Day: August 11, 2004

a la Bruce Willis

Wal-Mart that beacon of low wages might be coming to the Nation’s Capitol putting itself at the old Brentwood lot, where a Giant and the Home Depot now sit. Now I am a fan of low prices, but not so much of domestic/foreign slave labor. According to today’s Washington Post Business section, right now they are at the ‘talking’ stage of filling in the space that was supposed to be taken up by K-Mart, Wal-Mart’s struggling rival. However, K-Mart fell on hard times before anything was built and so nothing was built on the site. Right now it is just an empty mud lot. Well there are worse things that could go there, the Kit Kat Klub Stripper Emporium.

Okay you may have seen the example of the not ugly house where the 3rd floor addition does not take away from the street view. Well when you add another floor with no regard of how it is going to look in regard to the other houses…. it’s ugly. Trust me.

The problem with a transitioning area where the prices are on crack sometimes are the renovations for sale. Most of the time the damage is limited to the original footprint of the house. But when the square footage can be increased by a coupla hundred feet, sellers/developers ‘throw’ something up and it ain’t always pretty. However it looks good on the MLS when instead of a 2 bedroom 1 bath, one can advertise a 3 or 4 bedroom with 2 bathrooms. Note that one of the bedrooms usually is the size of a walk in closet, with a window.

So if you own a home in Shaw or any other ‘transitional’ area please for the love of all that is good, think of your additions in a hostilic fashion. Think about how it will look with the other houses surrounding it. Don’t be the one with the ugly house.