Bad Floorplans and Divorce Sales

There are a couple of houses in my neighborhood that keep going up for sale every few years. On paper, they sound good. They're both custom houses with lots of bedrooms, great schools in walking distance, low tax rates, and swimming pools. So what's the problem? They have terrible floorplans. In fact, their layouts make me wonder if both architects were from extremely dysfunctional familes. The master bedroom is far from the kids' rooms. The pool is out of sight of most of the house (so your children can drown without you noticing). And one of the houses has 5 back doors, all of them leading out to a narrow walkway at the bottom of a slope. At the top is another road. Guess what--perfect for people who don't mind their teenagers (or younger children) coming and going at odd hours. One of them has a kitchen in the very center of the house, so there's no natural light entering from windows in the surrounding rooms. Either the person who cooked there was allergic to light or someone hated her (or him).

These houses take a long time to sell, and when they do, it seems inevitable that the next family falls apart a few years later. In one spectacular case, the next-door neighbors recounted to me how the wife came home, saw the sign on the lawn, and attacked it with an axe. Then she took the axe to the living room windows. The cops had to come and haul her off. Whew!

So yes, while there may be a buyer for every house, no matter how bizarre, there are some floorplans that will attract people who don't want to see each other. And when that happens, odds are that they won't stay there for long...