Dirnberger House Redux

It was an overcast Saturday morning. Water from thunderstorms earlier in the week still stood in puddles around the big brick house. The bogs were a testament to both the amount of rain that had fallen and the house's lack of adequate outside drainage.

To say the house's insides needed a little work, was an understatement. While the triple-brick-thick exterior walls looked as solid as the day they were laid a century before, the interior was in desperate need of more than just a paint job.

Some walls were down to their studs. Blue tape stretched across the sink in the kitchen warning everyone not to use it. Parts of the old heating system were still visible around the house although some radiators were long gone and the massive boiler was pushed into a corner in the basement. The new heating system was obviously incomplete with no runs extending to the two upper floors.

The house needed work. A lot of work.

It had devolved into more than your average fixer-upper and the small group of people gathered in the backyard vouched for its condition.

The minimum bid of $25,000 was not much for a house on more than a half-acre lot located in the center of Cape Girardeau. If it had been in better condition there would have been a lot more people. But it wasn't, so they weren't.

The auctioneer started.

It took a minute before someone actually bid which was rather odd since the auction bill clearly noted the minimum price the current owners would accept. It was almost as if the bidders in attendance were hoping the owners would have a sudden change of heart and take less. That wasn't going to happen. They were flipping the house and they wanted their money out of it.

Bidding was slow and drug on for 20 minutes. The starting bid of $25,000 crept upward. The middle-aged man who initially opened the bidding seemed to waver when it got around $27,500. A young couple with perhaps one of their fathers had the bid at that point, but then the middle-aged man decided to go up another hundred. They stayed out.

Another young man of Asian descent entered the bidding after speaking with someone on a cell-phone in presumably his native tongue. He and the older man pushed the bidding higher in increments of a hundred. The young man finally bowed out, leaving the older man as the winning bidder.

It was likely a disappointing auction for both the house flippers and the auctioneer. The minimum price was realized, but a hefty profit was not. But they were out from under an elephant that needed a lot of work. It was now someone else's problem.

The older man who bought the house was not new to the neighborhood. He'd lived there growing up. Who knows what motivated him to buy the house. Perhaps, it was sentimentality for days gone by when he originally lived there and the house was in its prime.

It's hard to say, and I didn't ask. I just shook his hand and welcomed him back to the neighborhood.

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For more on this house, read my earlier blog Ode to the Dirnberger House: 15 Years of Observations from Across the Street from February 12.