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Sunday, March 01, 2009

You Can't Judge a Shed by Its Looks

A while ago we got rid of our tetanus hazard, crumbling, falling apart shed. It was from 1946 and metal. It also had several broken windows. In fact I wrote a post about it where I said that I wished I had had a picture of it to post, but then again why would I have had a picture of this awful shed in the first place? In fact, this shed was so awful that we didn't know we owned it when we bought the house. Apparently the previous owners didn't know they owned it either or maybe they were just in denial so that they had a defense against the lawsuits that would follow if some neightborhood kid got lockjaw from entering the shed on a dare.

We are still not sure what we are doing about moving, but with many houses around here selling for close to their assessed value, our realtor suggested that we have our house reassessed. Why? Well for some reason we were listed as a two bedroom house instead of a four bedroom house, and the assessed value is on the MLS listing. I would have love to have been a fly on the wall of the assessor's office when my husband called and said basically we weren't paying enough taxes! Or so I thought. Turns out later that actually the assessor's office has had quite a few phone calls from people looking to move and maximaze their profit in a lousy market.

The assessor came out and explained to us that in recent years our town changed the formula it uses to asess houses. Basically they used to set value by number of bedrooms but ended up with small, 4 bedroom capes being valued higher than far larger colonials with 3 bedrooms. Now they assess value based on footprint. Apparently one of the kids shows just described this the other week. The footprint is what you would get if you were to take a piece of chalk and trace around your house. Basically a body outline of your house. The larger the footprint, the higher the assessment. Thus it made no difference that we have 4 bedrooms. In fact, the assessor kept on complementing us on the size of our bedrooms, the quality of the solid wood doors in the upstairs bedrooms (which I had mistakenly criticized at playgroup last week), and the solidity of our plaster walls. After all that, he told us it made no difference that our kitchen had been updated or even that there were summers where we had not mowed our lawn...frequently. It's all about the footprint.

But our assessment did change. Guess what lowered our assessment? Yeah, removal of that rusty falling down old shed! Since it's an outside buidling, it was an extension of the footprint. Our assessment did increase slightly because we put in a deck, so bascially the whole thing was a wash. No increased tax revenue from our household despite my argument that the shed was a major eyesore and I did the town a favor by getting rid of it. Otherwise, the shed might have tarnished the town's good name.

A. Elliot's Lessone Learned: In some towns, looks and quality are unimportant and only size matters.

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Name:Alex Elliot
Home:MA, United States
About Me:Professional Mom of two cats, a dog, an ant farm, and oh yeah...two boys: a 6 year old and a 3 year old. Also found in my house is my husband who is known on this blog as The Big Giraffe.
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For those of us who didn't get an instruction manual with our babies and for whom parenting hasn't always gone as planned. On a more serious note this blog is about supporting a woman's ability to make her own choices about parenting including the choice, for whatever reason, to bottle feed her babies formula.

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