“What Were They Thinking?” Department

What’s worse than a home with a wall of built-in’s designed to accommodate a too-small (35″ or less) TV?

When the built-in’s are also recessed two feet (!), because TV’s of that era still had picture tubes, which had a huge footprint.

And the wall of built-in’s is in a room with a vaulted ceiling, so it extends 14′ floor-to-ceiling, instead of just 8′ or so.

And the wall of built-in’s isn’t just in one home, but in 1,000 (!) that were all built in the early ’90’s!

Functional Obsolescence

The foregoing pretty much describes Stonegate, a 1,000 unit development in Scottsdale built in the early ’90’s.

While the complex has much to recommend it — great location, well-built homes, beautiful grounds, etc. — the developers had no way of knowing that what seemed like impossibly generous proportions for a TV less than 20 years ago would be superseded by today’s huge, flat-screen TV’s (and lots of them!).

Think of it as the technological equivalent of a one-car garage.

By now, you’d guess that a majority of those built-in’s have been (expensively) retrofitted to fit today’s technology.

On the list of holdouts: my parents, still watching their (perfectly functioning) 33″, picture tube TV.

About the author

Ross Kaplan has 19+ years experience selling real estate all over the Twin Cities. He is also a 12-time consecutive "Super Real Estate Agent," as determined by Mpls. - St. Paul Magazine and Twin Cities Business Magazine. Prior to becoming a Realtor, Ross was an attorney (corporate law), CPA, and entrepreneur. He holds an economics degree from Stanford.

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