Transcript:
298 West Park: looking at the basement right now. I’m in the front of the house and a lot of these houses – this is a really nice large house – the basement here is paneled. It needs to all get removed. You can see the paneling behind is just covering ugly wall. Essentially this property is being actively thieved out.
You see some original wiring perfectly safe where it has not been tampered with. I think I’m going to go straight to the breaker panel. That’s an old phone system for those that don’t know what phone systems looked like back in the day. That can just get ripped out. This is your breaker panel. The incoming wires from the city have been stolen because those were reasonably high gauge copper so that will need to get replaced, The rest of this breaker panel looks like it’s here because the middle bars are there so I don’t think anything major has been taken. You may be missing a neutral bar from the left hand side. There’s a grounding bar; there’s a neutral bar, but I think they had a second neutral bar that somebody borrowed.
You have a lot of stolen wire like this here and wherever that ran; same with some of this other cut wire you’ll see as we walk through the house. It’s been played with. It’s interesting. I’m not familiar with blue romex. The basement does still have a water heater that I would predict has zero life left in it and then a furnace that I would just budget for replacement. They’re not overly expensive – twenty five hundred dollars gets you a new properly sized furnace.
There’s a commode in the basement that needs to disappear, but you do have PEX tubing up in the ceiling so all of that’s frozen. We’ll see what its value is. That orange wire we looked at was the dryer. So that is the basement. The duct work doesn’t look like it was monkeyed with which is lovely.
We are looking out the front door. It’s kind of unusual. You can see the neighborhood with the bars. It’s well updated, but I would call the neighborhood a D, a D plus, if I’m being polite. Maybe a D minus. This is lower than my personal investing category, but you can see the number of windows. This is an exceedingly large house. It’s a three bedroom on the MLS. I suspect when we go upstairs we’re going to find a fourth bedroom. You do have some really nice space. There’s a full basement under the property.
Coming into the living room: hardwood is smited. You’re not going to use the hardwood. You’re going to put down another floor. I don’t see real settling. There’s a definite dip in the floor here so you may want some time with a car jack and some beams. The drywall isn’t sagging so I think it’s old movement not structural.
This is an example of thefted wire and copper tube, possibly plumbing, that was going upstairs. I believe that goes upstairs to the upstairs bathroom.
Moving into the kitchen you’ve got kind of an odd cut up method. If you were a homeowner I would talk about opening up the first floor. But you have a pantry which is unusual for Toledo homes. This unused room is additional space. The bathroom downstairs needs new flooring. This is going to be plumbing and patched electrical. I would predict cast iron. You have lead on the left going into a cast iron drain. You may be fine. We just need to see what’s going on there. If it’s PVC it’s reasonably cheap and it’s all accessible now because of the plumbing theft.
Moving upstairs you can see some wiring theft there I suspect it was pulled down from above. Moving into rear bedroom number one – it has a closet. That’s the backside of the tub for the bathroom upstairs shower. As long as water turns on and we replace some plumbing it’s not catastrophic. This is where they were stealing that copper from down below; you’ve got work to do but nothing catastrophic.
Bedroom two in the middle has a closet. You have one outlet, one switch, actually two outlets, so it complies with Section 8. You can see wiring has been monkeyed with: screws opened; they were in process of actively stealing.
Bedroom three in the front has a closet and an additional closet. Lovely windows, not great for rental grade, but visually strong. I think we’d remove that track when we redo the floor and leave it open as a walk in closet. Many of us that own homes wish we had a closet that large.
There’s a small attic access that needs to be blanked off. This is not for resident access; they will attempt to make it a bedroom. I would not permit that; they just need to not know it’s up there.
That is 298 West Park Street: three bedroom house, very large. The lot to the left is a tear down. Further down is another boarded property ready for tear down. This is why the neighborhood grades lower. I’m looking at three tab shingles on the roof. As long as they were installed well and we’re not seeing leaks I would budget siding. If you do siding and fascia on this house it’s going to yield dividends.
It’s exceedingly large and when adjacent lots get demolished you can speak to the county and buy land for one hundred dollars, annex it, and potentially own a significant footprint here. That is 298 West Park Street.