Stewing

Well, now we wait for Friday & the agent, to do a round of about a dozen places nearby. One (the dirt-cheap one) is already under offer, so that may not be a go-er - but then it was, as they say, priced to sell.

Cat is still mulling over the Grand Old Lady, and saying, well, if they dropped their price by 40% (cough, cough), then we could afford to fix it up, over time: which, I suppose, yeah, it seems to have been on the market for a couple of years. But I suspect the price has already been dropped several times, and the wiggle room will be small, although we will check.

There's another place, one we looked at months ago, which she's really caught by: it's on a quiet cul-de-sac, single story brick, with the house in a V shape giving a very secluded back yard. It's been empty a couple of years (owned by whatever govt agency funds veterans mortgages), and is pretty rough, certainly plenty of scope for projects for her, but also fairly large, and not so bad that it isn't liveable immediately.

The problem? well, it backs onto West Markham, which is pretty much the main arterial road for west Little Rock, and the traffic noise is not just loud, but fairly much constant, even in the weekends and late evenings.

Cat is dreaming of putting up an earth rampart, perhaps topped by a new privacy fence and then a line of trees, but ... well, it already has the fence, and at least some trees, and damn it's loud. I can't see anything that would realistically be able to buffer that much noise, but Cat's "I will" is so strong she can persuade herself of most anything ... for a while. I have to admit, it is a GREAT bargain - I haven't found what the price has fallen to, last we checked, 6 months ago, it was $110k, so probably under $100k now.

But, with that much noise, the outside space that Cat is hungering for, will be pretty much unusable to her. We went through this with the balcony in Sunbury, which she worked on enormously, but could never baffle the traffic noise there (from much further away.

I suggested she cruise West Markham looking for people with substantial fencing, to ask them how well it has worked as a baffle for the noise, and I hope she does that: lord knows, if she can produce a good solution, I would love to buy something that big, flat, and cheap.

Sorry, seem to be obsessing about houses this week, funny that.