Was it the prevailing breeze, which comes from the southeast, that dictated the balcony placement in the 1982 garage apartment of a 1940 Garden Villas home (top) on nearly an acre of land bordering Sims Bayou? Instead of maximizing private views of the water and cleared watershed to its north (above), the higher-rise building (at far left in the top photo) peeks over the main home and toward the street, which is located west of Telephone Rd.Â
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Despite mentions of new appliances and updates, results of the 2013 kitchen remodeling didn’t make this week’s listing, at $229,900. In the dining room (or is it the breakfast room?) a half-height wall capped with countertop shares a service-prep bar with the adjacent kitchen:
A previous listing of the home, no longer accessible on HAR’s website, shows what the kitchen looked like before its redo (at right). The property’s earlier runs at the market included a 2011 listing for 8 months at $150,000, a brief November 2013 relisting at $225,000, and subsequent price reductions to $215,000 and $212,500 before a break in March 2014. Original hardwood flooring finishes out most of the home’s shared living spaces. The family room also packs in wooden paneling on opposing walls, beams on the ceiling, and access to the back yard near the garage:
All 4 bedrooms measure 10 ft. by 10 ft. This one faces the street:
A few rooms sport fluffy carpet — perhaps a part of the recent remodeling effort:
Here’s one of the 2 full bathrooms in the 2,356-sq.-ft. home:
The 2-car garage has a ground floor workshop as well as an apartment level, totaling 1,025 sq. ft.
The double-decker structure is the home’s closest neighbor:
The apartment’s shallow balcony turns the corner and snags a cross view of the yard:
The property measures 42,125 sq. ft., accommodating the home’s deep setback from the street.
To see the kitchen redo, check out the open house Saturday morning.
- 7345 Sims Dr. [HAR]
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I really like this house it is a great deal almost a acre lot well kept 3300sqft. The price alone screams come and do some more remodeling
We have kin who have owned there for years. I do enjoy driving around the neighborhood but don’t think I’d want to live there. I’m a little surprised however, that it still seems to be a “secret area”. I mean, such big lots and all.
I’ve checked this house out a couple of times. What the article failed to mention is that the house comes with an excellent view of incoming Southwest Airlines Jets, situated as it is right in the flight path.
Jason, a coworker who grew up in Garden Villas fondly recalls watching the planes fly overhead. It’s too bad that the awe of the jet age is long past us.
Flight path not withstanding; isn’t Sims Bayou infamous for flooding? I’d certainly check before considering this house.
I was in this house the other day. It is a lot of home and land for the money, and Sims and Haywood are the nicer streets of Garden Villas. Plane noise is definitely there in Garden Villas, but the people who live there all swear you get used to it. Your mileage may vary. I didn’t notice them coming in while I was there, but in some parts of Garden Villas, it is very noticeable. As for the flooding, they redid Sims bayou back in the 90’s, so flooding hasn’t been an issue much around there since. Not in Ike or Allison. The house appears to have the original hardwoods, and if a house has had water in it, you can usually tell from the hardwoods either being warped, or replaced. There are some mis-steps with this house, but over all it is pretty decent and the garage apartment is a huge 2 bedroom.
I’m not super familiar with that area. I know that if you go out west of there it gets pretty sketchy pretty fast. How bad is it there?
I went by for the open house. Jason is correct. There were some very loud jets making their presence known that day. At least three in the 20 minutes I was there. You could not be any more directly under the flight path than this house is. The rooms are not measured correctly in the listing. The bedrooms are all bigger than 10×10. One of them is about 17X13 actually with a huge closet. The bathroom is not in the master and the room closest to the bathroom to possibly be combined with the bathroom is not the larger of the bedrooms, but still a nice enough size. The garage apartment, as mentioned, is huge. It does not feel like an acre, because most of the land is in front of the house. The part to the back has a garage taking up a lot of the space, and then a pretty quick down slope towards the bayou.
Stuff across Mykawa gets bad fast, that area (Garden Villas) is alright though. There isn’t a lot of direct access to points west. There is an old article on the neighborhood Stephen Fox did for Cite magazine back in the 80’s http://offcite.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/03/GardenVillas_Fox_Cite20.pdf
Thanks for that PDF Robert. I grew up in Garden Villas in the 80’s, went to GV elementary and Mt Carmel. That was like a visit back in time.