Charming, loads of character. But really damn old.

No, I'm not describing myself, except maybe the old part. I'm describing the majority of houses I looked at this past week, which was my first week of house hunting. House hunting is really fun. House hunting would be a lot MORE fun if I could afford what I really wanted. I don't even want that much, just something maybe built in this century that isn't all wonky and crooked.

The houses I looked at this week put the "old" in Old Colorado City. Having a house in the historic district of town is very cool. There are Victorian bungalows, Arts and Craft styles, cape cod styles, and many, many other architectural wonders in Old Colorado City. Please note the use of the word "old" in the town name. In the name of all things holy, some of these houses should be condemned. Seriously.

So I see one such house online and it looks "charming." It's a "bungalow" with the awesome big covered porch on the front with the enormous brick pillars out front and the porch swing on one end. Very Norman Rockwell-ish. Until you get inside. The first house I looked at had one such porch, a beautifully manicured yard with privacy fence and a mailbox on the porch, which means the mailman actually WALKS around the neighborhood and delivers the mail. You can't get any more Norman Rockwell than that. And besides, there's something just very cool about stepping out on your cute bungalowy porch to retrieve your mail. Or maybe I'm just lazy. But I think it would be cool. So you step inside the house and everything at first glance, is still quite nice. Nice-sized living room, nice dining room...then you walk into the kitchen and things start to go downhill. No, I mean, ACTUALLY go downhill, as in the entire house slopes. Not good. The kitchen had the old fashioned white metal cabinets, which are cool, except they don't open at ALL because the roof is sagging so the tops of the cabinets scrape against the ceiling. That's a bit of a problem. The sink appeared to have been installed during the Harding administration and the refrigerator was not full size. Next to the kitchen, the basement stairs beckoned and we descended into the fiery depths of basement hell.

The house was built in 1904 and the basement walls consisted of enormous chunks of rocks...which were crumbling and caving in. A fairly recent (I'm talking last 50 years) beam had been added above the basement to support the sagging floor. Huge cracks snaked up the basement walls and disappeared onto the first floor level. Not good at all. Too bad. The house was cute from the outside, had a nice yard, but the Norman Rockwell part was shattered once you step inside.

The second Victorian house I looked at was built in 1899 and looked a little rough from the outside but was better on the inside...except that the previous owner must have smoked like a freight train...and had cats with incontinence issues. It smelled so bad in the house the back of your throat closed up upon entering. But because I find old houses fascinating, I bravely entered the basement, where the smell was increasingly worse with every step of descent. The basement had concrete floors, and one huge room could have been used as a bedroom or something, had you finished out the walls and floor.

The curious thing was the little rooms. Four little rooms, all with concrete walls and floors, none of which were bigger than 4x6 feet or so. It was pitch black down there, but each room had a single interrogation-room style light bulb hanging with a little chain. Upon illumination, you found yourself in nothing more than a little concrete room. Nothing else in there. But there were four of them. It was cool and creepy at the same time. Cool, because I imagined one of the rooms was where coal was kept to be shoveled into the furnace. Creepy, because it was just as likely that the rooms were used by a serial killer to hide and torture his victims. It could have gone either way.

Needless to say, I did not make an offer on those houses and I'm no longer positive I want an old Victorian house in Old Colorado City. Sometimes, old is not charming at all. Sometimes, old is just old.

I'll keep you posted....