KnifeCatching 1339 St. Charles St.

Read This:The following review is just my opinion and only my opinion I am not a professional house appraiser or inspector and I am not a structural engineer. The opinions expressed in this review are based on my own inspection of the property, the publicly available facts from aggregator sites such as Redfin and Zillow and the online permit database for the city of Alameda. I am not responsible for incorrect or missing data that appears in these sources. In fact, its probably best that you just ignore everything you read here as the lunatic ravings of an unbalanced mind.

KnifeCatching 1339 St. Charles St.
Up for review today is 1339 St. Charles St. which has the official specs of being a 3-3 of 2571 sq ft on a 5600sq ft lot built in 1907 on sale for $907k. What they don't tell you is that one of those bedrooms and one of the baths is in the second house behind the main house. The house was built by Marcuse and Remmel (just like mine) so we were interested in seeing what it looked like on the inside. The house does have a good location on St. Charles st and is in the Franklin School district. Lots of pics and prose about the place on the Realtor.Com site.

We actually viewed the place a while ago but I am now just getting around to posting the review. We where initially excited about the place because we thought the main house was a 3-3 of 2571 sq ft, its in a great neighborhood and the lot was a decent size.

Sorry for the quality and lack of pictures I guess I'm just rusty....

A google street view of the front of the house. Its always fun to compare the street view and satellite views to what you see after its all fixed up for sale....
The house presents well from the street and has a nice front yard for Halloween. If anyone isn't 100% sure that I'm not a total crackpot don't you think that having one of my official 'good house criteria' being how good the front yard is for Halloween decorations puts me into the crackpot category?

From talking to the listing Realtor, it appears that they have spent quite a bit of money making the house ready for showing. I believe that the entire outside, inside was painted and it looks to me like they put new sod everywhere.

Side yard is nice.

Here is the 'back house' which is a 1-1. It was actually kinda nice inside with more of a 50's rustic feel. As far as I can tell this is a legal 2nd unit.
We were thinking , 'Hey rental income to help pay the mortgage.' If the main house is awesome this might be doable. Besides the house being there the backyard still seemed pretty usable for outdoor entertaining.

The bottom floor of the house is uh, well, fugly. Actually it reminds me a lot of the bottom floor of our place when we first bought it....that's not necessarily a good thing..
One side of the bottom was this big long wood shop looking room. The ceilings in this area might be legal height I can't remember.

The other side of the downstairs is a little more rough. Its cut up into ~3 smaller rooms. It looks like that at one time it was probably a separate unit.

This is the middle room...with those big lights and the window covered with paper I immediately thought of one thing....Grow Room.....

The walls here appear to be original lathe-plaster but in rough shape...and dirty.

Shot of where someone had torn into the ceiling to access the plumbing...
If this is the state of all the plumbing in the house then its going to need a new water and gas re-pipe.
Sorry guys I don't remember if I checked the panel to see if the place is still on fuses or what...see I am rusty...

The back part of the bottom floor. We were told that at one time there was a full kitchen and bathroom down here but I couldn't really tell where they would of been.

More exciting bottom floor pics.

This right here was the coolest thing about this floor of the house. An original clinker brick fireplace which to me really points to the fact that this bottom level was originally intended to be legal living space. I believe that now though the city does not view it as such.....too bad, woulda added 1000 sq ft to the place.

Okay I apologize for the lameness of this next part.
I was running after the baby and forgot to take pictures of the main floor.
I do remember that it had nice wood floors, 2 nice looking fireplaces formal parlour and dinning room and a kitchen that looks like it was redone in the 80's with fake wood Formica counter tops....there was a weird half bath outside the house where you had to go outside from the kitchen to use it. It would be great for garden parties but not so great in the winter time. The kitchen was big enough to be an eat-in though.

Going up the stairs to the top level of the house. you have a nice stairway and nice landings on both ends.

On the landing is the only full bathroom in the house. Its a split bath so one side has the vanity and claw foot tub and shower. This bathroom was surprisingly big.

I can't seem to rember there being another full bath anywhere else in the main house...so I don't know where the 3-3 spec comes from...I only counted a 3-2.5.

the other side is just a toilet without a sink...This looks kinda claustrophobic to me. The toilets sorta close to the door so it seems to me that you'd feel like you were pooping in the landing....

One of the bedrooms on the top floor...not super big but with a decent closet.

Other bedroom on the top floor. Also not real big....

Conclusion:
The main house is only a 2 1.5.....that's just too small. There doesn't seem to be any easy way to get a second full bath for a master bedroom kinda thing on the top floor.

