Everything you’ve wished for, or your worst nightmare?
Owning a home, a garage, a bunch of land for hooning on, and more classic cars than you can count is all our common dream. Well, if you can get a mortgage for the $400,000 property listed on Zillow right now, that dream can be your reality. But like every dream, this one’s gonna take work to realize, because boy is this place an unpolished gem.
Currently for sale in Canaan, New Hampshire near the Vermont border, this property is aimed directly at all of us. “ARE YOU A CAR ENTHUSIAST?” opens the ad, which is for the grounds of a defunct classic car boneyard called Parts of the Past. The 18-acre site is littered with close to 300 classics in varying conditions, some of them seemingly in good shape. Others… You’d better be up to date on your tetanus shots.
From what few photos of the cars there are, it looks like the majority are pre-1970 and mainly if not all American makes. I spy some old Chryslers, a DeSoto, and a Nash Metropolitan, but most are too distant to be instantly recognizable. A pile of doors suggests many may have been picked for parts already, so there’s no telling how complete most of the cars are. Some may just be decaying shells, while others could be what auctioneers like to call “restoration opportunities.”
Going by the surprising bounty at the overgrown former AMC dealer in North Carolina, more of them may be in good shape than we think. But even taking inventory of the cars on the lot and their condition would be a months-long process if it’s not your full-time job. Whether you want to part them out to maximize your return on investment or liquidate it all, you’ve got a Sisyphean task ahead of you.
Even if you want to use the onsite garage to restore some, and enjoy the forested land for all it’s worth, you’re still gonna have to figure out what to do with the house. It’s a one-bedroom, three-bathroom home that’s sold as a “post and beam”-style affair. That may be overselling what looks like an incomplete major renovation, with exposed studs in almost every room and an almost totally unfinished bathroom. I’ve lived in a place like this, and it sucks even more than those Modern Farmhouse-style places your least interesting neighbor lives in.
Between the house and collection of unknown cars, it’s hard to say whether this place is really worth $400,000. Is it more than the sum of its parts, or does it even add up to that in the first place? That’s for people who get boots on the ground to decide. Me, I’d sooner take one running car and a livable house, but to each their own.
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