floors anyway, and figured that the fire repairs meant it had a brand-new roof, I low-balled and the owners accepted.

SoCal is different: there are places with square foot prices close to Palo Alto levels with 1/5 the household income. Not surprised they're tanking hard now...

Well, the values will collapse somewhat when the buildings do in one of the long overdue major quakes (you're overdue on all three major faults, the San Andreas, Hayward and Calaveras.)

Other than that it will probably be when the city there collapses under the weight of the sheer stupidity of its social programs.

I was also waiting for the crime rate to skyrocket if the voter-approved ban on ownership of handguns and AMMUNITION had been enforced...

It occurs to me that someone who has experienced horror - Horror! - because of a wallpaper pattern has had a darn good life.

That's all.

We looked at a house where the master bedroom was papered with the Wedgewood china design "Singapore Bird". A picture of this is available at --
http://www.replacements.com/webquote/ADASIB.htm?s1=KX&13731&
I thought I might have a vertigo attack.

Outside, it was a Cape Cod bungalow. Inside, a wonderland of retro-Googie Las Vegas lounge decor, circa 1957. The bedroom door was black and white checkerboard. If I'd bought the house, exposure to that environment would have, within a week, so altered my brain that I'd have traded the Subaru for a big sedan with tailfins and started wearing narrow ties and fedoras.

long ago and far away, while in grad school in dubuque, iowa, we rented an old one-room schoolhouse in the midst of the cornfields (those old, romantic, idealistic days...).

we'd moved in, been there a few days, when a car drove up. a young man came to the door and said he was friends with the brother of the owner and he had left some "tools" in the basement from when he and the brother had been using the yard to work on their cars.

we told him to go look in the outhouse instead.

[when we were moving in, we had found an orange-cellophane-wrapped block -- oh, 5" x 8" x 2" -- of some densely packed herbal substance tucked up in the rafters in the basement. not really wanting to be caught with this in the house, we had dispatched it to the ledge below the holes in the outhouse out back. the young gentleman in question quite happily climbed down into the outhouse to retrieve his, um, "tools". never saw him again.]

When house-hunting we came across some real beauties:

(1) Next door to a Junior High. Tiny house with narrow dark hallways and tiny rooms, and an addition: a rec room on the back, one huge room about the size and shape of a basketball court. At least a 20 ft high ceiling. We said "no thanks".

(2) The House In The Hill. Used to be ON the hill, but the hill slumped. You couldnt stand up a floor lamp, there was at least a five-inch slope across most rooms.

(3) The houses where time did not pass: 1960, 1968, 1973. You've seem them-- houses decorated to a farethewell with every gimmick of a particular year, and not touched since.

(4) The deal-breaker appliance: A fold-down ironing board, in the living-room wall. A Pull-out stove About 6 by 18 inches, pulls out of the kitchen wall.
A two-car garage, with the cars in-line, not side by side.

(5) The split-level. Three additions, each one a different shape, each one on a slightly different level.

Whew, there were more, but the memories have
blissfully and thankfully faded.

Sigh, the memories keep coming back. More horrors:

(1) The 70's custom house. Two small bedrooms. Small because of a stylish very wide curving hallway right outside the bedrooms, for no particular reason. A big high wobbly deck out back, with a perfect view of the alley and the neighbor's cars up on blocks. A large attached garage, but no connecting doorway into the house. "No Thanks".

(2) The wallpaper-tester's house. Every wall a different pattern of wallpaper, most of them with a different bald-eagle motif. A blue dial-phone in the kitchen. Blue fridge.

(3) Ms. Haversham's place. A concrete pool out back, empty, with a 30-foot high tree growing up through the drain.

You can't make up things like this.

...in suburban Philly was in move-in condition when we got it. That would be because the industrious former owners took in the task of de-pinking it. The people they had bought from had painted the entire interior pink - even the lovely wooden banister was painted over. The inside of our closet doors are still this vomitous shade - think pepto-bismol mixed with milk of magnesia.

One friend house-hunting in our area in 2004 swears she looked at a rowhome where the entire bottom half of each wall in the living room/den/dining room area was covered in carpet. Not flat decorative carpet - shag carpeting. The top halves of the walls were mirrored. And in the bathroom, the toilet seat was clear acrylic, the better to see the dollars and coins embedded within.

