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problematic Victorian mansion
Saturday, May 14 2016
I'd stayed up late last night drinking a lot of booze and smoking a lot of pot, and I knew I'd have hangover today. It was mid-level one, and not especially incapacitating. Because Gretchen had spent the night dogsitting at Susan & David's place, it was my responsibility to walk our dogs. Unusually, Neville and Ramona stayed with me for most of the walk and were with me as I approached the Chamomile from the south on the Stick Trail. I caught sight of a male Scarlet Tanager flitting between trees near the trail, and the brilliant ultra-red of his plumage contrasted so intensely with the light green of the still-unfurling foliage that it seemed to sear a hole in my retina. A male Scarlet Tanager is a rare sight, though today I also saw a number of olive-colored birds that could've been female Scarlet Tanagers (though these seemed to be concerned about ground-based nest sites, and Scarlet Tanagers do not nest on the ground).
Gretchen had returned from dogsitting by the time I came back from my dog walking, and it was then time to drive into Kingston to look at a piece of real estate Gretchen thought might be a good investment. It was a large brick Victorian mansion in that web of residential neighborhood between Albany Avenue and Broadway. From the street, it looked to be in good shape, and the neighborhood around it was also good (at least by Kingston standards). The building had been cut up into four rental units, meaning it could produce a gross cash stream of something like $4000/month. No tenants were currently in the building; it was for sale by owner, and had been carefully staged so that those with poor imaginations could picture it in an ideal state of use. Most of the interior seemed to be in a great state of repair, and there was evidence of recent remodeling, particularly in one of the downstairs units, where lots of octagonal tile (with squares to fill in the holes) had been installed. The house had a marvelous grandiosity to it, with its high ceilings and spectacular mouldings. But there were evident problems in its subdivision. The only room that would work as a bedroom in one of the first-floor apartments had huge bay windows facing the street, and the bathroom was connected directly to the kitchen. But the other first floor apartment was even worse; to get to the kitchen, one had to walk through its bathroom. For tax reasons, the building might work better as a three-unit than a four, and Gretchen has an idea of perhaps making the two awkward apartments on the first floor into a single unit. Perhaps one could be a business office and the other could be a residence for someone like a massage therapist. I wondered if perhaps the units could be combined by taking down a wall, but the only place where this could be done was between a kitchen and a bathroom. There's already enough tromping through bathrooms to get to kitchens and kitchens to get to bathrooms as it is. The problem with the first floor is the grand Victorian staircase in the middle of it all, and that has to be public space.
The apartment on the second floor had no such problem. It had a central room with other rooms opening off it in a spoked pattern, which made for a much better layout.
There was a fourth apartment in the attic, reachable by a ridiculously-narrow stairway (the reason there was so much space on the second floor and also for an iron fire escape in the back). The stairway led to a finished attic that had been grandfathered in from a time before sprinklers were required in attic apartments. It had beautiful cathedral ceilings finished in cello-colored shiplap. Most of the space in this apartment consisted of an undivided central room, though in the middle of it all, taking advantage of the headroom, was a sleeping loft beneath a single skylight. The main problem with this apartment, aside from the narrow staircase leading to it, was the lack of vertical walls. There weren't a lot of places where one could hang a flatscreen or push a couch up against a wall. Still, there are plenty of people who would go apeshit over a space like that with all its kinky Victorian charms (there were lots of gnomish doorways leading to hidden storage warrens back in the low-headroom areas along the margins). There were other interesting features, such as a slate roof, a solid garage out back that also had a slate roof (and was wired for 240 volts). The basement was a labyrinth of rooms, some of which were carpeted. Many of the exposed pipes down there were made of copper and as thick as my arm. There was a nice shady backyard, though the tiny front yard was paved entirely in asphalt and could be used as overflow parking.
