Before and after - Pool

As purchased April 2007:

The real estate disclosure form had "none" marked under the question: Is there a pool on the property?  One then had to ask whether the pool was on another property or was it now defined as a pond?

The pool was surrounded by holly trees.  Ouch!

You can see the original privy on the left.  We cleaned out the debris (polite term) and painted it this summer.  More on that later.

July 2007:

The pool is a cement Anthony pool from 1972.  We hired Chas Pools to muck out the mud and debris.  They replaced the pump and filter too and kept it nice all summer.  We hired Steve Samluk of Trees, Inc to remove two overgrown cedar trees and all the holly trees.  The chestnut tree in the background on the left had a very large branch that scraped the corner of the roof.  It had actually scraped through the shingles and had worked its way through the corner of the roof deck.  We heard that the house might be haunted.  It was just neglected.

As purchased, April 27, 2007

I made quite a few images to document everything visually on the day we purchased the home.

There are a few photos here for you to see, but if you follow this link, you can see the rest:

As Purchased Web Gallery

Come on back and the story continues!

Background

My wife Wende and I had been searching for a Victorian home for 15 years before we found this one.  We looked at beach houses, farm houses and town houses in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland.  We finally began to narrow our search for a grand home in a historic community in walking distance to community shopping and restaurants.  It had to be in the right level of dis-repair so I could afford it!

We saw this one before it came up for sale and made contact with the owners after seeing an article about the house in the October 2004 issue of the Middletown Transcript.  Shortly afterward, the home was listed for sale, but it was overpriced.  We would see it now and again over the years and bide our time.

Finally, in January 2007, we learned that the home was heading to foreclosure.  We would have a chance to buy it at Sheriff's sale, but the outstanding mortgages exceeded its real value.  This took us by surprise.  If we wanted this house, we were going to have to act immediately.  We would borrow all the equity from our current home in Newark and add to it a mortgage and credit line on this home.  We would buy it in April 2007 from the bank that bought it at Sheriff's sale and have a clear title.

If anyone has been following the news, this was not a good time in the real estate business to do this kind of thing.  Home prices were falling and credit was tightening.  We had hoped to sell our home in about one month and have enough money to pay off all the loans.  But our home took 8 months to sell!  By the time our home sold, we had lowered the price and spent all our cash on swing loan payments so that we were dead even, not in the cash-rich position to make repairs that I had hoped!