for sale

  • Craigslist finds, May 2007: West Coast Edition

    Plenty of nice stuff out there if you know where to look. Included for your edification, several bits & pieces of Arts & Crafts furniture, architectural salvage and other related items that I’ve found using the terrific Craigslist search engine Crazedlist.

    • refinished Limbert dresser with original copper hardware, $1000 (San Francisco CA)
    • document or sample cabinet, $340 (Santa Cruz CA)
    • Gustav Stickley ladderback chair, $475 (Santa Cruz CA)
    • L & JG Stickley "postal desk" and rocker, $500 ea (Glendora CA)
    • set of 4 early Mission Revival / Craftsman side chairs and 1 armchair, $350 (Ventura CA)
    • Stickley #729 writing desk, $5900 (Montecito CA)
    • round pedestal dining table, $600 (Sherman Oaks CA)
    • set of four c1925 Stickley side chairs, $3600 (Las Vegas NV)
    • set of two contemporary Stickley spindle-back armchairs, $1300 (Del Mar CA)
    • contemporary glass-top Stickley coffee table, $250 (San Diego CA)
    • L & JG Stickley armless rocker, $500 (Portland OR)
    • another Stickley armless rocker, this one with new-ish leather seat, $250 (Portland OR)
    • Stickley Bros. rocker, needs minor repair, $225 (Tacoma WA)
    • drop-leaf Mission desk, $275 (Alameda CA)

  • more houseporn: brown shingles for sale

    The unpainted (or brown-painted) brown shingle is one of my favorite types of house. Usually taller than a one-story ground-hugging bungalow, built in either a Craftsman style or Western Stick variant (which often incorporates more rustic and cabin-like features, like rougher beam endings and less-symmetrical eaves), and are less often Craftsman-fied Queen Annes, with glossy trim and a bid of beadwork around the windows, these houses always seemed warm and friendly to me – partly because I grew up in Berkeley, CA, which is full of such homes, and partly because my father lives in a very warm & comfortable house built in this style. Some are raw wood or brown-painted wood shingle, others use wood siding or brown-painted wood siding; all share a sort of undecorated honesty of design. (There are also quite a few very modern brown shingles, built in the angular "Northern California" style that owes far more to Sea Ranch than Maybeck; these are mostly in the Eucalyptus woods of the upper Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco Hills, and while I am sure many of them are fine homes, they’re not especially interesting to me, or – I imagine – to you.)

    Here are a number of attractive brown shingles for sale. As you can see, the style is most popular on the West Coast, specifically in the Bay Area; I doubt wood shingle would last nearly as long when exposed regularly to snow, wind and ice.

  • Realty Advocates: the under-pricing epidemic

    Brett Weinstein and Hal Feiger sell real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their firm, Realty Advocates, advertises "full real estate services at reduced fees," and they really do approach their jobs as a trade and craft and not just a get-quick scheme – Hal is very active in the development of non-profit affordable housing in the area, and even found the synagogue I grew up with (Rabbi Burt officiated my Bar Mitzvah!), Kehilla, a permanent home in the East Bay. Brett, on the other hand, has worked as a carpenter and general contractor, and knows a lot more about quality construction than most of the agents I interact with. Basically, I’d buy a house from these guys.

    Recently, they added a blog to their site; one recent article caught my eye. Read the complete article at their site:

    You know the practice: suggesting, or going along with a seller’s
    idea, that the best way to obtain the highest price in the sale of a
    house is to deliberately ask a price that is well below what you expect
    it to sell for. A more odious variation: agreeing to list a property at
    a price the seller has told you he would not accept. You figure this is
    pretty safe: everything gets bid up these days. The SF Chronicle
    recently dubbed this the “under-pricing epidemic.”

    Sometimes this practice is blatant, as when the
    agent puts in the confidential remarks section of the MLS: “seller
    reserves the right to reject any and all offers.” Other times, it is
    hidden, as when offer day comes and you, the buyer’s agent, deliver the
    only offer. You are then countered at a price ten of thousands, and
    sometimes, hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the asking price.
    In essence, the buyer is being told to bid against himself.

  • for sale: real estate update, May 2007

    A few homes that struck me as I was browsing new (to me) search engine Oodle, which lets you look at classifieds at almost every major newspaper in the US (and plenty of not-so-major papers):

  • East Bay (California) homes for sale

  • stuff you can’t live without: Mag-o-Grip

    I don’t frequently recommend individual products here, but this is so incredibly useful for anyone who builds, repairs or otherwise tinkers that I had to mention it.

