For sale: House with fabulous closet
My awesome colleague Justine Maki, who lives in Hampden, had an amusing looky-loo experience recently. Once I heard it, I wanted you all to enjoy the fun, too.
Here's her tale:
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Now that homes are regularly available for tours 24/7 — thanks, Internet! — open houses seem a little quaint. Sure, nobody's going to buy a house without going inside and seeing the space, but those "open" signs also attract a lot of nosy neighbors.
I'm not casting stones here — I'd love to buy a house in my neighborhood, but I'm not planning to sign anything for a year or more. So a few weekends ago, I checked out an open house across the street from my apartment and noticed something funny.
The helpful flier and online listing said the place had four bedrooms. But there were pictures of only three.
When I climbed the staircase, the case of the missing bedroom was solved: It was a closet!
Not closet in the "it's so tiny, only a bed fits" sense, but the literal sense — the room, across the hall from the master bedroom, was being used by the mister and missus as a walk-in closet.
The funny thing was the closet even had a closet. The husband's clothes were neatly hung in there, while the wife's stuff took up the rest of the space. There was also a nice vanity desk and an IKEA bookcase for purses and shoes.
I don't blame the Realtor for skipping the picture on that one — nothing says "tiny bedroom" like a closet.
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Thanks for sharing your experience, Justine!
Got a housing experience of your own -- renting, looking, buying, selling, owning -- that you think would make an interesting guest post? I'm all ears. Funny, frustrating, enlightening: all good.
Categories: Guest post, Housing market experiences
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Comments
Our current home has a tiny room we call "the little room" that was originally a nursery for the youngest child. I believe it was part of the landing outside the master bedroom that was walled in, and fitted with tiny closets.
Posted by: Dahlink | April 5, 2011 3:28 PM
I have one of those rooms in my "4-bedroom" rowhouse in Fell's Point! It's about as big as a decent-sized walk-in closet but since it has it's own little closet and a window then technically it's a bedroom. I put storage shelving in it along with the cat litter box.
Posted by: Fells27 | April 5, 2011 3:44 PM
soooo many lies and half-truths in real estate listings. we saw a house that was listed as 5 BR. what they had done was broken up the basement into a series of rooms--laundry room, tv room, the 2nd bathroom, and 2 other seemingly random rooms (what they called the 4th and 5th bedrooms). the owners were there when we toured the place and they explained that the rooms could be used as bedrooms. i guess technically ANYTHING could be used as a bedroom. but these were small rooms with very minimal light. i can't remember if there were small basement windows or not.
on one hand, i guess a 5br house would be more attractive to a large family? on the other hand, this was a 1500 sq ft single-story house so i can't imagine that many people actually living there--talk about crowded. the rooms were all small and you had to walk through some bed rooms to get to others. in my opinion, they would've been better off with less rooms that were larger, to provide more usable space and less space wasted on walls and walkways
ultimately, it was priced 50k too high and the owner was adamant on price, so at least the only time we wasted was the 10 minutes to walk through. however, listings like that always left a bad taste in our mouth. don't lie in your listings--it will drive your most qualified prospects away, because they'll wonder what else you're hiding. it sends bad signals.
another funny thing was houses that had no real description at all, just square footage and BR/BA info. usually the only description would be some cheesy real estate cliche: "priced to sell" (i.e. downtrodden fixer-upper), "must see" (usually used for the most mediocre houses), "picture perfect" (saw this on quite a few houses in need of paint and a good cleaning), and so forth.
Posted by: chappy10 | April 6, 2011 1:35 AM