The last time I looked for a house I found one we really liked except for one oddity: it had multiple locks on every window and door. The Realtor told us that the owner was apparently ''overly-concerned'' about security issues. We soon learned that homes in that neighborhood had been robbed repeatedly, and they were probably selling because they were scared to death of the neighbors. We kept looking...

Over the years my late father-in-law made additions to what became a 1 1/2 story rustic cottage on a slope overlooking the Delaware river outside Port Jervis, NY. It's a beautiful spot, and we enjoyed many summer vacations there.

Trouble is, each room he added could be entered only from the outside; there were no connecting interior doorways or stairs. So moving cooked meals from the tiny kitchen to the living room where there was space to eat required walking outside carrying a loaded food tray and ascending a stairway leading into the dining area.

To go from living room A to new bedroom B, you had to step outside A using a different exit and walk uphill and around the cottage corner to enter B. This was of course great fun, especially at night or in the rain.

I called the the Maurits Escher house.

At the risk of sounding ignorant....What is a " "progressive" aroma" ?

If the house with shag on the walls of the garage/family room was in Allen Texas, I might have owned it. I didn't put the carpet on the walls, it was left that way by the builder who had used it as a sales room when the house had been a model home.

In thirty years, my husband I have bought two homes--both of which had major decorating problems.
The first had one bedroom decorated like a bordello...all red, red carpets, red drapes that covered one complete wall and a red wrought iron chandelier that had white globes that had red and blue streaks coming down the side of each globe. The second bedroom was done in a dark brown paint the color of excrement and the third bedroom had a purple home done tie died carpet with purple drapes all on one wall. Needless to say...we ripped out everything and found lovely, never walked on hardwood floors underneath.
The second home had a huge hole in the roof directly over the front door.
And owners wonder why their house sits on the market for months?

I'm a Realtor in a semi-rural & rural area,some of the things I've seen.....

I went to show a house in an area of nice homes,looked fine from the outside,but when I opened the door the blast of light from the canary/chrome yellow interior about blinded me & my clients,who didn't even want to go in.
I called the listing agent & the poor woman told me I was about the 20th Realtor that had clients refuse to even enter the house,but she couldn't convince her clients to re-paint.
Of course they were getting upset with her for not having sold the house.

Don't get me started on additions & remodels.....the horror!

the "progressive smell" is generally thought of as being pot smoke, Patchouli and unwashed feet

... on the ceiling...in the kitchen.

http://home.woh.rr.com/albrechtdata/kitchen_0.html

I would bet the progressive smell was pot.

Well, Lileks, there is your next book, "real estate horrors"............
But funny this topic should come up. There is a really nice 4 plex in the town over from me. On a corner. Nice looking set up. Been onthe mkt for 8-10 months. But the house is painted- blue, turq blue.

I grew up in the 60's and 70's in Colorado in a very old mining town. The house my parents bought was built in the late 1800's...smallish, gingerbread trim, 10 ft ceilings, a front foor with a porcelain knob and a transom with the house number stenciled on it. Of course they threw all that away and "upgraded" to a hollow core door with the three little windows in descending order....threw away the original gaslight hanging fixture. Threw away the round oak table (a new chrome dinette set replaced that of course!). Even as a little girl in 2nd grade I thought it was a bad idea! Now, my mother hates to think of it, too, but at the time they were sick of that "old stuff" and wanted shiny and new!

The underground mine where my dad worked went on strike for 8 months the same year we bought the house. We went temporarily to southern Colorado and he worked on a ranch helping hay. We lived in a 2-room bunkhouse with another family of 4-a total of 8 people! No running water. As a kid, it was heaven-I can't imagine what it was like for the parents!

No house I have ever lived in has been new or NOT in need of remodeling...holding sheetrock up on the wall while dad cussed was a constant in my childhood. My husband and I live in the house my grandfather built here in northern Minnesota and I lived in at age 4 and 5...before the move to Colorado. We acquired it in 1975...and, following family tradition, began "fixing it up". Just yesterday we tried our best to paint over the horror that is Z-Brick....(well,it WAS the 70's!).

