Fug of Fright

In honor of Halloween, we present some scary-looking places for you to rest your bones.

 Welcome to your doom, where every night is a dark, sad 60's night.

Settle in and write out your last will and testament at the desk beneath this room's sole window and the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling; resist the tempation to do the same.

It was a dark and scary night....as every night will be if you make this your bedroom. I guess a light sleeper would appreciate this coffin, but I'd rather sleep in the bathroom at Jewel-Osco than sleep here.

Fireplace of Fright! I don't know why, but this fireplace looks like an awkward afterthought and the two candles at each side appear ready for holding seances...for your dead investments.

The dark paneling and moldy-looking carpeting make for a room only a contractor could love. What's scary is that this carpet continues into the bedroom.

 Finally: "The Chimney Has Eyes!" Or A Window, At Least. I've never seen someone build a chimney around a window before. My guess is that the fireplace attached to this chimney is another "slapped on later" addition like the chocolate firefright above.

Can't get enough of that Halloweeny vibe?
Haunted Houses at The Real Estate Bloggers

Handyman Specials

The latest thing is to recommend that people look at foreclosed properties, hoping for a deal.

Oh yeah, a little thing about the foreclosed property market: People do crazy stuff to houses when they know they have to get out and won't make any money off of the place.

Ads for "as-is" and short sale homes showcase a blend of  rage-destroyed, neglected, and sometimes uninhabitable properties. Most of them are more sad than my usual brand of campy fug, and can give a contractor or handyperson enough work to (maybe) ride out the recession.

Perhaps these places will be bought and restored by flippers or torn down by developers. Perhaps someone will buy them, lovingly fix them up and live in them. Who knows what the future holds for these homes?

Attack of the 80s

Although Rooms From The 80s are all too easy to find, it's rare to find that perfect decorator specimen that is a monument to all things pastelly and Miami Vice-y. Lo, I have found another. This one is so delicious that I'm loading up the post with photos, because words truly cannot capture the byoo-tay. Let us tour, shall we?

Feast your eyes on the leather sectional, an odd shiny floor, and vertical blinds for days. Giant vase and dramatic lighting! Glass cocktail table! It's like you've died and gone to Los Angeles.

Mahwbul jacuzzi OMG! And more vertical blinds! You're a star!

Wow, glass railings, giant vase, spotlights and 80's staircase. It's a hallway fit for Krystle Carrington.

Every piece of seating in this house has a shag rug beneath it. All the better to cushion your tootsies from the glossy floors which have got to be cold in the winter.

Now, the kitchen. And surprisingly, I don't hate it to bits and pieces. Note the GINORMOUS vase in the corner. WTF is with the vases? Glossy, spotlighty contemporary design is the way of the day in this house.

Now, the rear. The rear isn't that bad. It's a very California-looking house in my opinion.

This snazzy joint won't come cheap. Houses this meticulously decorated (even if the decor is outdated) never come cheap. As far as 80s-themed houses go, this one takes the cake, the pie, and the chicken thighs. It's indeed a fine specimen of luxury retro, and better yet it's not a modern faux 80s revival, it's the real dang deal!

Nice To See You, Deer

Some people like to mount beasts on their walls, whether heads of beasts such as deer or bear, or entire beast bodies such as fish.

Is that a real bird caught in photogenic flight outside that window, or is that one of those bird stickers that keep the splatters away? Maybe it's a mobile. See what looks like two fishes on the windowsill below the bird? Maybe they're in the mobile too. Maybe I'm just batsh*t crazy. This whole scene is loaded with eye-f*cks.

There's something a little odd about the placement of the deer head in this living room. It's like he just popped in to make your acquaintance and eat your houseplants, and look what you did: sealed him into the wall.

To make matters even worse, the wall portrait is an eye-f*ck onto itself. I think the subject consists of horses being ridden by jockeys, but there's a head in the middle of the painting that looks like a goat or dog looking out at you. What the hell? Maybe it's just my monitor and my aged eyes.

Finally, if you don't have the trophy yet to mount above your mantel, mount the promise of a trophy to come:

Mealtime is Big Business in this House

Nothing says  "our family is run like a corporation" like pleather-coated office chairs around a granite-topped dinner table. Kinda reinforces that "family meeting" crap I used to hear on TV in the 90s (do people still hold family meetings?)

Let's hope nobody gets demoted to eating at a card table in the attic. At least they won't have to sit under the 60s lobby chandelier any more while waiting for the family's Trump to pass judgment on how they cut their peas.

Wow House: Hall of Doors

Keeping with something I said a few weeks ago about sometimes posting good houses instead of just shitty ones, here's our second Wow House, featuring the Hall of Doors.

