The Discovery

It isn’t even ours yet, and here I am starting a blog about it… the house that we have, with the aid of the Frenchtown Historical Society, already dubbed the “Edward A. Ohlms House,” for the man who had it built in 1908.

We’d been house shopping, but we didn’t know whether we would actually buy. We own another house, a ca. 2005 rowhouse finished to our specs in the New Town at St. Charles, an up & coming, highly successful new urbanist development. We love New Town, but having just returned from 3 years in Edinburgh, Scotland, in November of last year, I had been feeling the pull to live somewhere… established… more than ever before. Despite all the coolness of New Town, I have periodically missed the little, 1940s brick house we had in University City (and which took only 2 days to sell in 2005). Seeing opportunity in (a) the bottomed-out housing market, (b) the excellent tenants who’ve been renting our New Town house and wish to stay indefinitely, and (c) our temporary free housing with my mom, we started… “just looking.” Everywhere…

We considered buying a second property in New Town. We considered Kirkwood, which has been largely out of our financial reach until the current housing crisis. We considered St. Louis City, especially somewhere very near the Botanical Garden. And we considered historic, downtown St. Charles. As my husband will quickly attest, what I wanted from a house could change from one day to the next; however, there were some consistencies: Brick… hardwood floors… preferably a lovely wood staircase… and a fireplace. An extra perk would be a balcony, and another extra perk would be a water view.

The house Mark discovered, quite late in our “just looking,” has all of those things except for the water view. It does have a view, though, especially from the finished third floor, aka the attic; the house is at the crest of a hill, and then you walk up 3 floors… from the north windows, you can even see the top of the Discover Bridge (Hwy 370). I love living up high. In Edinburgh, our flat was on the 7th floor. I think it bestows a certain sense of security, like the way castles are often situated on hilltops.

As I was saying, the house was discovered quite late. In fact, we had just decided that we were unable to find anything that was cheap enough and worth the stress of dual-property owning for us to actually pull the trigger. We were trying to keep our costs down as much as possible, “just in case” we suddenly lost the tenants in the NT house. We had decided that we would just move back to New Town when the lease on our house ran out, and our tenants were banished. We both felt a little bad about that; they love the house and New Town, and they have waited anxiously to hear whether we’d buy something else or kick them out… We had decided to do the latter, when suddenly Mark gave Zillow another peruse (the first time we’d looked in a few weeks), and discovered… the short sale. Mark, the would-be day trader, is a sucker for a bargain, especially one that also presents a real investment opportunity. Me, I'm just a sucker for brick.

St. Charles has a negative, white-bread, “Real America”™ reputation in some circles, probably because it was, not long ago, the destination for much of the “white flight” out of St. Louis city. However, it has changed and continues to change. These days the downtown area, in particular, is much more diverse than a lot of people give it credit for. There is a thriving community of artists at the Foundry Art Centre at the northern end of Main Street (where Mark used to go to fire the pottery he threw on his wheel at home, and where he’ll soon be going again – now by foot). The grade school Lily will attend is only 70% white; the rest is mostly African-American (20%) and Hispanic (8%). And then there is the wide-ranging economic diversity… There are enormous, beautifully preserved, brick houses right across the street from simple, 1960s vinyl ranches, and there are meticulously maintained blocks immediately adjacent to blocks where people seem to think that their front yard is the best place to store the junk they are too cheap or too lazy to throw away. So when I saw the listing Mark had found, for an all-brick, all-hardwood, 2233 sq ft house priced at $129,900 and looking rather lovely from the photos…




I thought, it has to be in abominable condition, or (despite the listing’s claim of “location, location, location!”), it has to be on a “bad block.” Even IF the house were as lovely as it appeared, surely nextdoor we would be presented with weeds and rusty car parts...