Eliot Hopes to Buy a House

7571 Mount Hope Road

Eliot's found a house he's keen to buy and I have to admit that it's a very well kept older home. The inspectors who've gone over it have pegged the age somewhere between 1864 and 1900. In fact this is an interior wall of the original cabin around which the house grew.

It's on Mt. Hope Road in Waterloo Township, Jackson county, but the mailing address is Grass Lake. Mt. Hope is paved and the house sits 3.8 miles north of I-94, which conveniently has off and on ramps. It continues south to Grass Lake.
It comes with nearly 5 acres of land with about half of it unused and unmowed.

That's Eliot speaking with the seller, Mary Spaan. Her husband and she bought the house in the late 1970's from the Crates family and have used it as a rental. The Crates were dairy farmers and had about 90 acres back then.
Their barn still stands. The inspector went through it with Eliot and said that the barn didn't need a ton of work to stabilize it if Eliot wanted to keep it.

I know that seems pretty optimistic but the inspector really liked it. There's a second story hay loft and he thought that should probably come down and use that wood for the repairs.

There's a small pump house near the barn for watering the animals. When Mary, the seller, heard us talking about filling the well with cement she said, "My husband always said that was the best water on the property." During the septic and well inspection, a largish black snake was coiled up in the corner of the pump house.We didn't spend a lot of time checking it out.
The building directly behind the house was the milk house with racks still in place over solid tubs that had cold water flowing through them to keep the milk cool.

There's a 2 car garage that extends well past where cars would park. At one time it was heated with a wood stove. There's an upstairs to the garage, Mr. Crates wood working shop.

The elephant in the room has been the presnce of a buried gas tank beside the garage. Michigan law says that a buried tank that hasn't been used in a year has to be removed, It took awhile to work out the details (ie, $$$) but the tank's due to come out early next week (June 22 or 23) if the weather holds.

 The basement is a Michigan type but with a cement floor. Originally the walls were just stone but when they built the house above it they poured concrete into forms to make it a cement wall.

 
There's an enclosed front porch that faces the road.

And a deck off the back.

That's Suzy Lewis, Eliot's realtor, taking a break during an inspection.

The living room is large and has stairs to the second story.

The kitchen is really big so you don't need a dining room.

You can see where the wood cook stove was.

There are 2 bedrooms upstairs. Their ceilings are angled like the roof so the windows on the sides are nearly floor level but there are sky lights in both of them. The end windows are really old.

The doors have an unusual shape too.

It needs a lot of detailing but the inspector pronounced it extremely sturdy. A lot of the quibbles can be taken care of in a day (rewiring 2 cfgi outlets, adjusting an under sink pipe to run downhill, etc.) but the house inspector was very positive about the house and stressed that not everything needed to happen at once. The well and septic inspector pointed out some long term upgrades but said it's all working the way it's supposed to.
There's a real cellar door outside, the beams in the basement that support the floor above are trees...with bark on them, and there's an outbuilding that no one knows why it was built, but there's six inches of black walnut shells on the floor so Cathy's named it the squirrel house.