202 Livingston Ave

• MLS# 2218564 – Zillow Page
• Ask $439,000
• 3 bedrooms – 2 baths – Colonial
• Taxes: $7,797 – Village Taxes: $534.00

My overall impression of this house is that I really liked it, although it’s a bit small. It would really be a fabulous house if it had a family room and bigger bedrooms.

It has a nice living room, a nice fireplace, a nice enough dining room and kitchen, although they’re all are kinda small. If you had a real dining table and chairs set up in the dining room you’d have a hard time walking through it.

The kitchen is a galley style, cabinets on both sides, nice tall ones to the ceiling, and lots of them. The kitchen is pretty new, updated in the last five years at least if not sooner. The appliances are very new and modern. The countertops are the Wilsonart solid surface stuff. It’s not granite or quartz, but it’s attractive, and the sink is seamlessly composed of it although it’s white. There’s a little area to the back with more cabinets.

The bedrooms are pleasant enough but small, with OK closet space. Both bathrooms are quite small and neither has tiles except on the floor, both have those plastic tub surrounds.

The basement is low. I probably could stand straight up, but I felt like I was going to hit it so I bowed my head. The yard is smallish but well kept, and there’s a big driveway and detached garage outside the fence.

They just replaced the furnace, put in central AC at the same time, did the windows upstairs with nice ones that bend in for cleaning. Plus there’s a new, 50 year roof. The seller said that they were going to do a 30 year one, but it wasn’t that much more.

It’s a fine house, albeit more suitable for a small family. The agent is the seller and she was very pleasant. I wouldn’t pay $440K for it, not that small and on the busy road. $400K, or $410K, but then I get surprised what people will pay in Babylon. It’s a very liveable house, just not terribly big.

155 Cooper Street

• MLS# 2183404 – Zillow Page
• Ask $349,000
• 4 bedrooms – 2 bath
• Taxes: $6,300 – Village Taxes: ?

Sometimes, I think, you really want to try to see what a house was or what it could be, rather than what it currently is. 155 Cooper Street is a classic home from the halcyon days of turn of the century Babylon. What it could be is a restored beauty within easy walking distance to the train and nestled in the heart of the village. What it is, unfortunately, is a decrepit, ramshackle house that has been sadly neglected for decades and currently serves as a flop house.

I think that this is the first house that I’ve seen that is actually unlivable. This is despite the fact that at least a half-dozen people are, in fact, living there. The Realtor notes in the listing that the house needs some TLC. What it needs is a complete, top-to-bottom renovation including new kitchen, baths, windows, siding and a completely new electrical system. The electric in the house looks like it hasn’t been upgraded since the house was first electrified, probably some time in the 30′s. It sports “classic” push-button light switches from that period and wiring run on the outside of the walls.

On the other hand, the house does appear to be structurally sound, apart from some troubling floor sags. It’s of decent size for the period. The four bedrooms are modest, but you could probably knock out a wall and make one decent master. There’s a huge walk-up attic that could be dormered out and turned into a big master suite as well. I do see a lot of potential here.

Unfortunately, the house sits on a pretty small spit of property wedged in between the train tracks on one side and the fire department substation on the other. Even worse, there’s no garage and no real place to put one unless you drained the scary-looking, pond-shaped pool in the back.

In better times builders would probably be lined up around the block to buy this house and turn it into a show piece. These days, I expect the house will sit for a while until someone with more money than sense happens along.

19 Nehring Ave

• MLS# 2184651 – Zillow Page
• Ask $319,000
• 3 bedrooms – 1 bath
• Taxes: $5,480 – Village Taxes: $636.00

This ranch-style home is on a corner lot in the Twin Oaks section of Babylon Village. The Twin Oaks section of Babylon is on the west side of Route 109 and consequently in the West Babylon school district. For this review, I thought about going into the thesaurus and pulling out as many synonyms for small as I could — tiny, minuscule, petite, cramped, etc. — just to keep things fresh. Instead of doing that, lets just take the small modifier as read and if there’s any part of this house that isn’t, I’ll be sure to let you know.

First of all, this house is listed as a three bedroom, but it’s really just a two bedroom. The wall to third bedroom has been removed and that area is now a dining room. It’s not a bad idea really, because otherwise there’s really no place in the house to eat. You couldn’t really fit a table in the living room and leave space for much else and there’s certainly no room in the kitchen.

The kitchen is nice and bright. It’s been reasonably updated, albeit not expensively. There are newer appliances and decent laminate countertops.

One positive is the decent-sized full basement. There’s a full bath down there that’s not mentioned in the listing. The house is cheap enough that you could finish the basement to make up somewhat for the lack of space on the main level. In this way, even though this place is smaller than 2 Edwards, there’s actual potential for more space with some money and effort if you don’t mind some rooms below ground.

This would be a nice starter house for a couple and maybe one kid. But I can’t imagine living in this place for long without feeling cramped.

• 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.