We were fortunate that we had somewhere to store all of our excess stuff before putting our house on the market because I knew our house would be shown on several MLS sites. I even thinned out our wardrobe to make the closets look roomier and thoroughly cleaned every inch of the house. I've looked at properties all over the US on the same sights and not only are people not cleaning their homes, but there's often too much furniture, knick-knacks and pictures of family on the walls. Even if the house is huge and the rooms spacious you can't tell because of all the stuff they have crammed in them. In many of the homes, they allowed their house to be photographed with unmade beds and dirty clothes and toys strewn everywhere. The also don't bother to make little repairs to a hole in the wall or loose trim and paint over the garish colors that their children's bedrooms are painted. These are the exact same people that will complain when their house doesn't sell or they get a low-ball offer. I realize not everyone lives in a perfect house or has the money to fix everything but at least clean up and declutter! Fill your garage or outbuildings with boxes of your stuff if you have to but if you want to sell your house, at the very least clean up!

I've still been wondering about this and decided to search for the terms and read them carefully. You can find the Member Agreement without going through the membership process. Here are a couple of things I found that will keep me from joining. "Nextdoor may offer similar accounts to businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. These accounts do not have access to neighborhood discussions or to messages between neighbor members. You can make choices about receiving messages from organizations at (link omitted). Nextdoor provides organizational members with some aggregated statistics about neighborhood activity and size." AKA unwanted advertising. "Preferences. By default, we subscribe you to messages both for your neighborhood and nearby neighborhoods. You can customize your neighborhood subscriptions at (link omitted)." What I don't like about this is that other neighborhoods will be subscribed to MY neighborhood, and after seeing the huge area assigned to my neighborhood, I can only imagine the number of people then subscribed. Might as well just put the whole town in and be done with it. "Content. You retain all ownership rights to the text, photos, video and other content you submit to Nextdoor (collectively, your “Content”). You give us permission, in the form of a nonexclusive worldwide license, to use, copy, and publish your Content as described in our privacy policy." So I own the rights to my photos but nextdoor.com can do anything they want with those photos, including publishing them as their own. No thanks. From the included Privacy Policy: "Verification as a Resident Of Your Neighborhood. Nextdoor requires members to verify their status as real-world residential neighbors.....by...(1) having a neighbor who already has a verified account....confirm your address, (2) (2) submitting your name and street address (and email address....and then providing us (or a third-party service provider directly) with additional authenticating information....such as a unique code....(or)....we may allow you to use a credit card number or the last four digits of your social security number. .... To help with verification, we may share or confirm your verification information with our service providers. ... We may retain your verification-related information for a reasonable period of time (further down it says 'as long as necessary') even if you do not complete all verification steps." "Facebook Connect. If you register for Nextdoor using your Facebook account, we automatically request your email address and publicly available information, including your account ID, name and gender as well as public information about your Facebook friends. If you revisit Nextdoor while logged into Facebook, we’ll automatically log you into your Nextdoor account. If you don’t register for Nextdoor using Facebook but later attempt to log into Nextdoor using your Facebook credentials, we’ll connect your Facebook and Nextdoor accounts and request the information from Facebook as if you were newly registering. ... If you register or log in via Facebook, we may give you the option to invite your Facebook friends to Nextdoor. Those friends will see some information about you along with your invitation." Great. So every friend, even those I really don't know, on my Facebook page will see my neighborhood if not my exact address. There is a lot about collecting information and sharing it with 3rd parties, their expanding corporate family, and even google. This maybe the scariest part of their privacy policy: "Export of Data (Non-U.S. Residents). By using the Services, you authorize Nextdoor to use your information in the United States and other countries where Nextdoor operates. Please be aware that the privacy protections and the rights of authorities to access your personal information in some of these countries may not be equivalent to those in your country."

"Never buy the best house in the neighborhood" is a meaningless statement if you don't know the price of the house, how it compares to its neighborhood, and how much the house would be in a better neighborhood. People who bought the 'best house' in gentrifying areas made tons of money - much more than if they had spent the same in a better neighborhood, or opted for a normal house in that area. The attraction of buying the best house is that one assumes you are getting it at a meaningful discount to the same house in a better neighborhood. If the neighborhood improves, you'll do very well. If the neighborhood stagnates, you've enjoyed a bigger/nicer home. Only if the neighborhood declines do you get hit. And presumably no one is buying with the intention of living there a long time in a place they think will decline. Long way of saying, there are very good, sound reasons for buying the best house, but it all comes down to the price. And for this particular property, rather than hazarding a guess as to the cost of improvements/code violations, I'd have a professional GC walk through it with you so you have a reasonable range of the costs involved.

oberon476, thank you for this. Makes a lot of sense, and echos things I read (but forgot) in the "Get Your House Right" book and articles by Steve Mouzon. Earlier tonight I took several of the photos into photoshop to try and get a rough idea of scale, and the photoshop measure I got was .60 for width and 1.0 for the height of the pane. Seems like checking my current window options against the golden rule is a good next step. Mark, that would be a dream! Seriously, if I ever built a home in the budget his firm works with, he would be on my call list. I have two of his books that are dog-eared with post-it notes throughout. A few of my earliest and clearest childhood memories are visiting a Frank Lloyd Wright home (Dana Thomas) and visiting Colonial Williamsburg, and both places seared such an impression. I heard him once mention both as influences and immediately realized how/why his work resonates so with me. I love the look of anything old, with classical proportions, and he somehow makes that happen in new construction. My weakness is that my brain can see when proportions aren't quite right, but I have no gift to make them ideal on my own or by sight. So thanks for all the feedback!