148 Indigo Hill Rd, Somersworth, NH 03878

This house is a small but cute cape built as part of a development of similar homes in the early 1950s as inexpensive housing for mill workers. I have owned and rented out the house for 20 years. The neighborhood is decent and quiet. This is a very basic house which will serve well as a starter home for buyers looking for an in-town dwelling with good access to employment opportunities. The lot is small but the back yard is reasonable in size and very private. All major appliances are included, except for a clothes washer. Construction is 2x4 framing and fiberglass insulation, with (I believe) 1/2" foam insulation under vinyl siding. The ground floor has a mudroom with entry to the kitchen. The kitchen is open to the living room and a hall with 2 bedrooms, a door to the cellar stairs, and the (only) bathroom. A stairway from the livingroom ascends to the 2nd floor, which has 2 bedrooms, each with a dormer and low, slanted ceilings. All the rooms in this house are small but pleasant, it is, after all, an 1100 sf, 4 bedroom house! The livingroom and 4 bedrooms are all newly recarpeted. The kitchen and bathroom have ceramic tiled floors. All rooms have been repainted and the walls are mostly in excellent condition. The kitchen is small but functional. I have not replaced the counters, but they are in good if not excellent condition. The bathroom has a 5' iron/porcelain tub/shower with a glass enclosure, totally functional and pleasant, but the tub would profit from a refinishing. The cellar is a single large space with a new concrete floor and a perimeter drain system. The floor is always dry, but the cellar is humid, typical for this type of construction. Except for the mudroom, all windows are vinyl, double pane. The foundation is block and is in good shape with no bends or bows. The roof is asphalt shingles, in excellent condition. The heating system is hydronic, with a 100,000 BTU oil-burning boiler with an integral coil for domestic hot water. The boiler is high quality but about 30 years old. It is extremely reliable and will outlast you or I. The house heats very quickly in part due to most of the radiators being the original cast iron type. The kitchen radiator was replaced with a very nice flat-panel Euro style unit, and one of the upstairs bedrooms has a single baseboard radiator. This heating system works very well and will last as long as you want to keep it. Note that this house is ideal for a rooftop solar-electric system. The front of the house points due south, and the roof angle is steep, which is just what is needed. Grid-intertie solar-electric systems are very inexpensive at this time, with federal and state support in many instances. Such a system would generate all the power you need to run this house, and that power could also be tapped to run a modern heating/cooling heat-pump (mini-split) system. This is an option that you should explore with a full-service solar contractor before upgrading the heating system with a conventional boiler. More efficient and cheaper in the long run. The yard has nice plantings and trees, all of which are in need of TLC. You can see in the photos that the rhododendrons around the front door are immense. There is a large apple tree in the front which produces lots of apples, but needs pruning, thinning and spraying for the apples to be good. The blossoms are spectacular in the spring. The rear boundary is a 15' deep forsythia hedge. There are peonies around the apple tree, and agaves around the other large tree in the front yard. The backyard has a fairly large concrete pad which was originally a basketball practice court, my tenants used it for motorcycle storage.