To Make The House Work For Us.
The house is on a brick foundation which has to be changed....figure a easy $100k to do it right.
The plumbing is going to need to be redone.
The realtor had a great idea for how to make the house livable for a modern family.
Rejigger the back half of the house and bring the weird bathroom into the houses envelope, then put a stairway down to the bottom floor and turn the room with the cool clinker brick fireplace in it into a family room.

Realistically you're going to have to gut, the bottom floor, blow out the existing brick foundation and concrete slab dig down to give yourself reasonable ceiling height, then somehow convince the city to let you turn it back into living space...put the master suite on the bottom level along with the family room and be okay that there is an entire floor between you and your kids...

That's the only way I can think of getting the space and usability out of the house that a modern, family will demand.

So, that's a new foundation, slab, complete remodel of a master suite and family room and a kitchen remodel plus probably re-plumbing and rewiring the house...my guesstimate for that much workwould would be in the $250-$300k range...maybe more.

How does the price stack up...
Ya know, I don't know...having that rentable unit in the back is throwing off my internal value meter....If you bought it for $900k, sunk $300k into it and in the process added ~1000sq ft of legal living space....still though being into the place for $1.2M I don't know if it would be worth that much at the end of construction...

Halloween 2010

Happy Halloween!!!

Okay, its really late but here it is our annual compendium of Halloween craziness. We had several new things this year along with lots of returning favorites and a separate Halloween party to boot.

Sit back, relax and enjoy this pictorial tour of our haunted mansion...

Here's an overview shot of how the place looked during the day time. Not too scary right? Kind of a good spooky sky no?

But here's how the place looked at night! Booga, booga, booga.

Kid level view of the entrance to the grave yard at night...from this angle it looks like a boring straight shot right to the back doesn't it?

Here's how our giant scarecrow looked during the day.

Giant ScareCrow at night.... In the past several years the scarecrow 'did' things. So this year we put it right up front on the sidewalk and ....it didn't do ANYTHING, but sit there and look spooky. We put it up pretty early and EVERYBODY who walked buy asked us, 'whats it going to do this year?' Because everybody was expecting it to do something....we're kinda becoming a victim of our own fame here...lots of repeat customers over the past couple of years and they remember all the scares.....its making it harder to scare people....though, we managed to do it pretty well this year.

Wait, who's that peaking out from under the scarecrows arm? Its Silas our runaway scarecrow. He actually made appearances in the graveyard this year...when he wasn't out eating uh,....stuff.....

Up front on the other side of the path was this new addition to the Haunted Pumpkin Patch. Its a fogger uh, thingy....it attached to a little fogger and then you can make creepy fog come out of its mouth. When you time it just right it makes for some awesome creepy pictures.

Creepy foggy pumpkin and Bob.

For the brave souls who actually enter the haunted pumpkin patch, a few steps in and a look to the left reveals another new addition. This is Peter Pumpkin the Great Pumpkins half brother once removed as he said it.... Peter is a talking pumpkin who told the story of the Haunted Pumpkin patch, the rules of the pumpkin patch and lots, and lots, and lots, of really, really truly terrible Halloween jokes....man were they bad...so bad that you couldn't help but laugh in spite of yourself.

Closer up shot of Peter. We made it look like the spiders are holding him up. The 'pumpkin vines' are hiding a speaker. I just realized that it looks like Peter has a third eye...maybe he's Hindu?

We set up a little sitting area at Peters feet with hay and mini hay bales for kids to sit on and listen to him....and we actually got kids to slow down long enough to do that!

Continuing on down the path looking to your left was this scary guy. It's a pumpkin headed zombie trying to free itself from its own grave...he was new this year and got a great reaction from people.

Shot of the pumpkin zombie and Bob. This year I got the reasonably bright idea to take one of our many funkins and carve it up so that we could hide a red spotlight inside it. It worked awesome! The pumpkin zombie is creepily lit, the source of the light is hidden and it gives the pumpkin a creepy red glowing visage. That's like a Halloween three-fer. The pumpkin zombie is a home made animated prop that when triggered thrashed about violently trying to free itself from its grave and growled and yelled out for brains. This guy scared a lot of people this year.

A little bit past the pumpkin zombie on the right side was our ghost making a return visitation in the downstairs. The hanging skull bowl was where the candy was so the kids had to make it at least this far to get some. The person handing out candy was in charge of triggering the pumpkin zombie and the fog machine.

And of course at the end of the path behind the chain and floating over the rest of the cemetery is BOB, our giant floating head of doom. Bob is the face from the mirror from the original sleeping beauty movie. He can talk to kids and look around and change his facial expression to suit his mood.

A close up of the skull below Bob, just because.