I have no idea what's behind these fabulous doors. I can only guess:
- bookshelves
- dead bodies
- fourth dimension
- enough rice and wheat to outlast Y3K
- who knows? something the owners wanted to organize

All I know is that the doors are gorgeous, high-line and classy and all that. Ignore the linoleum floor and "brick" archway leading to Ye Olde Oaken Kitchen, and even pass your eyes beyond the cheap pulls on the doors - nay, Doors - themselves. These are but minor distractions amongst glory. One might expect Doors like these in houses costing $10,000, even $15,000 more, but yea, today is your lucky day because here they ARE!

The rest of the house is the epitome of 90s middle-class luxury, but for some reason those Doors look like they just might be the fanciest things in the entire subdivision. Want!

Fug a Stove

Why waste lovely space that can be used housing cheap shelving unit by placing a stove in that space? I mean, what makes you think that just because it's a kitchen in an occupied house for sale that there's going to be a stove in it?

And really now, would you rather see that dollar store shelving unit in there, or see what really happened to that stove?

(Photo represents the assumed fate of the missing appliance. The fate of the ham that was inside that oven remains unknown.)

I know that sometimes when kitchens are renovated, the owner cheaps out and doesn't supply a stove, but nothing about this kitchen indicates that it's been renovated within the past ten years. Why go out of one's way to stuff a storage unit in there unless this is indicative of how these people live, day after day after cooking-free day? Once upon a time I lived in an apartment with a stove that hadn't worked in years, but at least it was there as a comforting placeholder. This, is just, jarring.

Fug a stove. That's what the tiny dorm-size microwave is for. In a neighborhood chock full of fast-food hell holes, who needs a stove? People who cook? WTF is that all about?

(Stove photo source: http://www.explorationswa.com.au)

Cooking Up Plastic

I don't understand the function of the plastic wall guarding this kitchen. It doesn't offer any real privacy, and it doesn't even appear to extend fully. What the hell? And what's with the hideous pattern printed on it?

Don't even get me started on the aluminum-foil-papered, mirror-striped dining room wall in the background (yes, the entire wall is mirror-striped; I saw the foh-tohs).

Deal Fell Through

"Deal Fell Through" is the lead in this place's ad. Methinks that's not the only thing that fell through. I suspect that the fridge used to cover the brickless spot on the opposite wall, but nothing can explain the jagged edge where the bricks end on the left wall. I don't recall shoddy quality as ever being in style.

Needless to say, this place is being sold as-is, come and get it, call your contractor, you know the drill. Hope your contractor knows the drill too.

For Sale: The House That Surrounds This Table

Real estate photography is a lot like Twitter: You only get a limited amount of space to tell your story, so you better optimize what you've got.

With that in mind, I don't understand why some photographers choose to showcase things that convey little or nothing about the house being sold, and why the real estate agent then decides that these are the photos to post in the ad. If one can only place six, seven or eight photos in an online ad, why select a shot like the one below?

Shots like this make me think a) the photographer and real estate agent are very bad at selling things visually and b) how horrible is this house that this is one of the best photos of it (assuming the agent selected the best photos for the ad, which we all know what happens when we assume)? The table in this photograph isn't horrible - I question the ergonomics of having that giant ball in the way of diners' legs while seated at the table, though - but is the table what's for sale here or the house? Is the table included? If not, why is this a feature photo? *smh*

This homeowner's priorities are clear

Today's house is a well-kept sixties abode with a bar in the basement. Now, a lot of sixties-seventies-eighties homes have wood-paneled bars in the basement of varying levels of complexity. This house's bar, however, looks like it should be serving paying customers. Note the TV mounted on the wall, the abundance of seats, and the line of beer cans near the ceiling in the second photo. And there's enough linoleum to qualify as a dance floor or intoxicated fighting surface, to boot.

So if you like to drink and don't mind paying a contractor to modernize your kitchen, here's yer house.

From the Fug to the Suck: A really bad house

I sit here and mock questionable design choices and sadly ruined as-is hovels on this blog, but a couple of home dwellers have several issues with their rented house that go beyond fug wallpaper and block glass toilet surrounds. They document those issues on their blog, Really Bad House Design.

There's a trick to viewing this website, at least there is in my Firefoxed world. The text is all in white, so you have to highlight the page's text in order to read it. I don't know if this was intentional (?!) or if this was a design flaw, but that's what you gotta do if you want to read the site right now.

So if you want to read the words of someone with a specific and detailed list of house gripes, visit Really Bad House Design and get to highlightin'. When you're ready to come back to the land of petty nitpicking about carpet colors, we'll be here.

Papered in Fug, Part II

There is more than enough fug wallpaper in the world to fill a thousand posts, so here's the second.

Crazy-ass wallpaper? Check. Sick green rug? Check. Least appetite-whetting dining room of the month? Ding-ding-ding! You win!