    The Mag-o-grip (not sure about the hyphenation) is basically a magnetic wrist-wrap that lets you keep nails, screws, nuts, bolts, drill bits and other useful metal things on hand. That’s it – so simple I’m amazed it hasn’t been around for 100 years, but I guess truly useful things are often this simple – and not really obvious until you see them. It’s available for about $15 from MDG Tools and various retailers. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of having forgotten nails, nuts and heavy staples shred my shirt pockets and clog up the dryer lint trap…

  • “Shelterporn” from Houstonist: big profits in Texas

    Houstonist‘s every-Saturday Shelterporn section focused on a really pretty bungalow in last weekend’s edition:

    Longtime shelterporn readers will know that we’re most partial to two
    kinds of houses: clean, contemporary designs and traditional bungalows.
    Frankly, though, it’s the bungalow that really makes us think "home" —
    and so it’s only natural that we fell in love with this Heights beauty at first sight.

    At $599K, it’s no bargain, whatever that means, but I can’t speak to relative prices, not having much knowledge of Houston’s current real estate climate. However, based on the last selling price and the square footage price of other homes in the neighborhood, Zillow estimates the home’s value at $187,915, which certainly seems a bit more realistic.

    Adam Wells, president of Clerestory Homes, says that the upgrades and renovations were extensive:

    This project was definitely a labor of love for our company. It is
    an original 1920s bungalow that was extensively remodeled and
    renovated. We added ~1,900 sq.ft. to the original ~900 sq.ft.
    footprint.

    You can see previous sales data here; looks like a flipper or the developer bought it for $160,656 last year – so a more than 300% increase in price. It’s just too bad that people are priced out of neighborhoods they’ve lived in for years, and entire areas are ghettoized, by profiteering and personal greed. That said, the house itself is beautiful, inside and out, and apparently the buyer is very happy with her purchase.

  • Urban Archaeology: architectural salvage in New York City

    Urban Archaeology, with showrooms in Manhattan, Bridgehampton, Boston and Chicago, has been in the business of saving urban architectural treasures since they opened their Manhattan store in 1978.

    In addition to a large stock of salvaged materials, they have also developed their own line of lighting, bath accessories, washstands and medicine cabinets based on popular historic designs.

    As far as salvage goes, though, this is no scrapyard, but rather the highest end of the collectible architectural antique sellers.

  • for sale: restored Horseheads NY home, $199,500

    From Martha Horton’s recent article in the Star-Gazette‘s Twin Tiers Homes section:

    John
    Stevens, a Horseheads native, studied architecture at Cornell
    University, and his wife Rosemary, originally from Owego, is a Cornell
    graduate, but the two did not cross paths on campus. They met later,
    when Rosemary was employed with Corning Inc. and John, an independent
    electrician, was doing work there.

    John
    had purchased a Craftsman-style house in the Village of Horseheads in
    1993 from the Shappee estate. The original owner, who built the house
    in 1920, was James Shappee, a prominent citizen and foundry owner. His
    caricature by famed cartoonist Zim hangs in the Zim Center in
    Horseheads. James’ wife Febe was a Horseheads school principal.

    When
    Rosemary, an interior designer, first saw the house, she recognized its
    "good bones," and thought it was well worth preserving and updating. So
    the couple went to work on it, doing most of the labor themselves. "We
    worked on the house every day after work," Rosemary recalls, "and every
    weekend." They are still working on it.

    John
    did extensive rewiring and updated the heating system. Rosemary, who
    now operates her own interior design firm under the name of "Designs by
    Rody," masterminded the aesthetics. "I wanted to keep the house in
    character and bring it forward as it would have evolved through the
    years," she explains. "Houses talk to you," Rosemary adds.

    The 3+ bedroom, 4 full bath, almost 4000 square foot house is listed by Kristen Dininny, a real estate agent with Signature Properties. There’s a map here.

    Of course, where I live, a house like this would sell for well over $450,000, even with the market falling a bit in the past year. It’s almost tempting to move to New York and try to make a living doing freelance work or by beefing up this site and trying to make some money from the advertising … the $200,000 cash I’d walk away with from the sale of my own smaller home would cover expenses for several years.

  • Redfin: find, buy & sell homes online

    Redfin is a real estate listing service with an integrated blog, which gathers neighborhood information, maps, photos and other information on a particular for-sale property all into a nice neat package. They bill themselves as "the industry’s first online real estate brokerage," and brings the whole web 2.0 package to MLS listings. And unlike customer-hostile realtors and newspapers who hide MLS listings behind layers of logins, security measures and other barriers to a halfway decent customer experience, Redfin puts the listings themselves right there in front of you, to browse and bookmark and share as you see fit.

    A recent listing in their San Francisco Bay Area section shows a small, attractive, and – as usual – ridiculously overpriced bungalow in one of my favorite Berkeley neighborhoods. Unlike other real estate tools, though, Redfin is much more upfront and honest about pricing, forgoing hype for honesty; they point out that $602 per square foot is just short of criminal, and present alternatives like this more expensive overall but only $396 per square foot home with a beautiful view just up the hill.