PEABODY, MA — A blighted Peabody home riddled with mold, hoarded old furniture and appliances and rotting food, which the city attempted to take into receivership two years ago, is now fixed up and on the market following a more than $300,000 renovation.
Angela Hirtle and her partner, Harry Ogden, purchased the home at 12 Samoset Road that fell into deep disrepair following the death of its owners last summer and spent the last seven months gutting the house to its core and refurbishing it. Now the home that was once an eyesore and danger to the neighborhood is on the market with Hirtle saying she hopes it will soon house a new family in the city.
“It’s so gorgeous now,” Hirtle told Patch. “The lot is beautiful. It definitely makes the neighborhood better. It used to be party central for kids breaking into it.”
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Hirtle said that of all the properties that they have renovated and flipped “this was the worst one” when they bought it from the estate of the couple that once owned it last July.
“You could not walk in there,” she said. “You could not see daylight. They were hoarders and there were 17 couches, 16 washers, dirty dishes stacked everywhere. There was a hole in the roof so for years it was raining, snowing in the house, on all the stuff.”
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She said they filled up 13 dumpsters just trying to clean the house out and “as we were pulling up the rug the floor was coming up with it.” The basement was so caked in mold, she said, that you could not enter it without respirator masks.
She said the foundation, once they were able to inspect it after the mold was removed, was actually “immaculate” — “It was almost like all the stuff in there insulated it,” she said — but that everything else was “taken down to the studs.”
“It wasn’t a case where we went in there and replaced the lights,” she said. “Every wire, every pipe, is new.”
Hirtle said all work was done with local companies with Leccese Contract & Design as the contractor, Joe Falzarano Jr. Plumbing & Heating doing the pipe replacements and Hirtle acting as the designer and realtor.
The result of the renovation Hirtle said cost $330,000 is a four-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,900 square-foot house on the market for $829,000.
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“The goal for me and my husband every time is to see a family go in there,” said Hirtle, who lives in the neighborhood. “We don’t go in there and slap lipstick on a pig. We want it to be a place where a family can love living there.
“That makes it fun for me too. I have children ages 13 down to 2 and if someone moves in there with children then maybe that could be a friend for us too.”
(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)
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