Also new this year is what we where calling 'The Zombie family Picnic'. We have the daddy zombie, the baby zombie, the zombie quatoo but no mommie zombie.....do you want to be their mommy?
These guys where right in front of Bob and the quatoo gave the people a good scare. The quatoo is attached to our 4-bar lifter and when activated it jumps up 4' and out 4' to right behind the chain and right up in peoples faces. We haven't used a prop on the 4-bar this lite in years...I've forgotten how fast that thing can move....halfway through the night I had to re-rebar it down as it had pulled its stakes out and was in danger of decapitating someone...

Zombie family by night. Bob would ask people if they could tell what the zombies where eating and when people turned to look the Quatoo would leap out at them. Lots of great reactions. I think the best reaction was from our dear friend Ian. He and his two twin 7yr old boys came by dressed as zombies!!! I was introducing them to our own zombie family when the Quatoo jumped up for a hug...I think Ian must of jumped up like 3' in the air and back 4'...truly one of the best reactions of the night...

So now after you walk back out of the graveyard and are walking past the rest of the house you see this. Also new this year was granny....Irene whipped her up in like 30 min... Isn't it sweet how shes rocking her grandchild. This prop got a surprisingly strong reaction. People where never sure if it was a dummy or if there was a person in there who was going to jump out at them.

Granny at night...creepy! See how the baby has a roll of smarties in its hand? Also Irene stuck a red glow stick behind her eyes on Halloween night so they would glow spookily.

Long shot of granny framed by a couple of pumpkins with Henrietta looking on.

The spiders where up to their old tricks this year...besides holding up Peter and covering all our nice decorations with spider webs they caught their biggest meal yet

Slappy!!! oh no!!!!! Slappy, who was our lazy, snoring grave digger last year is playing the role of a cut-rate painting contractor....I think the spiders are union.....
Slappy was hooked up to a 3rpm timing motor that would make him shake every once in a while like he was trying to free himself. It was subtle but caught several people off guard.

This year we added sound to Slappy. I jiggered a motion sensor and had it turn on a set of self amplified computer speakers. I had a little mp3 player hooked up to the computer speakers with one track that was running in a loop. One channel was Slappy asking for help and talking about his spider troubles...the other channel was the soundtrack for the.....

Hell Hole
Yes, of course the Hell Hole returned this year (I mean we have the sign and everything)....its just such a good use of the otherwise wasted side yard space. This year we added more floating specters (even a pumpkin faced one of course) and more twinkling orange lights for a better 'fires of hell' effect.

Hell Hole at night. The sound track really got some people with the screams of the damned and a creepy, deep demon laugh.

Silas back in the graveyard, on the prowl.

Maybe Silas is going to help the pumpkin zombie out of its grave so that he'll have a partner in crime?

Look at Silas, mugging next to his wanted poster...

But don't worry folks, the Silas retreavel team was succesful in capturing him.

This year we were part of the Alameda Haunt Your House Contest and Canned Food Drive. We made up these Halloween themed canned food collection boxes and everybody in the contest got one.
Here's Henrietta checking to see if anyone dropped off any tuna...

Even our daughter Natasha got into the act... On a side note, I had no idea that we have so many Russian people in our neighborhood. They were all so excited to hear that we named our daughter Natasha because its ,'such a good strong Russian name!!!' Not making that up, honest.

The final haul for the canned food drive. We took in just slightly over 500 pounds of food!!! We totally blew away the folks at the food bank. We showed up and said, 'Hi I've got the food from the Halloween contest.' and they gave me this little cart to put it on and I was like... 'You're going to need a bigger boat.' They seemed so truely grateful. They even wanted to keep the Halloween boxes so that they could hand out the food to familes in them! I kinda like the idea of folks down on their luck getting their free food for the month in one of our boxes....

Here's of course a blurry shot of halloween night and the crowd of people waiting to get into the graveyard. We made them wait until it was dark enough to see Peter..we didn't use a very bright projector...

Because we are completely insane we had a party on the night before Halloween and invited all our friends, family and neighbors. This was early on, the sunken living room got so packed at one point that I was mildly concerned about somebody taking a spill into the fire pit.
SuperMan totally dug roasting marshmallows over the fire pit.

Overhead shot of the party. Lots of food on the table. We only had the fire pit and the fire flowers over the table on so none of our neighbors felt the need to call the AFD plus, they were almost all at the party.

Here is the family Madscientist after a hard weekend of haunting. We went through 6 gallons of spiced cider, untold pounds of candy, one bottle of rum (ya I'm looking at you Mr. shifty neighborhood meth head on a ten speed that was lingering too close to the spiced cider for too long I remember what you look like and if you still have teeth next Halloween you're a gonna want to steer clear of me if you want to keep em.)

Next Post, The Videos!!!!