84 Village Line Rd

• MLS# 2209043 – Zillow Page
• Ask $459,000
• 3(2) bedrooms – 1.5 baths – Cape
• Taxes: $8,770 – Village Taxes: $682.67

This is a neat, old 20′s house with some interesting quirks, if your into that sort of thing. As you walk into the place, the stairs are right in front of you with the living room to the left and the dining room to the right. Both of these room are of decent size. The living room is an especially nice space, or it would be once the tchotchkes and pictures were cleared out. The hardwood floors have potential, but they’re all beat up and need to be refinished. In the back of the house is a den which looks like it’s a converted sun room. It’s all done in dark paneling, but freshened up it could be a very pleasant place to spend some time.

The kitchen is very tiny, pretty much a galley kitchen. It’s not old old, but it probably wants a redo sometime soon. Off to the side of the kitchen is the laundry area. Space has been made for an office and it’s nice but I think you might blow out the wall there and make the kitchen bigger as that would probably be a better use of the space. There’s also a bonus room here, really 3/4 or so of a converted garage. I worry about these garage conversions. The village wants to ensure that you have a garage to park your car so I wonder if it’s on the CO or if it was done “on the sly”.

Upstairs are the bedrooms and they’re laid out in the typical cape style, one on either side of the stairs. The one on the left is of usable size and there are some interesting built-ins that take advantage of the various attic-like nooks and crannies. On the right are bedrooms two and three. In fact, you have to walk through bedroom two to get to bedroom three, making it of little utility unless you have kids who don’t mind sharing the space. Both rooms are fairly small, as you might imagine.

The Realtor suggested that the two bedroom side could be used as the master suite, with the extra room being used as a dressing room. It’s an interesting idea, but it makes the house a true two bedroom proposition, which isn’t really appealing to me.

In the middle of the upstairs is the full bath which sports what I’m pretty sure is the original tub from the when the house was built. The bathroom is old, but not really charming old. It’s just tired old and it needs some work.

The backyard is very nice and the basement is a bit musty but it has enough height for me to walk around comfortably and maybe even enough for a treadmill, an unusual thing for a house from this period. As mentioned previously, the garage has been mostly converted to a room, so there’s no space there for a car.

The house is certainly livable as is, but anyone spending money in this range is going to want a new kitchen and a new bathroom at minimum. Bottom line, this is a lot of money for a tiny house this far north in the Village, especially one that needs as much work as this one does.

• MLS# 2185361 – Zillow Page
• Ask $419,000
• Previous Sales:
  02/25/2003 – $280,000
• 3 bedrooms – 2 bath
• Taxes: $7,431 – Village Taxes: $761.62

I was really excited about this house, first posted on MLS last week, as it’s in our price range and the photos on MLS looked good. I didn’t want to wait for an open house because I was afraid it might sell quickly, so I arranged to view the house last weekend. And in the end, I liked the house a lot, but the bedrooms were just too small for us. The house listing read to me as a three bedroom two bath, with office. Which sounded perfect to me, other than I’d like a family room or den as well, but in our price range that’s becoming a bit of a pipe dream. However, the third bedroom IS the office. It’s a typical cape floor plan, but people expand houses all the time, so I was hoping there really was a third bedroom plus separate office. In reality, the third bedroom is downstairs, across from the living room, and it’s perfect as an office, as there’s room for two desks and shelving, or one desk and some bookcases. I guess you could wedge a twin-size bed in there but not much else. Certainly not a bed and a desk. The bedrooms upstairs aren’t too small in square footage, but the sloping dormered walls prevent you from getting much furniture in there other than a bed and a chest or so. Our bedroom furniture, which includes a long dresser with mirror and tall chests, wouldn’t fit in there at all. This would be a great house for a single person, a couple with no kids, or a couple with one child, or possibly two who were willing to share a bedroom. However…that’s not us.

So, it’s not for us, but it could be for one of you. I really admired how they did a fabulous job of maximizing space and storage. The kitchen is the best example of that. It’s a small kitchen, there’s no getting around that, but by putting in tall, narrow cabinets, your eye follows them up to the ceiling. The laminate counter is cut back whenever possible to allow more space between the two areas of the kitchen, and everything possible is tucked away, like the microwave, which is in a cubby underneath the counter. In other rooms, there’s storage for wine and other sundries in the dining room under the staircase, and in the downstairs bath they cut out storage cubbies in between the studs on one wall, and there are small cabinets tucked between the ceiling and the top of the bath/shower enclosure. I absolutely adored the covered patio on the southern side of the house, and the yard is quite nice, with mature plantings, although there’s no backyard to speak of as the house is situated at the back and to the side of the corner property.

Whoever renovated this house, whether it was the current owners or previous ones, did a fantastic job. It’s a very livable little house. But in the end it’s just too small for our family.

I guess that my fame is a bit more limited than I’d like to believe.

50 Cadman Ave

• MLS# 2180638 – Zillow Page
• Ask $465,000
• 3 bedrooms – 2 bath
• Taxes: $9,284 – Village Taxes: $1,033.12

For those of you who have been keeping up, this house was first mentioned back on March 15th by commenter Steele. At that point it was an exclusive by Hoffman East and was listed at $459K. Now it’s out on on MLS and is listed at $465K. So, a month and half on the market and no takers means…you raise the price six thousand dollars? This tells me that the seller is pricing the house based on their financial requirements, what they need to get for the house, not recent comps. Not a good strategy in any market, but a partucularly bad idea in this one.

As for the house itself, it’s nice enough. There’s no path to the front door, so you have to walk up the driveway and enter though the side door. I find this kind of thing very annoying, but it’s easily changed.

The kitchen is of decent size, recently updated but not top of the line. The countertops are green laminate and the stove is a cheap, electric model. Debra says that they must have spent a lot of money on the pulls, even though they are — in her words — hideous. The layout is well-done, though and the open floor plan flows nicely into the living room and dining room area. It makes the space seem bigger than it is and would probably be good for entertaining. The living room/kitchen/dining room areas have ugly tile on the floor, but the other rooms on the first floor have nice wood flooring.

On the first floor we also have two smallish bedrooms and a 3/4 bath (shower stall, no tub) and the den. The second bedroom isn’t too bad, but the third is pretty cramped.

The entire top floor is the master suite. The master bedroom is of decent size, bit certainly not huge. There’s plenty of closet space, although some of the closets are oddly shaped and/or crammed into corners around the roofline. The full bath on this level is OK. It’s got double sinks, actually two separate vanities, one on each side of the door as you walk in. The tub is small and the bathroom as a whole could use some updating, although it’s very usable as is.

There’s no door to the basement. There’s an open staircase leading down, making it seem more like part of the house. The basement is half-finished and the finished portion is sealed off in its own room. The finished room is big and is obviously being currently used as a bedroom. There’s a sump pump in the unfinished portion of the basement and all the appliances, the burner and the water heater are up on stands, which does concern me. But it was raining pretty hard when we were there and the basement did seem bone dry.

The backyard is big for Babylon and there’s a nice new deck. The detached garage is small and crammed with stuff. If we bought this house, we’d definitely want to put a shed in the back to make room for a car in the garage.

Bottom line? A nice house but way overpriced.  As I mentioned in the comments earlier, the most direct comp is 55 Livingston Ave. It’s a very similar house in a very similar location, although I think Livingston was nicer on the inside,  closer to the train, on a bigger lot and had lower taxes.  That house went for $445K, so I can’y see paying more than low 400′s for this place and  even that seems a bit much.