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Our house |
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 Our house on Otis Hill in Hingham, |
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&comment=We moved there in 2016 "House location on Talbot Road") 2nd-to-last house on dead-end street |
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We bought this house for $789,000 (when it was just a rental property), remodeled it for $650,000, and now it is appraised at $1.4 million (see Before and After). We have owned 3 houses in suburbs on the South Shore. Our house is a 3-bedroom, 3½-bathroom, 2-story, 3200 sq. ft. Gambrel Cape (a cape house with a Grambrel roof) with 2 garages (we added one) and a fully-developed, walk-out basement. We bought this house because it was smaller than the 3-story, 10-room house where we raised our 2 sons (who are grown and gone) and there are only 2 of us now. The house has views of the Boston skyline, Hingham Harbor, Boston Light (the first lighthouse in the U.S., which flashes every 10 seconds), Swampscott and Marblehead (and the Swampscott watertower) on the North Shore, and a bit of Atlantic Ocean. To get to our street go up the hill across from Hingham Lobster Pound on Route 3A. Hingham has excellent suburban mass-transit commutes to Boston by commuter rail and commuter boat, which I took for 35 years to my jobs in Boston. It is difficult to express on this webpage the joy I have every day living in this house. I am retired now and I know we were lucky to buy our first house in the 70s when prices were low (our monthly mortgage was less than I paid for rent in my last apartment in Boston, less than $200/month). We have owned several houses since, and with rising prices we had equity and could move up to better houses. We had been "empty-nesters" since 2007 when our youngest son graduated from high school and left for college, and we finally decided to downsize from our large, 3-story, 10-room, Victorian and bought this house. Patti and I live in Hingham, a Boston suburb on the South Shore, in a house on Otis Hill that we purchased in May, 2015, and remodeled for a year before moving to in June, 2016. We've owned 3 houses (our first house was a Cape in Weymouth we had from 1977-1982 that we lost in a fire) and after living for 34 years in our second house, a 3-story, 10-room, shingle-style Victorian house in charming Hingham Square where our boys were raised—after they had gone off to college and there were only 2 of us (we were empty-nesters for 8 years) we decided to downsize and we bought this house just a few blocks from the coastline overlooking the harbor near the end of a dead-end street. We worked closely with an architect, Roger Hoit, and a builder Construction Technology Group (CTG) (lead by Kevin Goslin) who designed and constructed several other houses in the neighborhood so we were able to observe their other achievements in addition to seeing the progress on our remodeling as it occurred. After all the remodeling we basically created a new house. This is not the house the boys grew up in but we have 2 spare bedrooms that the boys stay in when they visit. It was not in my mind when we picked this house (perhaps it was in Patti's) but though we live near the harbor we are on Otis Hill and it is one of the highest places in Hingham (see views) so we have some protection against rising sea-levels from climate change. The lot is only 1/3 acre, but with an underground sprinkler system and 2 driveways it seems larger. Remodeling . . .
I love this house so much because the remodeling was designed by an architect and built to our specifications. The original purchased house was built in 1950 but it has been rebuilt with all new construction and it is now basically a "new" house (the town records say the house was built in 2015 when we rebuilt it). Since our house is new it will be years before we need to be concerned about fixing or replacing things. We installed a generator (so we're never without power) and AC condensers behind the garage. The house is a Gambrel Cape (a Gambrel-roofed Cape Code style), with the master bedroom/bathroom in an addition we put on, which also has the kitchen, living room, and laundry on the main floor, 2 bedrooms and bath on the 2nd floor, and a fully finished basement which includes a TV room, my office, a full bathroom, and a refrigerator for beer and wine (you could call this my "man-cave").
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When we remodeled this house we added an addition putting the master bedroom on the main floor to minimize stair-climbing, and you could say this is our "retirement" house that will probably be the last house we own. We have
increased the size of the house we bought from 1200 sq ft to 3200 sq ft (by adding the addition, increasing the size of the living room, and making the
basement larger and livable space), and it went from a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom house to a 3-bedroom, 3½-bathroom house with a finished basement. We had more room
and extra space in our previous house so we put some of the unused furniture in half of the new garage.
