The Second Visit… The Inside

I said before that I thought it would either be on a bad block, or it would be in abominable condition on the inside. We’d already seen that the former was not true, and we were about to see that the latter wasn’t true, either…

To be sure, it’s a mess right now. Like I mentioned, it is a pre-foreclosure short sale; the seller and bank both want to avoid foreclosure. We have learned that what we are paying is approximately $100,000 less than what the seller owes the bank, but the bank has approved the sale at this price. It’s all a sad story on the seller’s part, something to do with a divorce… and alcoholism. The house is being sold “as is, no seller’s disclosure, no inspections.” The mess left behind, we’ll inherit… a few trashed pieces of furniture, a lot of garbage (including moldy food sitting out on the kitchen counters), and miscellaneous, random belongings.

But we were able to see past all of this. Left to our own devices, since we’d been left the key and had no agent accompanying us, we wandered the (to us) enormous house. Every turn brought a surprise or new discovery; even the light switches were never where we expected them to be and had to be hunted down. Instead of the trash on the floors, our eyes were drawn to the wood trim and doors, the pocket doors, the old fireplace mantles, the built-in hutch in the dining room… the grand, split/double staircase – with one set of stairs presumably intended for the servants…







And of course, it was enormous. The 1st floor consists of a foyer, a living room, a formal dining room, a kitchen, and a half bath. Up the beautiful staircase, we found two very large bedrooms, two small bedrooms, and a full bathroom. Off one of the smaller bedrooms, there is a balcony. Up another flight of stairs… to the attic; it is completely finished into one enormous room, with another full bath (in dire need of a makeover), more hardwood floors, exposed beams, and great views in all four directions.



It needs a serious cleaning. It needs some stuff replaced (like the knob & tube wiring visible in the basement; our insurance company has given us 12 months to replace that). All of the systems are old and likely to need replacement before too long: the A/C, the furnace, the boiler, and the hot-water heater.

But… it is also amazing. It has original floors, original doors, original windows, original wood trim – almost all of which has never been defiled with paint. We think that even many light fixtures and bathroom fixtures are original. The original windows work incredibly well, opening smoothly and easily despite their size; I’ve learned that they operate on a weight & pulley system (they actually did know how to build things, back in the day!). We have learned that the doors (and quite possibly the trim and other items) are all made of something that is an Arts & Crafts style hallmark called “quarter-sawn oak” and would likely cost ~$500 each to replace today; and there are loads of them – there’s even one laid atop 2 sawhorses in the garage, as if it was used as a work surface.

The house has its quirks, to be sure. There is a bizarre shower-and-heat-lamp amalgamation amidst concrete walls in the basement… Our inspector took one look at the proximity of the heat lamp to the shower head and said, “Do me a favor – promise me you’ll never use this shower.” The “finished” part of the basement is gross and needs loads of work, except that we’d never need to use it. And then there is the crooked toilet in the 1st floor half-bath…. Yes, it is plumbed this way:



But there is actually incredibly little work that MUST be done to the house. There are various cosmetic revamps to do, and plenty of money to spend, but nothing that couldn’t be lived with, for a while…

We went back home. I texted the agent, told him we really liked the house, and asked if we could get an inspection done as long as we did it prior to making an offer (so the contract would not need to be contingent upon it). He said Yes. He hastened to remind me that the seller would not pay for any inspections or do any repairs, and to make sure I knew that this would be the case even if we did not get the house. In short, it was our $350 to gamble and nobody else’s. I said yep, I know.

It was well worth the risk.

First Visit

At first, I could not get hold of the seller’s agent (we weren’t working with a buyer’s agent). It’s just across the bridge from where I work, maybe 10-12 minutes away, so after work, the day after Mark had discovered the property, I did a drive-by of it. I parked, got out of my car, stared up at it, and without even walking around the back I immediately pulled out my phone and called Mark. I believe I said something like, “It’s awesome, dude. It’s huge. And awesome.” Somewhere in that conversation I also mentioned that the van parked across the street had an Obama sticker on the bumper.





It is a lovely block. There are some modest homes and some gorgeous ones, and all are well-kept. Later, when we went for our inspection, the nextdoor neighbor (whose newer, brick-with-white-trim house is beautiful and pristine) smiled and waved at us; a little while later, the lady across the street (of the Obama van) was out in her yard with her dog, and she did the same. It’s on 4th Street, which puts it on the “right side” of 5th Street for our taste; 5th Street is a very busy, 4-lane thoroughfare, so if we were going to move to downtown St. Charles we did not want 5th Street to be between us and the historic heart of the town, Main Street, because we wanted to be able to easily walk there. (We love leaving the car behind.) At one end of the block (and directly at the end of “our” alley) is a big, beautiful, stone church, whose (real) bells are heard loud and clear at the house…



The house is a 5-minute walk to the north end of Main Street; a 5-minute walk to the Foundry Art Centre; a 10-minute walk to Frontier Park (which runs along the Missouri River); a 10-minute walk (or 2-min bike ride) to the Katy Trail cycling path; and a 20-minute walk to the Trailhead Brewery on the southern part of Main Street.



When I finally got hold of the extremely harried selling agent, I really expected to be told that the house was under contract. In fact, from the moment I had seen the listing, I expected that the house was already under contract. This one had only been on the market for 2-3 weeks (the interval during which I’d stopped my daily trawling of Zillow and Realtor.com), and we had been watching houses that had been on the market for several months to a year or longer, waiting for the seller to get just desperate enough to take a low-ball offer. (As an aside, Zillow.com rules for such purposes, usually giving the entire selling and pricing history of a house, so you know what the seller paid and how much/how often they’ve lowered their price since they’ve been on the market.) However, for a brick house of that size, at that price, mentioned as being a “possible short sale,” even at just 3 weeks on the market I thought we would be too late. Instead, I was told, “You’ve really come in at the eleventh hour.” He then told me there were several offers on the house, and that they were “negotiating a contract.” But… he told me that we could go see it, and he advised me that if we liked it, we should come back to him ASAP with our best offer.

We arranged to see it that very night. He would have the neighbor leave the key under the mat.

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...