It’s Back – June’s Tucson Featured Palmer & Krisel Flipped & For Sale – Tucson, AZ

Built in 1959, this Palmer & Krisel-designed home in Tucson, AZ was first featured on the blog at the end of June as a distressed property with an asking price of $80,000. Selling and closing for $96,000 at the end of September, the property is now back on the market with an asking price of $189,000. With three bedrooms and two bathrooms, this 1,416 square-foot home sits on an 8,000 square-foot lot with a two-car carport.

With a new yellow paintjob, white gravel driveway and new red-gravel front yard, this home also boasts new white-framed windows, a Victorian style front door, and a new roof. Inside, the home has been thoroughly updated and renovated, with no effort put into salvaging any original detailing or features.

Entry has a new door that is the antithesis of midcentury modern

Living room at least still features its floor-to-ceiling windows

Now that the master bedroom door has been moved to the living room wall, furniture placement options in the room are extremely limited - there's no good place for a couch or television

The good news is that the living room retains its floor-to-ceiling glass windows, allowing the indoors to blend with the out, and the clerestories at the end of the home have remained in place without alteration. The placement of the master bedroom access has moved from the entry hall to the living room and is now in the form of double doors, which severely limits and restricts furniture placement and television placement within the living room.

The entry between the living room and kitchen has been closed off, creating an odd pass through and cul-de-sac in the kitchen

Kitchen cabintets were extended into the family room, cutting out a sliding glass door

Kitchen is slightly overscaled and traditional, losing it's former efficiency

The original kitchen was removed and replaced with traditional dark cabinetry, granite counters and stainless steel appliances. The access doorway between the kitchen and the living room has been closed off, interrupting the traffic flow. The kitchen is now a cul-de-sac that has a strange permanent opening into the living room, and has been extended into the rear family room. The large sliding door is now gone, replaced with a single swinging door which cuts down on the amount of light entering the space.

Master bathroom is visually larger but doesn't provide much net benefit

Classy floor tiles have been used in the master bathroom shower, while glass block has randomly been added

Master bedroom as viewed from living room. Note that the master bath has no door now, a strange feature to be seen from the living room

The master bathroom and closet/dressing area have been merged into a large space, and the bathroom access to the entry hall has been removed. This now leaves the entry hall as a dark and doorless narrow corridor. The master bath reads more generic, but admittedly is larger in size. There’s a large, open shower tiled in generic floor tiles, no door and a single-sink. The room actually visually appears larger, but wastes more space in lost floor plan efficiency.

Guest room

Guest room

Guest bath has been reconfigured - note placement of plumbing fixtures is so strange that the walls couldn't even accommodate a toilet-paper holder

Guest baht sink is actually smaller and tighter than what was originally in place, cutting down counter space by two-thirds. The net gain in space was a negative in this situation

Now that access to the master bath has been cut off to the entryway, the former jack-and-jill bathroom between the two guest rooms needed to be reconfigured to allow access without going through a bedroom. The bathroom now faces the kitchen through removal of the laundry area, and has been reconfigured with a long, narrow configuration and a strange placement of the water closet on one wall and the sink on an opposite one. Again the net increase in space here was zero, and the reconfiguration now creates more wasted space.

Back of home as viewed from backyard

No landscape was provided in the backyard; fence is new at least

The backyard has a new fence, and has been scraped clear of pretty much everything. Its Flipper 101 back there – the mantra is that flippers believe that a buyer has determined whether or not they’ll buy a house before they enter the backyard, therefore there is no need to landscape it. In a Palmer & Krisel, the interiors are so closely tied with the exteriors that ignoring the backyard is a tough sell.

The home is definitely move-in ready. The tweaks to the floorplan didn’t help the home much and created just as many problems, if not more, than they mistakenly thought that they would solve. It’s the only Palmer & Krisel for sale in Tucson right now, so if it’s a must have, we wish the buyers well and can’t wait to see what they do to the space.

Check out the full listing on Redfin.com here: 316 W Wheatridge Drive

Or Zillow.com here: 316 W Wheatridge Drive