CarrboroWeb- Carrboro and Chapel Hill, North Carolina- Layman's Guide to Real Estate- Case Study #5

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Case Study
Property #5

Property #5 Carl Drive

About two years ago I designed a passive solar home that I was going to build on my property. I thought about what we thought we would need(this was before we knew Anastasia would be entering the picture) and designed what I thought to be a very simple and efficient home that would be inexpensive to build and meet our needs.

On a Wednesday the property on Carl Road became available. I called my agent and she said we could get in on Saturday to see it. It was 1800 sq ft on 1.3 acres and purported to be "solar oriented", which I was sure what it meant. There was also a small garage that I thought could be used for an office or salon. It was listed at $239,000

I went to see the house and was amazed when the interior design was exactly what I had designed with the exception that they put the stairs on the opposite side that I had put mine. This meant that the kitchen, being under the stairs was closed off into a little nook of an afterthought whereas, mine was central to the planning.

There were a couple of other minor problems and one major one…
- to get to the downstairs bathroom you had to go through the office/bedroom…
- There was a brick wall that separated part of the kitchen which would be a huge demolition problem if we wanted to expand the kitchen
- The Major problem- 40000 volt high tension power lines that would have been the primary view had I made the outbuilding my office…. And a 100 foot easement for those power lines…. The property was just over 350 feet long so it seemed to me that I was buying almost a third of an acre, that wasn't really mine.

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