Having been painstakingly renovated and restored in 2002, the 6,000-square-foot “Grande Dame” at 1450 Masonic Avenue sold for $4.95 million in 2005 and then again for $5.375 million in July of 2014.
Four months later, plans to remodel the home’s kitchen and three of its five and one-half bathrooms were approved, after which the Buena Vista Park mansion returned to the market mid-renovation listed for $4.5 million but never sold.
And while the renovation remains unfinished, a “great opportunity to customize [the] finishes” in Realtor speak, the property has just returned to the market listed for $4.2 million, but touting: “Only at this low price for a close by 12/31.”
A nice house if you like that kind of thing – “Queen Anne”, I guess would be the best summary of the disparate elements – but it has the problem common to so many SF properties: no yard…you can barely lean out a (side) window without scraping the neighbor’s siding.
The Building has major damage. The previous listing stated that potential buyers had to sign a release of responsibility before they could go in to see the inside. I heard they took out a load-bearing wall from the kitchen without bracing the second floor.
Ouch. Trying to make an open floorplan and fumbled it. Based on the previous listing’s the photos the interior was quite nice. Kitchen could have used a sprucing up, but all the original woodwork was still in the house (hopefully not torn out).
How could DBI have approved that? Don’t they need to get an engineer to sign off on structural changes like that? It is very unlikely that structural engineer would have missed that issue. Or maybe the project was abandoned before the structural reinforcement had been installed.
Having worked through the bottom to top remodel and structural retrofit of a Queen Anne… good luck. These buildings are lovely on the outside, a disaster on the inside, especially if you wish to maintain some sense of the original. Deep deep pockets required.
UPDATE: $5.4M Mansion with Issues Resells for $1.4M Less