There may be a reason buyers seldom purchase their house sight unseen.
Just look at the perfectly ordinary, modest even, brick house for sale in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US.
Head around the back, and things start to get a little bit interesting: double height windows, ivy-clad walls, a tiny hint of castle looking on to a nice suburban swimming pool. So far, pretty expected.
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Then the fun starts.
Head indoors and there’s a double height living room, a galaxy of stars and planets on the wall, a spiral staircase leading to a minstrel’s gallery either side of the living room. Hello, Tudor castle.
Now we’re heading into bonkers territory.
The dining room is set up not for your usual pot-luck gathering of friends, but for an intergalactic space station mission. There’s your Mars landing shots (Or is it the moon? Answers on a postcard please). There’s your high-ish tech control bridge, air-lock doors for safety (those suburbs can be dangerous), an awful lot of working analogue dials and thingamies, harvested from an Apache helicopter.
The real estate agent’s earnest advertising assures us this is a 25th Century starship, complete with a talking space alien to welcome you at the door, sorry, hatch. And that Mars can be a dusty place, so luckily there’s working laundry behind another hatch/door.
Dinner could get awfully tense.
But just when you were afraid to let your guard down, you can head into the island paradise in the second floor bedroom, complete with hot-tub and sand. Lots of sand. Another room is an homage to 1970s hippies, complete with a very 1970s water bed.
Oh, and there’s wisteria and the plainest, most ordinary kitchen and bathroom. Priorities elsewhere, obviously.
All this for US$159,900 (NZ $250,000).
And they say all property these days looks the same.
Take the tour: From brick and tile to out of this world
The pictures on US property listing site Zillow need to be seen to be believed:
Everything seems fine ...
Starting to get interesting ...
We've reached new levels of strange now
And to cap it all - a desert island
