House 1 - I had an appointment with the real estate agent, he never showed. I sat outside the house in my car, and waited. Turns out the tenants had refused a viewing, the agent never bothered to call me back, so I left. Probably a good thing, from what I saw of the street as I waited outside. Way too busy, lots of hooning in cars, generally not the sort of area I wanted to live in.
House 2 - an open house pre-auction. It was built on the side of a hill (more like a cliff!) with the front of the house street-level to the road, and the rear of the house about 2 stories above ground level. It was pokey, unstable (you could feel the house shifting as people walked around) and somebody nearly fell through the rear deck as the boards were so weakened. If you were up to demolishing and rebuilding, it may have been a good deal at the anticipated auction price, but it ended up going for over twice that. I'm still shaking my head on that one!
House 3 - well, where do I start? A removal house in the middle of nowhere, on a half-acre block with only driveway street frontage. 60m long driveway. The house looked quite small from the outside, but inside it was huge. The owner was an interstate landlord, long term tenants, and the landlord obviously hadn't spent a cent on the place since he bought it. Many broken windows (some obviously from the move), damp, and the decor from hell. As an example - the living room had bucket yellow walls, fire engine red external door, grape purple internal window frame, orange curtains, a terracotta orange archway into the kitchen, and bright blue carpet. One bedroom, while the walls were pretty enough (pale blue with a wallpaper trim), the tenants, presumably in an attempt to cheer up the otherwise fairly grim house, had dawbed grape purple paint around the window frames, and the doorway was alternating orange with yellow and purple daubs with yellow with orange and purple dawbs. The kitchen was a tiny little area with two small benches and a stove in the corner of an otherwise huge room, mostly taken with a mudroom and doorway. The rest of the space was otherwise unused but for a kitchen table. The bathroom, oh dear, the bathroom... it was one internal room with just a tub with an oldfashioned shower rose over it. The other end of the bathroom went into a shotgun toilet, with a vanity, so you had to pass through the bathroom to get to the loo. Off the mudroom was a laundry with a second toilet in it, and a big hot water system taking up much of the room. Most of the damp seemed to emanate from there. The kitchen was painted terracotta orange with blue skirting boards. The smallest bedroom was papered with dark blue flowery wallpaper, and bright orange shag carpet. The main bedroom I couldn't get into to view - the tenant's adult son was sleeping off the night before. When I did finally see it, it was to find flowery wallpaper - most of which had been pulled off, and multiple staples in the walls, and the same orange shag carpet, with big holes in it. And when I spoke to the tenant, she let me know about the dodgy wiring and a few other issues. I also couldn't get into the front hall because it was full of boxes and curtained off.
Well, I bought House 3. 9' ceilings, Tasmanian Oak hardwood floors under all that horrible carpet (and the layers of masonite and/or laminate under it to even up the floor) and enormous bedrooms. Several years and a lot of hard work later, and I have a huge modern kitchen, a large comfortable bathroom with a corner spa tub, three bright comfortable bedrooms, a very comfortable lounge room and the biggest office / sewing room you can imagine. Before the renovation it held a pool table, lounge, desk and a very large oldfashioned electric brick heater. Oh, and I have also built a three car garage with verandah, which is great for entertaining if it rains.
