Check Out This Sweet, Cheap Greene County Farmhouse

  |  May 23, 2011

I fell in love with this eighteenth-century farmhouse when I was house hunting last spring, and it looks like it’s still on the market. I vaguely remember it was somewhere around $175,000 then, and the price has tumbled even further, to $159,000. It’s a lot of house for not much money, or at least a lot of bedrooms at a sweet price. There are five upstairs and one down, and the layout is a bit odd throughout: bedrooms opening up onto more bedrooms, a teeny bathroom under the front stairwell, an oddly situated servants’ staircase in the back.

While the upstairs was impracticable for privacy-loving twentieth-first century families, this house seemed like a blast for kids (and not surprisingly, the longtime owners had a bunch).  The tiny rooms, nooks and crannies, and endless wrap-around porch fit all my Anastasia Krupnik childhood fantasies of a creaky, beloved, bohemian old home.

We ended up deciding it was just too much house for us at this point in our lives, and we had reservations about Durham being too far from things to do, especially as we wanted year-round rentals. But I hope this house finds a family who can fill it. What would you do with this one?

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