Some of the layout of
the original house is the same, for instance it had a kitchen open to the living room and had 2 stairways, one going up to 2 bedrooms and a bathroom on the 2nd floor, and one going down to the basement which had a laundry
room and bathroom. We kept the open floor plan of the main floor with the kitchen and living room and we expanded out 15 feet in back and everything is rebuilt, so it is basically a new house. We added a master bedroom and
bathroom and a half-bath to the main floor. After remodeling, the back of the main floor is all glass with windows and doors looking
out onto a large deck (which has glass panels instead of balustrades so the view is un-obstructed) that wraps around to the bedroom. The addition has a bedroom and 2 bathrooms on the main floor and a garage below. The house is central air-conditioned, and the heating system is also high-velocity, so the AC and heat are distributed
throughout the house in the same small ducts. The Internet hookup is wired in a couple of locations and we have WiFi throughout the house (which we use on laptops and cellphones). We added a double-garage to the new house so
now we have 2 garages, and the new double-garage is half-full of all the furniture from the last house with no place to put it in the new house. (We hope to give these to one of our kids some day when they have a house.) The finished house is shingled with an addition and 2 attached garages, so it doesn't look anything like the
little brick house we bought (the bricks were facade, not
structural).
The walkout basement is my "man-cave", where I have my big-screen TV that I watch a lot, my refrigerator with beer and wine (when we bought the house the kitchen had a refrigerator which we put it in the basement), a bathroom, and my office that has my computer and Internet access. I spend a lot of my free time down here. The dogs love it and are always with me, and in the summer I keep the back door open to the fenced-in yard so they can go outside easily. Patti watches the TV in the living room and I watch the one in the basement and we have our own viewing tastes. Several reasons I like this house better than other houses:
We live on Otis Hill and I walk the dogs twice a day in our neighborhood (I'm retired).
In 1982 we bought our first Hingham house, a large, 3-story, shingle-style Victorian house in Hingham Square where we raised 2 sons, but after our sons had grown up and departed—Alex to Brooklyn, NY, and Ben to San Francisco, after both graduated from college and made world travels (see 2014 on Family news), we decided to downsize and we have relocated to our current, relatively smaller house (we went from a 3-story, 5 bedroom house to a 2-story, 3 bedroom house). The new house is located about 1½ miles from our previous house, so our long-time neighborhood friends will still be in our lives. We sold our previous, 5-bedroom, house to a young couple with 2 pre-school kids. It was a great house to raise our kids in. (As I write this in 2013 we have never been back.) Please note: Sometimes on pages and photos I use the labels "Talbot" and "Lafayette." Those are just the street names of our new house and previous house that I use to distinquish the houses. Before and After photos
Interior photos after remodeling
The house is completely rebuilt and everything is brand new, so it is basically a new house.
Main floor changes:
Second floor changes:
Basement changes:
Both garage doors are automatically opened with remote controls, and the mudroom door has a keypad lock. – Modern living: house is keyless, and we have 2 keyless cars, so we don't stick keys into locks or ignitions anymore Both front and back lawns have underground sprinkler systems. There is an outdoor storage room in the back for lawn furniture, etc. The house has central air-conditioning. We installed a generator outside to handle electrical outages, and this really came in handy in winter 2018, when the neighborhood lost power. All untility lines (electrical, Internet, TV, etc.) are underground.so no hanging wires coming to house. As a homeowner, besides a workbench and a toolbox full of handtools, I've acquired several things over the years that I think every home should have:
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 "Otis Hill")
![basement](picture.html?image=pics/walk_out_basement.jpg&topcap=Walk out basement (my <i>"man-cave"</i>)){kind=link}
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,<br>Hingham Square (our previous location)</span>){kind=link}
![TV cabinet](picture.html?image=pics/tv_cabinet.jpg&topcap=TV cabinet with 65" Samsung TV and Sonos sound system&comment=Knobs have been added to doors){kind=link}
