It's a Go!

Today, our house goes on the market. We have an open house scheduled for this Sunday.

We live in a community west of Boston. When my parents moved here in !958, it was quite rural. Now, it's a very, very expensive town without many open spaces for building left. I just did a search on MLS (real estate listing service) and there are about 150 single family homes for sale in our town. Forty of them are listed at $1 million plus! The most expensive place is offered at over $3 million. You have to get about two-thirds of the way through the list to get to houses in our price range. Sadly, a house lot is listed for about the same price as our house!

There's a lot of houses now that are bought and torn down and replaced with the biggest McMansion the lot can support. Many homes here in town are split levels at about 1500 square feet, similar to the first place my parents bought here 50+ years ago. These are instant tear-downs. So, some neighborhoods are now a patchwork of brand-new monsters surrounded by half-century old homes in a bit of disrepair. After all, why bother to do any work on your house if you know the minute it's turned over, it's plowed under?

Fortunately, our house does not fall into the tear-down category. It's a unique house, architect designed. Also, it's a contemporary. I checked the MLS listings. Right now, it's the only contemporary in town on the market. Every other house is a colonial. Our realtors tell us that contemporaries are "destination" houses. They attract their own pool of buyers. So, we've got some good things going for us. In addition to the contemporary design, the most important feature is that we're "reasonably" priced in a town where home prices are typically stratopheric.

So, here's hoping someone falls in love with our house soon. It's exciting to finally be in the market.

Below are some pics ... We've got the place pretty spruced up. I don't know why I didn't take any pictures of the front of the house, but here are a few to show off how cleaned up and cleared out we are. The first 4 are different views of the living room. The fireplace is made from an old stone wall in town. The screen in the fourth picture separates the living room from the foyer. The patio is all cleaned up and the bridge for Skip's wheelchair between garage and house is newly stained. The yard, while it doesn't have much grass, is all cleaned up and the fence has been stained. The dining room abuts the living room and the fireplace is open to it as well as the living room.