And so starts a new blog about a new project. As many of my old readers know, we flipped our last property in an unexpected manner. After two and a half weeks of owning The House Up The Hill, we had an unsolicited offer to purchase the property and we took it.
Those proceeds have allowed us to purchase our first commercial building. We have been eyeing this building for more than a year. We asked several agents to explore the possibility of a sale with the owner. Mike was the agent who broke the ice and we started serious negotiations just before Christmas 2012 with the idea of closing on the property before year's end!
In between that time, I commuted back and forth to Florida to help out my newly widowed mother, we had Christmas in Maine and got married soon after.
Phew!
Then we closed on the building:
a cute little 25 x 50' building on lower Maine Street in Belfast built around 1865 or so.
With this as the street view...cool, funky downtown Belfast
The building is across the street on the right side of this photo. This is lower Main Street. If you squint, you can just see the harbor, once fouled with chicken guts, now home to hundreds of pleasure and working boats.
Oooo...you can see the blue of the water here. The views from the third floor are stunning. We are lucky boys to have gotten this great space.
From this side, it doesn't seem too bad. Some new windows and a bit of paint and paper and Voila!
Uh oh! Don't judge a book by it's front facade! Yikes!! This is the time when I ask myself how nuts am I??
This is probably the side that the city used to include our building in their Slum and Blight plan. Our building happens to anchor one corner of the slum and blight neighborhood in town. In essence, we are the gateway to slum and blight.
Bahhh....nothing 15 years and a boatload of cash can't cure! Bring it!
4 comments:
Question: I'm not sure how the previous owner carved up the place, but do you plan to rehab the building to reflect the historic photo? It would be totally great if you were able to reinstall the middle window on the second floor and sliding doors on the gambrel-roof barn. Time for that home-improvement loan...
Susan: We found an earlier photo of the building that shows a Victorian facade, but we only saw the photo once, so are on hold until we can get our hands on it again. We would put the third window back on the front of the building and you gave me a great idea about the sliding door.....
This comment was not removed by this author! Homer, come on up and do an archeological dig, that would be cool!
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