There must be an entry in the Book of Default Decorating that says "all proper dining rooms are wallpapered." Beneath that is probably the line "Copyright 1972". This house doesn't look that old, though, so it must be an old-minded owner that is responsible for this cartoonish mess. Fortunately, the sliders to the patio give a fantastic view of nature's finery, as well as a convenient escape route. Never, ever cover those sliders. You'll be entrapped with the fug with slim chance of escaping with your sanity intact.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Fug

Just because someone lives in a mansion and has lots of money to throw at a decorator doesn't mean they'll get five-star style results. Behold, a patterned floral fright, in two acts:

For me? Wallpaper and a checkerboard floor? You shouldn't have!

 Perhaps the best option is to retire to bed, and be faced by this horridly coordinated nightmare incentor of a pattern creeping across the walls and linens. Thank goodness that vomit-green floor is there to cool it all down, or amp up the quease effect. Really now, just go to sleep and dream about all the money that went into these flower horrors, and make a promise to call your contractor in the morning. Sweet dreams!

Floored

I present: the kitchen. The cabinets are all right, modern, kinda plain but passable. The granite-looking backsplash is OK on its own but looks weird with the bald-faced Ikea-looking cabinets.

But....the FLOOR....the floor is where the fug is at.

Decor by Crayola

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but behold these bright designs and see how your eyes feel afterwards.

Lavender wall, plum wall, and Sea O' Blue carpeting. Is it bad lighting and a photography flaw, or a color-blind decorator? Whatever it is, it needs to be repainted and refloored as soon as the deal closes. This room makes me sad and gloomy. Make it go away!

It's the BRIGHTEST, BLUEST LIVING ROOM EVER!!!!1 Actually, the more I look at it, the less I hate it. I'm starting to like it. Ssshhh, don't tell nobody. Damn mind-controlling color! It probably glows during the dreary days of winter, though. But boy, is it bright. It's like making every wall an accent wall. That said, I need to stop looking at it before I drive to Sherwin Williams with this photo and ask for 5 gallons.

Fresh from the grove is this orange kitchen featuring brown and white cabinetry. The orange itself isn't the worst color I've ever seen in a kitchen, and it's a nice change from the ubiquitous red kitchen, but those cabinets have got to go. The end effect is cheap, cheap, cheap. Even if this kitchen cost $80,000, it looks cheaply done. So there.

I don't usually show home exteriors because it's too "identifying", but this was too good to pass up. I figure that if you paint your house bright red, you want people to notice it so I'm going to help you out. This cedar house is ultra red, ultra trapezoidal and looks like a bunker in which to hide out from reality. You too can live in that house that everyone uses as a navigational aid: "if you pass the ugly red house that looks like half of it sunk under ground, you drove too far."

Glass Block Fashion Trap

Nothing says "20 years ago, someone said this was a good idea and now that person is no longer allowed in my house again" like an overabundance of 80's glass block in 2008.

  Welcome to the 80's, where the price of the home has been adjusted to 2008 numbers but the decor hasn't.

Now, for the glamorous bath, where the bather is entrapped in 80's luxury. What is that other building material, mahwbul? This here is where you take a soak after Jazzercise with a wine cooler in your hand.

Rest your Reeboks in front of the floor-to-ceiling 80's wall, contented in your decision to open a 2008 copy of the Yellow Pages and call a contractor. All this can be yours today, though it won't bring your feather-haired youth back. Damn!

Texture Maze

When designing an upper-bracket home (or evena lower-bracket home, for that matter), one should ensure the design flows seamlessly throughout the space.

A basement-y tiled ceiling bisected with plaster, a marble floor raised above and delineated from fields of subterranean carpet, and a sponge-painted wall all competing for attention in a 200 square foot space is NOT good design and probably pisses off feng shui, too. This corner of luxury isn't fooling anyone, which is why the owner should keep the liquor bottles out in order to provide the necessary "goggles" through which to view this opulence.

Wow House: Fab Closet

In a feeble attempt to reverse the neg karma being bandied about via this blog, every now and then I'll post examples of what I consider to be fab design.

Today's "wow" room is actually a closet...a closet that, at 25' x 16' is bigger than the living room of my first apartment and contains more shoes than a DSW:

I bow humbly in honor of anyone organized enough to keep this collection in check, and spendy enough to have enough shoes to warrant such an organization. Plus, there is an entire 4-foot section of nothing but black and brown shoes. A homeowner after my own cold, judgmental heart. Bravo!

Media Room Yee-Haw!

This multi-million-dollar suburban estate features a barfy pink media room with a cowboy statue in it. Never mind that pink and cowboys don't go together, at least not in my mind. This mauve hell reeks of 80's delight, but the house was built in 1999. Throwback throw-up, indeed.