I'm sure some of the houses mentioned are truly horrors - but I'm one of those who actually shopped for a cosmetic "fixer" when I bought my first home.

I figure, I'm very handy with a hammer and saw, I actually enjoy scraping years of accumulated mistakes off the hardware and re-painting, and I'm likely going to hate anyone else's taste in carpets or cabinets anyway - why not buy a house that needs them replaced and is priced accordingly?

And it's a good thing (for me) that a fixer/DIY house was where I wanted to start, as my house hunt, commenced in 1998, would still be going on to this day. There was absolutely nothing in my price range within a decent communte of downtown Seattle that didn't require work. A lot of work.

I'm actually jealous of the prices I was seing bandied about in the twin cities as "high". $425,000? That buys you not much within the Seattle city limits - maybe a studio condo, or possibly a 600 square foot house with 1 bed and a questionable bathroom in the neighborhoods where multiple locks on every window and door would be a good idea - or at the edge of one of our hills that is prone to mudslides in the rainy season. I know, it's Seattle...the rainy season is 10 months a year. Happy sliding!

A nice, well maintained 2 or 3 bedroom one-story craftsman (on a lot that stays in one place) with just one bath is gonna set you back about $650,000. Those four-squares that someone was disparaging in an earlier post? Here, we would pay $800,000 to well over a couple mil for that four-square. Aren't those $200,000 fixers y'all have available in Minneapolis looking better and better?

As for my entry in the Housing Horrors Derby: Speaking of questionable bathrooms....when I was on my house hunt several years back, I literally looked at over 300 houses over the course of nine months while I was house hunting. Most were too expensive, either up front, or in the amount of fixing needed, but every once in a while, a promising one surfaced.

One day, I went to look at a "well maintained" 2 bedroom, 1 bath home on a quiet street in a great neighborhood that was only $150,000 and had been on the market for a month. What could possibly have kept this gem from being snagged? The "built in 1909" on the listing sheet should have suggested part of the problem - not immediately apparent, as the listing agent had been smart enough to route open house visitors first to the back yard with its pleasant landscaping, and lush, green lawn. We entered through the back door - doors, actually, as a pair of french doors led from the dining area off the sparkling kitchen to a tidy deck. Both the dining and living room, with charming turn of the previous century details and 9 foot ceilings, had gleaming original hardwood floors and trim. The two bedrooms were smallish, as expected in an older home, but not so tiny as to be unworkable. Honestly, at this point, this little house looked like a steal.

But where was the bathroom? "Ah," said, the listing agent, "that's the one little quirk to this house... The bathroom is, well, through here," and she opened a door in the living room to what was clearly the front porch.

The only bathroom was not only on the front porch, it WAS the front porch! With the front door that we had cleverly been routed away from upon first arrival coming in one side, and the door to the living room going out the other! Apparently, the house had been built in 1909 without indoor plumbing, and when a bathroom was added later on, the homeowner, rather than repurposing a closet or adding on to the back of the house as is usually seen, chose to remodel the original front porch into a bath - while leaving the front entryway intact - doorbell and all!

I can't even imagine how one would explain to guests as you welcomed them into your bathroom to take their coats - or how unnerving it could be if guests arrived if one was in the middle of using the facilities!

Makes the "blue" house look like simple fix, huh?

(The welcome!-my-front-door-leads-to-the-potty house stayed on the market for several months in a very hot market...)

"We're in our recovery," Greene said. "It's a U-shaped recovery and I don't think we've totally hit bottom yet, but we are on our way up."

Where do you begin with a statement like that?

If I saw a house with an appalling color scheme, but with otherwise great lines, I'd lowball it.

Then a few months later when it still hadn't sold, I'd lowball it again. Sooner or later, I figure, I'd either end up with a house or move on to another target. But I agree that my taste is going to diverge enough from the popular that I might as well start from scratch.

As I have no housing horror stories of my own to relate (who could afford to buy in the last few years?) I'll just have to relate a few second-hand, such as the friends who bought a townhouse that had just been repainted— including over the outlets and light switches. That house also had a mustard-yellow toilet, something my friends finally worked around by sponge-painting the whole bathroom to coordinate. Now it actually looks like it was intentional instead of a hideous joke.

