Day: May 8, 2006

Jimbo has finally posted his tirade about flippers and men who gut houses so they have something to brag about at JRs. What? You can actually hold a conversation in JRs? It’s loud and crowded.
Personally, I got no problem with folks who gut the house, if the house is in need of gutting. Actually, there should be a point system to house gutting stories. 10 points for simply gutting it. 50 points if you found something between the walls (in the ceiling, etc) that was from the time the house was built and you had to send it to a restorer to fix it. 60 points if you kept it in place and worked around it. 5 points if it was over budget. It is always overbudget. 100 points if it was on or under budget and on time. 20 points if you and your partner did the work yourself. 40 points if you did it solo. 30 points if crackheads kept breaking in and stealing stuff. 100 pity points if your contractor runs out on you AND/OR puts a lein on your property. 1 point for each day you spent covered in some layer of dust. ….and so on.

The condo on the corner of 5th and Q had an open house. A small band of us went to check it out. There are two large condos for sale. The first one covering the basement and the 1st floor is going for $920K and the second covering the 2nd through 4th floors for $1.2million. Yes, over a million dollars.
If you happen to have a mill laying about buy the top floor condo and let us be friends. I want to come over and hang out on your top deck. I’m a really nice person and so are you. Really. And not just saying this because you are a millionaire.
“Amazing”, “Impressive” and “Wow” were words I used often when we wandered through the still not finished building. The bottom unit had it’s exceptionally large rooms downstairs. It’s fine for people who don’t spend a lot of time in their bedrooms gazing out the window. The bathrooms. The half bath had this funky glassy bubbly tile that I just loved. The showers were big and luxurious. The upper unit was even better, far better, than the lower unit and the lower unit was impressive on it’s own. One of the bathrooms in the upper unit was so big, I think it was the size of my bedroom. Heck the bedroom was so big it was the size of my whole 1st floor. The kitchen was big and amazing with a stove that could feed a dozen or more people and a living area that could host maybe 50-75 people?
But the view on the top level…. The view. First thing I saw was the top of the Capitol dome. Would have seen the whole dome were it not for some trees. Also could see the National Cathedral, sort of, a few branches were a problem. But with out tree sight problems we could see Howard University Founder’s Hall, HU Hospital, McKinley Tech, the Basilica, Kenilworth Gardens, and a couple other buildings we couldn’t positively identify (is that Children’s Hospital? What’s that steeple to?).
I had a conversation with Ly who is in Real Estate about a property somewhere in Shaw selling for about a million. She mentioned how it really was a luxury building. The problem is that many slap the word “luxury” on many condos and houses, when it really means the expensive stuff from Home Depot or Expo or Lowes. This place, I couldn’t say where you would get many of the things in it. It is truly a special place.
IT pointed out one little fault of the place. The exterior doesn’t match the interior. The exterior is modern. The interior is traditional with lots of custom wood things. I didn’t care.
Okay. I think this is a rarity. It’s Spring so I’ll probably see more Real Estate Agents on Crackhouses, but this one is not one of them.