Doug Cornelius .com

After years of planning, Mrs. Doug and I have decided that we are not real estate developers. That means we have scrapped our long-running plans to renovate our house. We moved out in anticipation of the renovation. Instead, we have put it on the market for sale.

If your looking for a grand, old house to renovate in the Greater Boston area. Take a look.  There is an open house on Sunday April 3 from Noon to 1:30.

Listing on Redfin: 321 Central Street, Auburndale.

You get a 30,000 square foot, wooded lot, with long rows of raspberry bushes and four big blueberry bushes. The house is over 2,700 square feet, built in the 1870s. There are beautiful striped hardwood floors in the hallways and dining room. Great hardwood in the library and family room. There are marble fireplaces and beautiful period detail.

What you don’t get are a good kitchen or good bathrooms. They are in desperate need of gut rehab. You’ll also need to re-shingle the roof and paint the outside.

It will be a great project if you have the stamina for a renovation.

The City of Newton delivered us shiny new barrels for trash recycling. Blue for trash and green for recyclables. The barrels are huge; bigger than our old enormous barrels.

The new barrels allow for automated trash pickup. No more shakers riding on the back of trash trucks. It also limits the trash each week to the size of the barrel. (It’s plenty big enough for us.)

Now I just need to figure out what to do with our old barrels.

The Boston Globe West has a story from the Newton History Museum at The Jackson Homestead focusing on the impact of the Charles River on Newton: Pages From Newton’s History.

The City of Newton is defined by the Charles. It has the river on its borders in the south, west, and north, and it was on the river’s banks that the city got its start — not as one unified town, but at first as a string of villages that grew up along the watercourse that provided abundant power for mills and manufacturing efforts. Improved transportation — first roads, then rail — gave those factories better access to markets. It also tied together the villages of Newton and brought the 18 square miles of farms and woods bounded by the Charles into a closer relationship with the metropolis at its doorstep, Boston.

. . .

The Charles today is slow and civilized, tamed by dams that have turned it into a series of elongated, picturesque lakes that make the river a marvelous resource for recreation and natural beauty. The original purpose of those dams was almost the opposite. They made the Charles a very hard-working river.