The DC Rowhouse Nobody Else Wanted

The listing photos were bad enough that I almost scrolled past it, which in hindsight is probably why it was still on the market after six weeks in a neighborhood where nothing sits that long. A hundred-year-old rowhouse with a sagging porch, a kitchen last touched sometime during the first Bush administration, and a basement that smelled like it had feelings about the last heavy rain.

Everyone who walked it before me saw a teardown, or at least a project that needed a contractor with a much bigger appetite for risk than most buyers have. I saw a floor plan that had not been chopped up by a 1980s renovation, original moldings that were somehow still intact under decades of paint, and a price that had dropped twice because two other buyers had walked after inspection. Northern Virginia had taught me patience with slow markets. DC taught me that patience is worth actual money when everyone else has already given up.

The historic district review process was its own education. DC does not let you touch the front facade without a hearing, a set of drawings, and more patience than the Richmond permitting office ever demanded. I sat through a review board meeting to get approval for a porch repair that anywhere else would have taken a phone call. But the same rules that slow everything down are the reason the block still looks like it did in 1920, and that consistency is exactly what makes these houses worth the trouble.

I closed on it financed the same way I financed the Richmond house: conservatively, with a contingency budget I assumed I would need in full and mostly did. The inspection report ran eleven pages. None of it scared me off, because by then I had read enough inspection reports to know which line items are theater and which ones are load-bearing, literally and otherwise.