We had some trouble
What’s Long and Low and Getting Lonelier?
These days, ranch houses are an endangered species. Once the revered symbol of postwar prosperity, these rectangular houses, with their rec rooms and picture windows and skinny wrought-iron balustrades, are now as dated as Melmac. In this one neighborhood, at least 100 ranch houses have been torn down in the last eight years, replaced by today’s dream, the multistoried, Palladian-windowed, double-height-ceilinged, great-roomed mansionette: Tara on a quarter-acre lot. When the ranch houses were first built in Braes Heights, they cost $5,900. The house that will replace the Calkinses’ is already on the market for $519,000.
The appraiser from FHA told our loan officer that he didn’t think we could afford the house with all the rehabs we’d need to do and she told him that we were actually planning on keeping the kitchen etc. the way they are.
It’s interesting. My sister loaned me a couple of old house beautiful-type magazines from the mid-50s and in those they recommend “beautifying” 1920s built-in shelves by putting paneling over them. And walling up arches for a more “sleek” and “modern” look. Horrors! That’s how we’re looking at this ranch but I guess the rest of the world hasn’t caught up with us yet!
Me too.
I would look at it that way.
Whenever in the past years I would read an article in a home magazine about updating a house by painting out the the original mouldings in a room - I would almost cry!