Woke up this morning to gray, murky skies and rain falling on our street-- really, a loud, weird avenue-- outside our bedroom window. We were scheduled to see another crib/shit-hole in Marine Park at 10:30 AM, but we couldn't deal with it. My husband drove by this crib the other day with our changelings in the back seat and took pictures of the exterior, which he immediately emailed to me as a kind of sad warning.
It was enough to make me cry, vomit and avert my eyes. Welcome home! Behold this breath-taking small, two-story mean crib with fake brick asphalt shingle siding which stretches with rips and tears around the entire perimeter with at least four oddly boarded up windows with heavy-duty garbage bags stapled to them. Mmmm, cozy! You can feel totally secure with the incarceration-style cyclone fencing with a strange plastic, black cat hanging from one section-- look hard-- surrounding the borders of the property.
Get ready to party the night away on the busted up cement "back yard!" Step up into serenity as your foot lands on the split and cracked brick-face stairway to the entrance heaving forward from a poor foundation. Breath in the love of gardening on the brown, scraggly 4x4 front yard. Before you throw down your G's, try hard to figure out what the fuck is leaning against the windows in the interior. Is it laundry, plants, books or corpses? Wait... is that a spear, an antenna, or a flag pole sticking out from one side of one of the exterior walls? Ahhhh, no need for central air when you have ancient air-conditioners falling out of the exterior walls where they were shoved in years ago (also covered with ersatz Shop-Rite bags as insulation).
Need I go on? Yes, I must. The asking price for this piece of shit is over half a million dollars! What this dump is really asking for is a stick of dynamite to blow it off the face of the planet. The exterior alone would cost close to $100K to rehabilitate and don't ask about the additional cost of a foundation fix. But wait. That's not all! Just take a look at the kitchen. I grabbed this image off another web-site because I couldn't bear to actually go in to see it...
Need I go on? Yes, I must. The asking price for this piece of shit is over half a million dollars! What this dump is really asking for is a stick of dynamite to blow it off the face of the planet. The exterior alone would cost close to $100K to rehabilitate and don't ask about the additional cost of a foundation fix. But wait. That's not all! Just take a look at the kitchen. I grabbed this image off another web-site because I couldn't bear to actually go in to see it...
Cook in luxury in this high-end, high anxiety-making kitchen! What do you make of the kitchen "peninsula?" I'm immediately transported to the hills and dales of New England where stone walls were once used for anything from animal pounds, to boundary lines to animal fencing. This piece is a truly pleasant blend of a rambling, Connecticut stone wall cum mini-Hoover Dam cum burnt and fallen Colorado-esque chimney merrily squashed between glossy, vinyl wood paneling walls, which give a knowing nod to the faux-rustic woodland feel of the Stonehenge peninsula-rock climbing wall island you probably will pitch over after a night of heavy drinking. It gives you that nice, itchy feeling of Poison Ivy. And, don't you feel so relaxed under the serene "Star Trek" lighting panels embedded into the drop ceiling? The lace doily-Moroccan tile-style linoleum flooring makes me want to flee to the Middle East and join all insurgent rebel groups fighting to bring down the devil infidel.
If I had another $45K, I'd make the above shit hole kitchen look like this:
If I had another $45K, I'd make the above shit hole kitchen look like this:
Anyway, we didn't go to see this bitch crib. Like I said, we couldn't bear it. Instead of seeing the dump, my husband and I took our kids to the New York Hall of Science instead where we discovered that my youngest son had Coxsackie virus after three days of fever, malaise and discomfort. No fever this morning, but as we were driving to the museum , my son showed us a sudden eruption of macules and other red bumpy shit on his palms (this is my RN description of Coxsackie), soles of his feet and later today, his bum and mouth. Oh, well. Summer fun.