Ancestral home for sale
 

I'm sad to see this go. This is the glatt ancestral home, for sale. My Aunt lived there last, and now that she died, my cousin is selling it. Another cousin is the RE agent.

I suppose I could buy it, but what would I do with it? It's in North East PA, about 20 minutes from Honesdale. Nice place. Old. 1826. (Although I thought it was older than that.) Set back from the road. Big. Very stately looking. Nearest neighbor is 300 yards away, although you can't see them through the woods. You feel like you are all alone there. 4.4 acres, but feels like 300. And it's so far from the road, even loud trucks going by are faint in the distance.

It's a steal at $89k.

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Sorry to see it go.

Retirement home for old Dwellars?

Did you ever live in that house?

I spent an entire summer there in college.

Mowing the lawn takes several hours, even with a big tractor and a sickle mower attachment.

Edit: And if you don't have a plow, you need to hire someone to do the driveway in the winter. But other than that, it's a normal house.

The maintenance would be murder... or bankrupting. :eek:

It's the same maintenance as any other house, except for the mowing and driveway plowing.

Edit: But you're right. I don't want it. Trying to keep it maintained while I live in Virginia is impossible.

Wish I could

$89k, on 4 acres?!?!?!?!?!

JFC!

You should see the piece of shit I've been looking at on the other side of the block, for $69k. Egads.

Someone will be pleased a s punch to get that.

Pre-WW-I houses are always full of surprises, and this one is very pre... and big with lots of joints and surfaces. That's what makes them so beautiful. Of course having been in the family so long gives you a leg up on condition and past maintenance.

People around this house don't know what a block is. Add that word and the price would immediately triple or more. :haha:

Pretty close to Grifftopia as well... maybe that's why the price is so low.

Could be a nice B and B there's good mtn biking in the area.

:litebulb: Or a honeymoon B&B, which is not unusual for northeast PA. Hard to tell with a house like that, how difficult it would be to upgrade the wiring for all those hidden cameras though. Can't risk wireless with all the electronic gizmos folks carry these days one might pick up a stray signal.

Interesting piece on Wayne County.

http://plan.co.wayne.pa.us/CulturalR...esAnalysis.pdf

Oral history says it was two houses joined together, so the framing probably has some surprises.

The kitchen needs work. Its layout is horrible.

There is a cool cabinet that passes through from the kitchen to the dining room and has drawers that slide both to the kitchen and the dining room, and cabinet doors on both the dining room side and the kitchen side. You would want to figure out a way to save that, but you'd want to gut the rest of the kitchen and pantry and start over.

It used to have a huge bat infestation problem in the attic, but I understand my cousin got rid of them and sealed the attic framing with shellac to get rid of the musty smell the bats left behind.

The well works well, and septic is good. Heating is good. Oil. No AC. Electrical was updated about 20 years ago from a tiny old fuse box to circuit breakers and mostly new wiring.

My one cousin and her husband are both certain that it's haunted. For real. They claim to have witness ghosts on numerous occasions. Too many to count. They even brought in some ghost hunters from a nearby university club. But I've never witnessed anything, even living there for a few months. I'm pretty skeptical when it comes to ghosts. Maybe you have to believe for them to reveal themselves to you. So maybe it's haunted, if you believe in that sort of thing.

It would be a horse of a different color if it was a Maine Glatt Ancestral home. PA is fine, but not for a second home.

Ghosts - I don't buy into ghosties but a friend of mine who is more interesting than myself finds that whole area to have a certain creepy mojo. It could be his crazy ex-girlfriend from Waymart(?) but he talks about the Native Americans avoiding permanent residence in the area and the general isolation. :eyebrow:

It may have some sort of bad juju or feng shui. There is a corner near my ancestral home that had at least 25 businesses in the same number of years. On the opposite corner another business, a deli, lasted over 40 years and made the owners quite wealthy. It was as though the other corner was cursed.

Where I am now there is a building that has had about 6 different businesses in it in the past 15 years that have all failed miserably, and long periods of vacancy. Popular opinion is that it is cursed. (unrelated to popular opinion, but by curious coincidence, the building is about 1/10 of a mile from a, recently discovered while excavating, native American site. The excavation had to be stopped while the area was mined for artifacts and so on.)

I think looking for explanations is pointless, shit happens that makes no sense but our brains want to create order and explanations. Got religion?

I wonder what the tax bill for the property amounts to, roughly.

That might be tricky, as it's been in the family forever. As soon as a property is sold the assessors rise from the cemetery at midnight to haunt the new owners. ;)

yes; wouldn't the property tax be some percentage of the assessed value, which should be something in the neighborhood of the asking price, no?

Google Wayne county tax parcels.

According to Zillow, the assessed tax value in 2013 was $100,300.

It's in Clinton Township and it looks like their real estate taxes are called millage rates. According to this chart I found, it's about 2 cents per dollar of assessed value. Or $2k per year. BUt maybe I'm reading it all wrong.

That sounds about right.
In PA, millage rates vary for school taxes, city/township taxes, and county taxes, but all are times the assessed value. It's makes me growl when a $3100 school tax bill, and a $10 head tax(for schools) bill, arrive on the same day. :eyebrow:

I saw that $10 head tax and wondered about that. Are they charging you $10 for your head, or $10 for the head of each student in your township? If it's for each student, that could add up ridiculously fast.

$10 dollars for your head as a way of raising school tax on renters and anyone living in town who doesn't own property. Bullshit, where do they think the money the landlord pays in school property tax with, comes from.:(

How much does this gentleman have to pay?
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Nothing, as we're gonna lynch him right quick.