Reeder's Digest: Danny St. House Review

An explanation for this post: Mark's friends in Florida, who now have a family of their own, are moving up here within the next month or two and needed us to go critique a home near us, complete with pictures, explanations and judgements as though it were us looking to buy the home. Here's the review in full detail (email was just not able to send such a large file!!):

We hope this helps with your decision:

Above, the front door is just left of the column. The top window is the upstairs living area, and the bottom window is to a bedroom.Below is what is below the bottom window in the above picture. Nice plant boxes/garden area: 

The house is a great size, with spacious rooms and a lot of closet space!! This is a picture of the hallway closet on the lower level. When you walk in the front door and keep walking back to the living room area, this is in the hallway, the door on the right: 

This closet holds the access to the crawl space:

We really wish we had as much closet space as this house does. There is a crawl space below the house which is 5’ deep, and pretty roomy. Sorry the pictures of that didn’t turn out too great: 

On to the laundry area:

The laundry area is inside the downstairs bathroom,but they are very nice, new steam washer/dryer set and they are staying with the house. If you don’t want them, we can take them off your hands for you. No charge.  No problem.

*notice the slate tile! below is the shelf above the washer/dryer

The carpet was just cleaned last week, but is a little stiff and worn in certain high-traffic areas.

Their master bedroom has a California King, to give you an idea of how much room is still in the bedroom after such a huge bed.

The master bath is huge! With a nice double vanity.

The care-bear bedroom is right next to the parent's (I tried to do pan-shooting again): 

with the butterfly bathroom right there in the hallway as well:

The kitchen appliances are showing their age a bit, and there is no kitchen pantry. There aren’t many houses in this area with kitchen pantries. There is an island, though, that adds quite a bit of extra kitchen storage. Terri also said that the previous owners would use the hallway closet by the master bedroom to put their food storage and extra pantry-like-goods. There are two big closets in the hallway near the master bedroom and little girl’s room, so you could probably do the same without sacrificing much closet space. 

Dining Area:

Hallway closet #1 next to the master bedroom (master bedroom door is to the right, Care-bear bedroom is to the left). She said this is where the previous owners stored their pantry-foods:

Hallway closet #2 is just as big, just lacking all the shelf-space. They had a whole Japanese Dresser in here. Care-bear room is facing this closet:

The living room upstairs was a bit odd-shaped, with a balcony-like fence along the stairs for a banister. Sorry, for some reason, we didn’t get a picture of the upstairs living room!! There is a wood-burning fire place in this living room, and not much room for a TV there. They had a little box tv shoved in a corner between the fireplace and the window. 

Downstairs, they had their bigger TV where it worked much better. This is the seating area they have down there for the TV-viewing. I think her dark blinds help keep out a lot of the southern exposure light for when they want to watch movies:

This is the area behind the couch, a lot of room for office-space:

These book cases are on the wall that is to the right of the tv (when you’re facing the TV wall). 

Here is the 3rd bedroom there as well with built in closet shelving:

She said that all the bedrooms are already set up to receive cable lines. It would just need to be hooked up. 

Fourth bedroom with deep (not totally a walk-in, but almost) closet:

So to recap: Downstairs, there are two bedrooms with closets, a good sized living area with backyard access, two hall closets (one with access to the crawl space), the garage access (the hallway/garage door has a lock on it, which is a good security feature), and the full bath with laundry facilities behind the door.

The back yard is a good size with a nice fence all around. There are three entry points through the fence. One on either side of the house, and one that opens up to the school; making it a VERY quick route for children who walk to school. There is a roomy shed in the back yard that would free up garage storage/crawl space storage, and it seemed to be in good shape. Here are the two side gates; the one on the right (with Mark there) is a double-open; both gates will open for wide access:

Then the third entrance/exit to the yard against the elementary school: 

The shed:(left) View of the back yard from fourth bedroom:

The grass (spotty from snow pile up - they have no pets)

Lots of trees and view of the mountain (clouds took off the Mt. tops)
Stairs to the downstairs living area, and next to the stairs:From the deck off of the lower-level:

this is the school parking lot through these trees: 

Under the stairs:The balcony off the kitchen:

Neighbors seem well-kept and their yards were nice. The street is normally not that busy, but there were yard sales going on all over the place. One neighbor (bordering Driftwood Bay) had the ‘lady-stickers’ in their car windows, so don’t know what that means! Driftwood Bay is normally a calm street with medium to light traffic. There are kids playing near the street often and there hasn’t been any trouble with that, that we know of. There are some police men in the neighborhood (up and down Driftwood) that keep an eye on speeding cars. It’s a very safe street as far as we can tell.

The car with the ‘lady-stickers’ and Steve walking in the background. Great view of the mountains. To the left of the house:

View from the Care-bear room of across the street neighbors (who just re-tarred their drive way! ... Made us realize this house’s driveway could use some TLC):
Just to the right of the house: (Mark can autograph this one if you’d like)
And to the very right of the house (at the end of the street):

Terry said that the only trouble she’s had has been with the water-heater valve dripping, but because of a home-warranty they had, it has been fixed. Also the springs on the garage door had been an incorrect torque before they lived there, so they broke shortly after they moved in. When it broke, they had them fixed and the garage door is fully functional now. 

Some things that we noticed besides the carpet and the kitchen appliances showing a bit of age, were the door handles and hardware (just cosmetically outdated, nothing major), there’s scuffing along some baseboards, and the paint looks like it could use a fresh coat. The house is white all over and has never been painted any other colors as far as we could tell.

The grass in front is well-kept and thick, while in back it’s still nice, just a little spotty. They have no dogs, so it is probably just from snow piling up during the winter.

Pictures I forgot to add in to the “review layout” is the master walk-in closet:
And the garage. Storage space, then the actual garage:
Then the bathroom tub/area. Not tile, but looks like it:It’ll be easy to make this place shine!! :)

The light fixtures seemed to be showing their age a little. Jayci did not use a flash on most of the pictures so you could see the natural lighting. There were lots of lights and so you have ample opportunity to replace the fixtures and make better lighting if you wanted to.
The house does not have central vac. It does have central air heating. Overall, we think it is in good condition and with a little TLC could really shine. If you had a little extra money I would say it could use new appliances, a new coat of paint, updated light fixtures, and new hardware but you could move into the house and things would be fine.

We hope this helps. Let us know if you have any more questions. Good luck!

Jayci and Mark Reeder