September 24, 2004
32 Chapel Lane
Sue McCalley has brought this fine old house onto the market at what I think is the very intelligent price of $1,890,000. The house was built in 1899 and is a beautiful example of a vintage Victorian: finely detailed moldings and paneling, huge windows, eight (!) bedrooms and so on. The third floor offers the best playroom opportunity I’ve seen and the entire house has obviously been carefully cared for and maintained over the past century. Chapel Lane (so named because St. Paul’s Church was there until moving to its Riverside Avenue location in the 1950s) has seen a huge surge in prices the past two years and I think it’s deserved. Some of the houses, now selling for well-over a million dollars, are old prefabricated Sears Robuck buildings designed in the Arts and Crafts style and shipped via rail to their sites. They’re unique, very, very nice and give the street some real pizazz. A brand new house at 23 Chapel, also a prefab and also nice albeit not as stylish, sold this summer in a bidding war for $2,395,000, $100,000 over its asking price. Sue’s listing could use central air, I suppose, but the micro-system I wrote about earlier this year (Unique Indoor Comfort 323-9400) would solve that nicely. Great house.
And Another One
Sharon Kinney of this office (again, that’s by way of disclosure and not the reason for mention in this column) has listed 6 Mill Pond Court in Cos Cob for $879,000.00. It’s a nice, four bedroom cottage right on Mill Pond, with minimal traffic noise from I-95. Very good condition and good location on a quiet, dead end street. If the town would only let Starbucks get up and running around the corner, this house would be absolutely perfect.
What’s Up With Those Sales Transactions?
I receive a fair amount of email complaining about missing and erroneous sales transactions reported in the column below mine. That’s very much not my department but by way of explanation, readers should know how the land recording system works in Greenwich: like so much of our town government, it’s “quaint”. ALL documents affecting title to real property are recorded in the town clerk’s office. That means, in addition to deeds transferring ownership, mortgages, quit-claim deeds, tax and mechanic’s liens, easements, etc. all go in for recording in an unsorted jumble. The clerk hand-writes the information in the “Day Book” and, eventually, it all gets alphabetized and compiled in the Grantor and Grantee indexes. But that’s eventually. The poor reporter whose job it is to glean the sales information for this paper must rely on the Day Book, where a combination of varying handwriting skills, deadline pressures and sheer volume end up causing (some) misspellings of names, erroneous prices and missed sales. Hey — use it as a rough guide to what’s going on in your neighborhood. If you want to know for certain what the house down the street sold for, call a Realtor (toss a stone in any direction—you’ll hit one). We’ve got our data on a computer.
Crooks!
Greenwich Time reports that a contractor has been arrested for walking away from a job after he pocketed a homeowner’s money, pulled the roof off the house and fled. It’s never fun to lack a roof—ask any Floridian—and I sympathize with the homeowner. But, just like the victims of crooked stockbrokers, those fleeced by builders could often have prevented their loss by exercising a little common sense and employing a modicum of caution. Before hiring anyone to work on your house, make certain that he or she is registered with the State of Connecticut. That in itself isn’t much of a protection but it’s at least a sign that the contractor is somewhat serious about his business, has an address and might even be found after he disappears from the job. The strictures governing home improvement contracts are, by law, heavily weighted in favor of the homeowner, so that, too provides a layer of protection (and, should the contract not comply with the law, it is unenforceable against you). The best advice is to ask for references from recent customers and then call a few. And never, ever, pay for the whole job before every item listed on the final punch list is completed to your satisfaction. If a contractor has received his last dollar from you, he’s not likely to be interested in spending a day or two installing missing doorknobs and correcting his mistakes. This last comment is not meant to disparage contractors—I like many of them—but is just a reflection on human nature.
Sue McCalley has brought this fine old house onto the market at what I think is the very intelligent price of $1,890,000. The house was built in 1899 and is a beautiful example of a vintage Victorian: finely detailed moldings and paneling, huge windows, eight (!) bedrooms and so on. The third floor offers the best playroom opportunity I’ve seen and the entire house has obviously been carefully cared for and maintained over the past century. Chapel Lane (so named because St. Paul’s Church was there until moving to its Riverside Avenue location in the 1950s) has seen a huge surge in prices the past two years and I think it’s deserved. Some of the houses, now selling for well-over a million dollars, are old prefabricated Sears Robuck buildings designed in the Arts and Crafts style and shipped via rail to their sites. They’re unique, very, very nice and give the street some real pizazz. A brand new house at 23 Chapel, also a prefab and also nice albeit not as stylish, sold this summer in a bidding war for $2,395,000, $100,000 over its asking price. Sue’s listing could use central air, I suppose, but the micro-system I wrote about earlier this year (Unique Indoor Comfort 323-9400) would solve that nicely. Great house.
And Another One
Sharon Kinney of this office (again, that’s by way of disclosure and not the reason for mention in this column) has listed 6 Mill Pond Court in Cos Cob for $879,000.00. It’s a nice, four bedroom cottage right on Mill Pond, with minimal traffic noise from I-95. Very good condition and good location on a quiet, dead end street. If the town would only let Starbucks get up and running around the corner, this house would be absolutely perfect.
What’s Up With Those Sales Transactions?
I receive a fair amount of email complaining about missing and erroneous sales transactions reported in the column below mine. That’s very much not my department but by way of explanation, readers should know how the land recording system works in Greenwich: like so much of our town government, it’s “quaint”. ALL documents affecting title to real property are recorded in the town clerk’s office. That means, in addition to deeds transferring ownership, mortgages, quit-claim deeds, tax and mechanic’s liens, easements, etc. all go in for recording in an unsorted jumble. The clerk hand-writes the information in the “Day Book” and, eventually, it all gets alphabetized and compiled in the Grantor and Grantee indexes. But that’s eventually. The poor reporter whose job it is to glean the sales information for this paper must rely on the Day Book, where a combination of varying handwriting skills, deadline pressures and sheer volume end up causing (some) misspellings of names, erroneous prices and missed sales. Hey — use it as a rough guide to what’s going on in your neighborhood. If you want to know for certain what the house down the street sold for, call a Realtor (toss a stone in any direction—you’ll hit one). We’ve got our data on a computer.
Crooks!
Greenwich Time reports that a contractor has been arrested for walking away from a job after he pocketed a homeowner’s money, pulled the roof off the house and fled. It’s never fun to lack a roof—ask any Floridian—and I sympathize with the homeowner. But, just like the victims of crooked stockbrokers, those fleeced by builders could often have prevented their loss by exercising a little common sense and employing a modicum of caution. Before hiring anyone to work on your house, make certain that he or she is registered with the State of Connecticut. That in itself isn’t much of a protection but it’s at least a sign that the contractor is somewhat serious about his business, has an address and might even be found after he disappears from the job. The strictures governing home improvement contracts are, by law, heavily weighted in favor of the homeowner, so that, too provides a layer of protection (and, should the contract not comply with the law, it is unenforceable against you). The best advice is to ask for references from recent customers and then call a few. And never, ever, pay for the whole job before every item listed on the final punch list is completed to your satisfaction. If a contractor has received his last dollar from you, he’s not likely to be interested in spending a day or two installing missing doorknobs and correcting his mistakes. This last comment is not meant to disparage contractors—I like many of them—but is just a reflection on human nature.
posted by Chris Fountain at 8:48 AM
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