The Historic District

Ha! That's awesome. I hope he got a tour out of it!

Chris

Hi All, This is one of my favorite houses around. It's a little over a mile from me, along the Aqueduct Trail (which runs about 40 miles from the Croton Dam down into Manhattan) so, if you're in the area, you can take a nice stroll and snoop a bit. Ignore, if you can, any thoughts of who would actua...

Looks like a great house to me! I have a Dutch Colonial from the same era, with an interior that was obviously ordered right from the Craftsman style pages of the catalogues when they were building it. So it's a mix. Good for you for looking to stop the "Open Concept" nonsense. That's grea...

We have a 3' cedar picket fence - now almost 20 years since I installed it - around our lot (50' wide and about 110' long). In the back yard, above the cedar fence, I stretched bird netting, giving a total height of about 10 - 12'. That's enough to keep the deer out, and is invisible from the house....

Usually this sort of stunt is precipitated by an internal risk assessment in a given area. If the insurance company realizes that they have too big a cluster of customers, they look winnow things down a bit in that area and spread the customer base (and risk base) out a bit more. It's not like your ...

No advice on the short sale... but the drop in valuation, as others indicated, could be due to the home owner filing a Tax Grievance to argue for a lower valuation, and/or a town-wide reassessment. We had both at our place. We were successful filing the Grievance back in (I think) 2007... and then l...

We have a great Craftsman house for sale in my neighborhood too! https://www.coldwellbankerhomes.com/ny/ ... _14797918/

Chris

For us the issue was price. We needed a house we could afford within a reasonable commute of NYC. That meant right off the bat we were agreeing to certain compromises - it would be small and need work. But we were agreed that we wanted an older home, that it needed to be in an area that we could rai...

I'd vote for #2 as well. We did a combination of your #2 and #3 (remove old siding layers, restore what could be restored, and replace badly damaged sections with Hardie Board). We had clapboards, not shakes, but there is a slight profile difference between actual wood products and the Hardie equiva...

I did our place. It took about ten years. The wood had originally been shellacked, so it stripped well (though of course it was still time consuming). Here's what it looked like when we bought the place: http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s259/saracenihouse/before-1.jpg And what it looks like now: h...