As soon as we were done looking at the place, I told Gretchen I wasn't interested in it, that the problematic first floor apartments were going to be too hard to find good tenants for. At first Gretchen seemed agreeable to what seemed like my made-up mind, but then she began chipping away at it. Back at the house, during our weekly coffee ritual, she got out a piece of paper and ran the numbers. Even with mediocre rents and big expenses, it looked like we would be able to net $14,000/year from the property even with a mortgage. Where else, she wanted to know, would we find a building in such good shape? And if we were to spend the same money buying two houses instead, the expenses would be higher and the rents smaller. She was raising a good point. So in the end I buckled and said, sure, I'd be willing to spend $270,000 on the property. While she talked with her father (who'd agreed to help us financially on this project using money that is otherwise doing little more than existing), I went out to the Subarus and tried to move the roofrack crossbars (complete with kayak racks) from the old Subaru to the new one. But then it turned out that the new Subaru required crossbars that were one full inch longer.
Gretchen had an extra shift today working at the bookstore, and while she was off on that, I ran some errands. I started (as I often do these days) at the Tibetan store, where the pickings were unusually thin. There were, however, two wireless routers. I know enough about wireless routers to recognize that one of them couldn't be reflashed with an open-source firmware, but the other, a Netgear WNR2000, I was less sure about. But I had my smartphone with me, so I looked it up on OpenWRT.org. Sure enough, it was well supported by the open firmware ecosystem. I don't know how useful a wireless router without a USB port or gigabit ethernet ports is, but it could be made to function as a wireless repeater, perhaps placed high in a tree on a ridgetop and powered by solar energy, allowing we to connect to Ray & Nancy's WiFi two miles away. In any case, it only cost me a dollar.
Out on 9W, I bought a spading fork to replace the one I'd been using whose handle had recently broken off. I leave my tools out in the elements and eventually (it seems to take a dozen years) their wooden handles rot through. While there, I checked out the LED lightbulb selection to see what was new (the options seem to change every time I look), and I saw a new 60-watt equivalent in beautiful big spherical globes whose LED "element" had been reduced to a thin cylinder made to resemble a vintage filament. I bought four of them even though they cost $12 each.
On the way back home, I stopped at my topsoil mine on the Esopus and, after giving the dogs a short walk in the nearby cornfield, I gathered six more buckets (30 gallons) to add to the cabbage patch terrace in the garden. The dogs were a bit more given to wandering off as I worked, and in the middle of it all I had to off and look for Neville, who I found over near the taxidermy place. He's a good boy, but I've never had a dog ignore my command to come quite as completely as he does.
Soon after back to the house, I had to head out again. Tonight was my night to dogsit at Susan & David's place. I brought my laptop, an Annie's no-cheese frozen pizza, an Annie's samosa wrap, a Lagunitas Little Sumpin Sumpin, a Mountain Brew Ice, and a bottle of Duggan's Dew blended scotch (the single-malts at Mirons were too expensive). Because I had a lot of shit I needed to do on my mentee's network game project (work he is incapable of doing), I ground up 20 milligrams of extended-release Adderall and had myself that kind of evening. (I generally like to space my Adderall adventures a week apart, but I make exceptions for very busy periods and time spent out of the house.) It had been a warm day, and I'd been wearing shorts and a teeshirt. But cold winds were blowing and at Susan and David's place I soon felt underdressed. In order to do all the work on my mentee's game comfortably, I climbed into bed with Darla (she's a big under-the-covers snuggler) and worked with my laptop on my belly. As I worked, I started out listening repeatedly to a new Dixie Chicks discovery called "Voice Inside My Head." I love the undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the structure of the universe evident in their songs, but that song is also sadly beautiful, and it got me thinking of some classic Jayhawks songs (for example "Pray for Me"), and while listening to some of those, YouTube seamlessly introduced some songs by the Shins (actually James Mercer, the main guy in the band). I've always liked what I've heard from the Shins, but watching a stripped-down performance of "Simple Song" was kind of mind blowing.
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