Inaugural Post

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, not in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
- JFK, Inaugural Address, 1960


I am the kind of person realtors hate. I go to every open house in the neighborhood - peering in closets, checking out the photos on the refrigerator, sizing up the furnishings and the age of the appliances. I consider it my business, as I am a property owner, after all, to stay up to date with the local housing market. I like to know who's coming or going, and why, and if they have any nice antiques that might show up in a yard sale. I'm not entirely wasting their time, I've always thought that if the right thing came along at the right time... well you'd never know.

And that's how we found this one. Bucolic, right? A charming craftsman cottage with yellow paint and a cheerful blue door, she resides on a gentile avenue in Uptown New Orleans. It's huge - 3000 sq ft counting the finished attic, has a backyard, nice sized rooms, and off street parking for two cars inside an automatic gate. Parking in this area is a rare amenity, and one of the first things Mr. Nola and I admire in any house.

When I went in, the house had been on the market for six months. It was priced competitively for the area - $395K, down from an original asking price of $415K. Parts of Uptown have houses selling at over $200 per square foot, so anything under $500K that isn't in a ghetto and is over 2000 square feet is a pretty good deal. It was also very pretty. Decorated for the holidays, one could easily imagine having big family dinners in the traditional double parlor, tucking les enfants in bed after hanging their stockings by the marble fireplace. It was like one of those Lands End Christmas photo shoots.

So why was it on the market for so long? Well, it had one small problem. Small meaning 13x8, to be exact. It was the kitchen. How a house this size made it to 2004 with a 104 square foot kitchen I do not know. I believe the previous owners all looked at the situation and decided the wisest thing to do was move. Mr. Nola and I, on the other hand, looked at it and saw a challenge.

Six weeks later I was handed the keys, for a pretty fair final price of $350K. This required some significant financial voodoo and the promise of all my organs once I'm done with them, but at any rate, it's ours. Having had a traumatic experience in the past with living in a house during a kitchen renovation - a sad story for another day - we planned to have everything that needed to be done DONE by the time we moved in.

It is now 5 months later and we are getting close to the date we have to vacate our current home, Chateau Danneel, for our new tenants. Before they move in, we have to get some repairs done at Chateau Danneel, so there will be projects going on at two locations for a few weeks. Over at That Old House, after five months of haranguing the architect and shopping for contractors, work is finally about to begin.