241 Valley Rd
241 Valley Road, asking $895,000, reports a contingent contract. This is a 1924 shack on 0.08 of an acre overlooking, but far uphill from, the Mianus River. But a beautiful view, and no neighbors to the east, at least. I’m sure you can do something interesting here. To keep score, this sold in basically the same condition in 2000 for $515,000.
44 Hunting Ridge
44 Hunting Ridge Road has taken another price cut and now asks $5.495 million, which is better than the $7.925 it wanted back when it was first built in 2006.
414 Stanwich
And back again, 414 Stanwich is now priced at $1.525. It sold for $2.1 million in 2003, so the owners can (almost) be excused for first pricing this at $2.695 in 2006, but buyers weren’t buying it. A number of rentals, a handful of brokers, and many price cuts and years later, it’s down to this level. I like this house; it’s always been the price that put me off. Perhaps this will do it, but if I were advising my own clients here, I’d suggest that they negotiate, hard.
For What It's Worth 
Okay, slow real estate day so let’s talk about iPhone’s new iOS7. I upgraded yesterday. Pros and cons. Least like the white keypad. Sucks up a lot more battery. Do like new icons, like Contacts and photos. Anyone else?
Slowish day for me, too. I’m a BlackBerry girl, though, so can’t help you there. Good luck with the ad hoc focus group. 🙂
I’ve read that the iOS7 sucks up a lot of gigs. Your experience?
@Cobra: I didn’t check before and after upgrading but as of today I’m using 5.3GB, leaving me still a whopping 22.6GB available. Believe it or not Mail takes up 1.2GB. Mail! Go figure. I do have five accounts that do push notification every half hour. I have close to 30 apps I use daily, hundreds of photos, use it for Twitter and text messages, and now with AirDrop can zing an attachment to anyone in my contact list. Just today though, 8 apps had updates, improving to meet the ios7 standards, I guess.
@housecat. I was a tgried and true Blackberry person myself until about two years ago. Same thinking about the real keyboard. Now I’m not sure I could go back. Mr. EOS turns his screen sideways and types with two index fingers so I often get very strange texts. I keep my screen vertical. The kids all type with their thumbs. Not a skill I could ever imagine mastering.
I phones don’t like my thumbs. I press A and it prints D. Blackberry here.
sorry EOS and why are you redux?
What are the odds that, two of you are Blackberry peeps? Especially on a day that RIM announced major corporate layoffs. I speed type with one finger. Thumbs were a problem for me too.
Redux because my first blog was simply Earth Ocean Sky. That went dark when I had a little security scare that turned out to be harmless but was enough for me to delete version one. Hence, Redux. Now I’m EOSDone 🙂
Ugh (about the layoffs). Toonces and I have the same issue with the iPhone. I also hated the fact that my ear would constantly either disconnect or “mute” the other person on the phone. I have a touchscreen now, but I am still a hardcore key board user when it comes to typing anything. I keep hoping BB will get its bloody act together – apparently it will ultimately be in vain…
[sorry – that should have read “typing anything on the phone.”]
GT’s got eighty pages worth of slow today!
Blackberry is following the “palm pilot” model.. and remember when people carried beepers?.. I do not know of too many other successful Canadian technology companies.. but, BB is New Lebanon and iPhone is old greenwich… that is terms the readers here can understand.. please do not redistrict the phones..
also, Obama is a big supporter and user of the blackberry.. When they went to offer him the different phone choices upon his presidency they said, Mr. President you can have an iphone, galaxy, blackberry.. He said, STOP!, you had me at black.. and my name is really Barry.. this thing was made for me..
SLTM: Obama is a big supporter and user of the blackberry
That’s it – I am going to try the Iphone again. Maybe I”ll try typing with just my pinky ala EOS
Right index finger. Although I like your idea of the pinky, it would stifle my tea drinking affectation!
Hope everyone enjoyed these last two days of summer weather we’ve had. It’s been spectacular. Make that beyond spectacular.
Index finger, pinky in the air. I am trying it as soon as my teen gets home.
Agree – absolutely beautiful weather!
My issue with Apple products is their functionality. I’m one of those crazies that thinks form should always follow it. (Granted, BB probably won’t be functioning much longer, either. But, even then I don’t anticipate another iPhone purchase, OG cachet or no.)
Ha – my iPad actually crashed (AGAIN) after I posted that.
