Duplex
This picture was taken last fall. Since I've been writing so much about our struggles as landlords, I figured I'd include the picture.
It's an old house from the 1920s. It has a lot of character. In the part my husband has fixed up, there are lovely hardwood floors. I spoke with a neighbor, and about 20 years ago, it was converted to a duplex from a single-family dwelling. It must have been something back then. I've never seen the upstairs unit, but I will when we regain possession. I'm guessing it might have been a five-bedroom home when it was just for one family. The front porch is just awesome to sit on. It's one of the first things my husband painted to make it more charming. He's still working on some painting outdoors. I was looking at the size of the place from the outside, and it is huge compared to our home. Hopefully we'll get the place entirely re-done and rented to people who pay rent in a timely fashion and who will enjoy living there.
2 Comments:
wow thats lovely Angela, i love the look of houses in the USA.hope you get your tenant probs sorted soon, sounds like a pain!!
Thank you, Sarah.
The houses in the U.S. have many different styles. This style house is typical for a home in a city in the 1920s around here. I'm guessing from the size of the home, the pretty columns that were in what was once the livingroom, and the hardwood floors, that it was in what was considrered a good neighborhood at the time. The houses in this neighborhood (and a lot of others from the same period in the city) have large houses on small lots. This has a small lot, sidewalks, no off-street parking (but a garage that is now in very bad shape and full of our tenant's junk), and an alley that runs behind the house. I don't know the name of the style of the house, but there are a lot around town. I call it "big box with a large porch."
My home (in an earlier picture in this blog) was sold as a style called cape cod (but it is a very small one). The original parts of the home were built in 1948 or 1949. It was a two-bedroom, one bathroom home with a kitchen one eats in. Originally it had oil heat that came out of only one place in the hallway. The house was so small that with only one place from which heat originated, it was still warm in the winter.
There are seven of these little cape cods built at that same time all in a row along my street. They each have a lot of nearly an acre. At the time they were built, this was a dead-end road out in the middle of nowhere (very different from large home on a small lot in the city like our rental is).
Anyway, over the years each of these seven little cape cods have been added onto in different ways. The road we are on now connects two rather heavily-used roads so it gets a lot of traffic. Our house got a kitchen added on so the original kitchen is now a dining area, a basement was dug out and finished in concrete (too low a ceiling for me to stand up in most places, though), a staircase to the attic (which originally had a pull-down trap door in the hallway ceiling), flooring and walls in the attic were added (where we will move my son soon), a family room was added, a much larger master bedroom with a connected full bath was added, a screen porch was added, and a large deck was added. At some point, duct work was added (for the heat to reach the additions) and the house is now heated by an electric heat pump. The duct work doesn't reach the attic or the basement.
Unfortunately, to get to the family room, one either has to go through the large master bedroom or the smallest original bedroom. Also the washer and dryer are in the smallest original bedroom so we just use it as an office, cat bathroom, laundry room, and as the hallway to the family room.
All of these changes to the house were made before we purchased it. We had vinyl windows and vinyl siding added, and that's the only changes we have made to our home.
It's very interesting to see how the other homes along our road have changed from their original two-bedroom beginnings.
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