But the other one is better. A couple bought the English house of their dreams, except for the disgusting carpet. Carpet everywhere, in some places (like the bathroom) layers deep. The house was certainly old enough to have hardwood floors, so they pulled the carpet up and refinished and had quite a nice flooring surface. Then she decides to get rid of the mosquito-infested no-fish pool in the backyard, and starts bailing out the water...

To find it lined in carpet.

In. Sane.

Sorry for late reply.

The aroma I noted was a mixture of bongwater, patchouli oil, vaseline and - it's difficult to put this delicately - vital bodily fluids.

Here in Jacksonville, there is a small subdivision with the following street names:

Miss Muffet Lane
Jack Horner Lane
Goldilocks Lane
Queen of Hearts Court
Pinochio Drive
Looking Glass Lane
Tinkerbell Lane

Can you imagine your return address being on Miss Muffet Lane?
Here's the link if you think I jest:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=jack+horner,+jacksonville,+fl&sll=30.407229,-81.55426&sspn=0.531789,0.907745&ie=UTF8&ll=30.276136,-81.756499&spn=0.00832,0.014184&z=16&om=1

The reason that the housing market is crashing is no more complicated than nobody wants to pay $1500/month to live in a dump. My husband and I bought our first home about a month ago. We had a budget of $175,000, which is around $1300/month for a mortgage payment.

We saw a 2 bedroom, 1 bath home in Fridley that had been completely redecorated (new flooring) because...the previous owner never litter trained his cats. 40 years of cat pee had soaked into the flooring in the house and the new carpet was the realtor's attempt to cover up the stink.

We saw several forclosed homes, one of which had not only holes punched in the walls, but they had pulled the insulation through these holes AND they stole all of the kitchen cabinet doors. Who steals doors????? I understand you're frustrated with your bank, but that's just ridiculous.

We saw a 1 bedroom 1 bath home that was about the size of my work cubicle, which was a steal at only $150,000. We saw a home that was so close to the freeway that the walls rattled. Again, a bargain at $160,000.

The piece de resistance was a home in Nokomis. The main level was cute...2 bedrooms, 1 bath, formal dining room and sunporch. Then we went into the basement. Apparently this guy had 6 kids, and each "deserved" their own bedroom. So, he built what I can only describe as cells. 6 cells in the basement. The walls were not always vertical, nor did they always reach the ceiling. Horrifying. And, he was asking $220,000! That's nearly $40000 per bedroom!!!

Of course the fundamentals are sound - historic employment levels, historically low unemployment rate, still very low mortgage rates (for those who can actually afford to buy a home) increasing tax revenue, expanding incomes, historically high stock market....and the list goes on.

Just becuase one piece of the ecomony is underperforming to recent standards, but arguably performing at or above historic standards, does not mean that the fundamentals are not sound.

You need to listen to more than just one sound bite from NPR or the MSM to get your facts.

here in the rural/upscale suburban fringes of Phoenix/Scottsdale AZ, it appeared down on the end of my street and like a hulking monster it still sits. No one wants it and why would they?

Set in a dirt road custom neighborhood of equestrian and other custom homes on acre, 2 or 5 or 10 acre lots, this thing sticks out like a sore thumb. The horror of it's denuded lot made me cry every time I drove by for over a year as I watched the "transformation". Yeah I'm a cactus hugger but why rip up what nature has so splendidly created, especially when it is the reason for the home's appeal?

It began life as a nicely made conventional midsize 2500sf Santa Barbara ranch with grey stucco and red tile modified hip roof in the late 80s. The lot was the draw: lush natural desert plants covering it's 2.5 acres. Original owner had horses, did a very nice simple turnout and pipe barn and left all the towering cacti, mesquite and other native trees, bushes, grasses and flowers in place as God had intended. It fit perfectly with all the other homes.

Second owner was a bonafide 80s German rock star who didn't change a thing. Until... he decided he wanted a studio at home. He comissioned a quite large room added at the back with a tall barrel roof for acoustics. It blended pretty well for what it was. I was never in it but I understand it was well done and very nice for sound. Trouble was he couldn't get his career back to the top of the charts, marriage went bad and he sold.

