‘Maintenance Manor’ Revisited

In my early years as a journalist, a recurring subject of my columns was an old North Boise house that came to be known  as Maintenance Manor.

  In buying the house, my wife and I placed our faith in the time-honored real estate maxim, “location, location, location.” Buy the worst house in a nice neighborhood, bring it up to the standards of the houses around it and your investment will more than pay for itself.

  It was a fixer-upper, with apologies to proper fixer-uppers everywhere. What it really was was a nightmare.

  The exterior made it plain that it was the worst house on the street – white, clapboard siding that was original and looked it, a hideous, rose-colored roof, a back porch enclosed with plastic sheeting instead of windows, a chimney that was falling apart …

  The interior was worse – a single bathroom that could only be reached from the back porch, woodwork that had been painted glossy black, pea-green carpet with multiple cigarette burns, single-pane windows that let in so much cold air they might as well not have been there, an ancient furnace that burned $300 worth of oil a month …

  A few weeks after buying it, we invited my in-laws to visit and have a look at the place.

  “I had no idea!” my shell-shocked mother-in-law said. “If you’d told me you’d bought a shell, I might have had some idea. And even that wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it is.”

  My father-in-law, a skilled handyman, walked all around the house and yard before delivering his verdict:

  “It is a nice neighborhood. If I were you, I’d tear down the house and build a new one on the lot.”

  It was the best advice we ever got. We totally ignored it, of course, and spent the next 13 years fixing the place up and adding on to it. We bought it for $20,000 and sold it for $70,000. After deducting the costs of materials and professional help with the addition, plumbing and electrical, we made next to nothing for the countless hours I spent with hammers, saws, chisels, paint brushes, etc., turning a house of horror into a home.

  Early this month, its current owners emailed to ask whether we’d “like to see what’s going on at your old place.”

  We would. A date was arranged.

  We expected the house to look different, and probably better. It had been a lot of years and a lot of subsequent owners since we’d live there. Most had probably made improvements resulting in an attractive, inviting interior.

  The reality couldn’t have been more different. The interior had been gutted. The addition we’d built on a slightly lower level than the rest of the house was gone, and a new floor had been built on the same level as everything else. The finish work is weeks away. It was a stick house –  nothing inside but framing, with holes in the floor where sinks, toilets and other fixtures would be installed.

  It’s fair to say we were thunderstruck.

  Everything I’d spent so many hours working on was gone:

  The living-room archway with bookcases on either side, gone.

  The China hutch, gone.

  The bathroom with wallpaper I’d hung and tile I’d installed, gone.

  The “new” bathroom with the beautiful vanity and sunken tub, gone.

  The family room, gone.

  My office, gone.

  The original fireplace with the ornate copper trim, gone.

  The new owners have big plans for the house: A bathroom with a sauna. A bedroom closet almost as big as the old bedrooms were. A kitchen several times the size of the old one. A deck on the back of the house. It’s going to be a beautiful home.

  Their plans are a tribute to the staying power of traditional old neighborhoods like North Boise. Successive generations pour  thousands of dollars into their venerable homes to preserve and improve them.

  The work being done on the onetime Maintenance Manor also is a testimonial to a basic human need. No matter a home’s condition when it’s purchased, people need to alter it, to make it their own.

  It doesn’t bother me in the least that my old home’s new owners have gutted it. On the contrary, it’s great that it was purchased by people who care enough to give it a major overhaul. Here’s wishing them the best.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.