I’ve had absolutely great results with the brand since 1988 when, having left a firm to strike out on my own, I paid $2,500 (in 1988 $, naturally) for a Mac SE: 40 mg memory, one floppy disc. I took it to my new office, got it out of its box and within 30 minuets had it all set up and I was happily writing away. I’ve never looked back.
I was always willing to pay the Apple premium because I’m a complete technological idiot and didn’t have to learn anything to use a Mac (my Wall Street friends would give me endless s*** on weekends for my choice, as they sat in front of cheesy IBM units, typing “back/slash gibberihgibberish – see? It’s easy!”). Over the years, as Microsoft machines became more and more like Macs, I had the last laugh.
I have an iPhone 3 – early adopter I am not, but will probably upgrade to the new one in a couple of weeks, once the furor dies down. I could switch to an Android or something, I suppose, but after 25 years with Apple, I’m comfortable with the seamless system they’ve assembled. I do not have an iPad – an Apple salesman talked me out of one a couple of years ago after i told him I intended to use it mainly for portable blogging. The iPod, he explained, is a better input machine than it is an output. I have no idea whether he was right, but I was tremendously impressed that a salesman would talk me out of buying anything, so I took his advice.
I do have a couple of AirBooks, which I love. Not as handy as an iPad, I imagine, but very light, very fast and, like everything else I’ve owned from Apple, easy to use.
All of which is to say I’m entirely satisfied with all things Apple. But I have gained no more sophistication in computer use than I had on that early afternoon in November, 1988, so all I’ve ever wanted is ease of use for simple tasks. I have no idea whether the things work for complicated mathematical calculations, or whatever it is that keeps the nerds so busy at Starbucks, but thankfully, I don’t need to worry about that.
A little help from the readers – my husband and I are about to redo our master bath. Complete gut job, and my question is – tub or no tub? Neither my husband or I take baths, ever. So I feel it is a waste of space but our builder recommends it for resale value. We suspect we will be in our house for at least another 5 years. We do have a bathtub in another bathroom in the house.
What is your objection to a tub and a separate shower? Is it space? Is it money? If it is space then a tub/shower I would think would increase value. If your concern is $ then I would think you get it back when you sell. Pick neutral sell friendly middle of the road quality stuff and you should be fine .. Then again, hard to answer the question without knowing more about the bathroom and house.
If you have room, I’d go for a tub – I’ve noticed that, just like backyards were until five years ago or so, their presence is required to maintain the illusion. In the case of backyards, the father used to envision throwing a ball around with his son, despite my pointing out to him that his kids were either going to be inside playing video games or, if they had any interest in sports at all, at some kind of organized game. That dream seems to have gone belly up, but the image of luxuriating in a warm bath continues, even in the face of the reality that no parent has 30 minutes to indulge in such luxury anymore.
So keep the dream – a friend of mine, a builder of high end homes, recently agreed with my observation that almost no one cares about a whirlpool bath these days because they’ve been around long enough for most people to have owned one and discovered they never used it. So why not install a free standing,good looking claw tub, and free up the space otherwise devoted to the whirlpool’s machinery? “Same reason I use Sub-Zeros”, he said. “Buyers still expect them.”
If you do forego the bath (which I might do), make sure there’s at least one tub on the same floor as the master bedroom because somewhere down the line, a buyer with small children or infants will appear, and they won’t want to schlep the filthy little beasts up and down a couple of floors to bathe them.
One final note: for a thousand bucks or so, you can convert that shower into a steam one. If there’s space, I’d go for it. Not a deal breaker if not present, but popular, and another reason to like a house, which you can add for a modest amount of money.
None of this is from God, of course, just generalizations from observing buyers’ reactions over the years.
Thanks so much for the responses, Chris and ToolMan. It was not a $$ issue, more of an esthetics and use issue. If we go for a tub, I definitely want the separate tub and shower. Our kids’ bathroom is on the same floor as the master and their rooms and has a tub, so we do have that covered. I have been looking on houzz.com and have seen lots of claw tubs as Chris suggested which may not take up too much space.
Buyer here (infamous). I take a bath almost every night. Chris is right: I’d consider a house with no tub in master as long as there is a tub somewhere on that floor. But it is a definite negative. Check out the tub in the pictures for 20 West end. Coolest tub I’ve seen. Similar to a claw type free standing tub but much more modern.
CF: totally agree with you on the Apple store’s customer service. They are terrific at that. It looks like Toonces and I will have to succumb to Apple’s hegemony soon, in any case. Gotta’ run – need to fill up the Yugo and make a run to the video store!