Third owner came in and immediately painted the entire home in bright mustard yellow and bright auto engine blue. Blinding regular joe colors, nothing even remotely subdued, hip, exotic, just the ugliest selections he could find. I often wondered if those were his college team colors or something. But I hate sports . . .

Even the barrel roof was blue (had built up asphalt so he just painted it too). But the red tile remained on the house. Even the GIS map aerial photos for the tax rolls showed that ugly blue roof...

Next he did an addition up front: 2 ultra modern square boxes, flat roofs, varied by a few feet in height which basically transformed one half of the front of the house into an ultra modern style as they effectively blocked view of half the tiled semi-hip gable roof. Problem was the other half including attached garage still had the red tile and semi hip pitched roof.

He was there all of 2 years and kept bringing more and more big boy toys on the property: 4 jet skis on trailer, 4 quads on trailer, 4 dirt bikes on trailer, super large speed boat, super large class A RV. So before you know it, he's cleared off a third of the gorgeous vegetation all around his home to park his toys. Really classy guy, he pulled them right up close to the house, I guess to admire them all the better.

Soon the horse set up disappeared and a full size basketball court was put in. No one I know ever saw anyone play on that thing, but there it was in all it's chain linked fence glory.

The 8 and 11 yr old sons needed to practice their motocross and evidently ripping down our dirt roads and tearing up other people's natural areas and washes wasn't quite good enough. So he got a bobcat and bladed the rest off, clearing about 95% of the lot, making little piles of dirt everywhere for the kids to jump. They had a regular circuit track all around the whole parcel. Finally he enclosed the whole 2.5 acres with chainlink fence which was covered with black shade cloth zip tied in place. Sort of you could see in but he didn't think you could see in so much...

Oh and I forgot the part where he pushed his neighbor across the street relentlessly (undedicated county dirt road) to move his gate and driveway to the side street. He wanted both of them to effectively shut off all access to our street on that end because they were on the corner of two streets and he thought it would be nicer if the street between the two of them (my street) was reclaimed by them and traffic would go away. But he was overlooking the fact that his house was built to be accessed from my street and faced that direction and was on the far side of his square double lot meaning he'd need a long new driveway through the kids motocross track. Luckily our neighbor told him emphatically NO on that idiotic idea.

Suddenly in the midst of all the changes there appeared 3 "sculptures", metallic hellixes (sp) looking sort of like those 3D tin stars that go on Xmas trees. These are apparently are the foundation of some religion and were prominently placed on the large unfinished dirt mound he had made in front of the entry, the mound that had 3 barrel cacti planted on it as a nod to all the desert he'd ripped out. I guess the mound was to elevate these things and set them off. The large one at 15' tall/diameter sat in the middle, with a med and small size one to complete the geometric out-of-this-world effect. They always looked like pods to me, like they came down from space to land in his yard... And all around this dirt mound, he edged it with grey cement blocks laid on the ground in an oval shape, some with their open cavities showing out around the outside. And no blocks were cut to make a flowing curve around the oval, they were just placed at 45 degree angles so that the inside was oval but the outside had little triangles open where they should have been cut.

Well Mr Big Bucks No Taste ended up splitting the lot. The lot now has one butchered tree, remaining motocross mounds and basketball court - it had 20 lush trees. He lost the house and the bank had it for over a year and couldn't sell it. Now it's changed hands and is still on the market under private owners the past year. This during the tail end of a really hot market here, still stronger than many places, but no one would buy it. Overpriced, ugly as sin.

The new owners have tried to spruce it up to sell, painting the whole thing the same red clay as the remaining roof. It blends now at least. But it really needs another big box addition (or super high parapet wall) up front on the other side to transform it from half Santa Barbara-half modern to all modern. That pitched tile mini-hip roof peaking out from the modern post-industrial boxes just somehow looks very weird. They've put in a few big boulders and a few more cacti but the place still looks like a moonscape.

Sad, really sad, and the biggest nightmare home improvment snafu caused by a moron neighbor from hell I've ever seen. Still, it sits with a price tag in the $700,000s....