Mansionmania Tournament: Round 1, Heat 32
 

Mansionmania continues. I'm going to show you the most expensive homes in every state and a few territories, with a few extras thrown in from the largest states to get the tourney up to 64. It'll be a single-elimination tournament.

You will choose among each pair of houses with the following assumptions:

• The purchase price for you is $0.
• All maintenance, utilities, property taxes, HOA fees, and cleaning is included.
• You must live in the home for the rest of your life.
• You can't travel more than 100 miles from home (via google maps drive time) other than 1 two-week vacation each year.
• You get $250,000 per year as a living allowance
• You get an additional living allowance at the cheaper home, which will be valued at 1% of any cost difference annually. I will note this amount in the poll.
• You get the furnishings. If unfurnished, you get an allowance that will give you mid-grade furniture in every room.
• You get any vehicles in the garage. But only the garage - nothing parked outside.

I encourage you to click on the maps in the listings to see the general location and neighborhood.

Also, I will only enter contestants if they have a sufficient number of photos to judge, as determined by me.

Your entries in this heat are:

Texas:

https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...4_M79784-98460

Oregon:

https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...3_M97304-10007

**** Oregon.

The house, the state, or the dead bodies littering the home?

How are the pictures getting worse? They showed us nothing of either house.

But it’s Houston going away.

I’m just totally not into horses or taxidermy. In fact, I farm around horse people and while they rarely give me any trouble the whole “lifestyle” or whatever I find abrasive. So it’s probably reasonable to assume I have an irrational hatred of horse people.

And taxidermy’s shine has wore off on me. At Cabela’s I audited the Taxidermy department. I had to learn all the associated risks and required management which is a giant drag, and then… I got to see what it cost, 12 years ago. So I’d waltz into every room and be pissed off at what I paid for.

Gimme Texas. That Oregon house pretty much creeps me out.

I don't even know where to start on this one. I'm too traumatized by seeing a world where every animal except horses is extinct. But I'll try.

Texas - It's a nice house, very clean in design. Almost too clean. Some of these houses seem like no real person lives there. I like the stairs and the wooden bathtub is nice, and the lap pool seems nice. But is that a second pool in Photo 12? It's on a nice 9 acre lot, and is convenient to Houston stuff, but it doesn't really speak to me. It's too sterile for my tastes.

Oregon - Do you know how I know that a divorced male owns the house? Seriously, that's overkill in every sense of the word. Stop it with the dead animals, dude. Just stop it. It's actually a decent house if you can get past the decorating, though. I can't discern what the kitchen is like, but it's got some nice rooms. I'd have to make some changes, but it's got good bones. (There I go with the carcass jokes again.) The big problem here is that the house has no access to much of interest. You can't reach Portland or even Salem, you can't get to the coast, and there doesn't seem to be much tourist infrastructure anywhere. The best you've got is Bend, Oregon, which has about 93,000 people. Ugh on that.

I like the Oregon house better, and I'd like the Oregon climate and culture better, but the Texas house has a huge advantage in setting. I want to pick the Oregon house, but if it came down to a choice I'd have to pick Texas. I'd go batty in rural Oregon for the rest of my life.

How many dead animals are in that Oregon house? We should try to count them, like a jelly bean in a jar contest.

As a dude that has 2 wild beasts as kids that can make a mess out of anything, give me clean lines, symmetrical design and open space.

I'm bummed about the Oregon choice because there are some really awesome houses in the Portland area that I like way better than the option shown. But I don't want to corrupt the contest with my own preferences, and this house barely had enough photos to qualify.

The Texas house was kind of the same deal. It barely had enough to qualify, and it was in a different part of Houston than the earlier entry so I couldn't justify kicking it out.

And what does taxidermy cost for a full size animal like a bighorn sheep?

I don’t remember specifics other than A bunch. Most of it depends on quality of they hide horns and mount but I’m guessing over 5Gs. Could be upwards of 20. But I’m a million miles from an expert. I just did one audit, found a giant (to me) variance, and decided taxidermy is for the birds.

The real kickers are polar bears. Every freaking store has one, but they’re illegal to hunt, so it has to be documented how it died, where blah blah blah. Those things bring a mint.

The rich in this country have an unhealthy obsession with horses.

I guess white goes with anything.

But man, if you're talking $5,000 for stuffing, and then you add in a license and guide and travel and stuff, that's an expensive stuffed animal.

I do not understand that at all. It can't be that every rich person develops horses as a hobby. It's got to be merely a status symbol to own horses. But that's a lot of money and hassle to just be a showoff piece.

Of course, so are the mansions, I guess.

Texas. Would probably rather live in Oregon, but not that house in that spot.

Both houses are ugly as hell and insanely decorated...

That Oregon house's living room looks like a Cabela's. No thanks.

I'll take the Texas home, even if it is in Houston..which completely sucks. The one thing i hate about the Texas home, as someone else pointed out, is does someone actually live here?

Deshutes Brewery is in Bend OR. I could be happy there.
....after calling in a dumpster truck for all the dead animals. Yuck.

...and I just do not like Houston. I visited several times for work and got a (apparently very) bad impression of the place. Maybe there are parts of the city that I didn't ever get to see that would have changed my mind - but the parts I did see (mostly industrial) left a mark.
Weather sucks. Concrete everywhere. useless abandoned road and bridge projects. Every afternoon a monsoon rain storm.

Cabelas was buying all these on the market because at the time they were expanding retail in a big way. Building a pile of stores. Then 2008 happened (to be more accurate, the gas price spike in 2007 happened) and that all stopped. I audited it between 07 and before 08 when the world ended briefly.

They had prices all over the board. They got some stuff bought pretty right, where they were patient and stuff. Other stuff they entered into open auctions and it was more expensive. A lot of stuff they'd go buy a collection, and so there would be a bunch of stuff they couldn't use. Like I said, I'm not nearly an expert.

But if it's worth displaying in a 12 million dollar house, it isn't going to be some deer some hickabilliy killed on the back 40 and got stuffed in the back of some dudes trailer.

There is (or at least was...not really my bag) A LOT of money in taxidermy.

Man Oregon is desolate.

But yeah - that place is awesome. And choosing Oregon dovetails nicely with my '**** Houston' rule.

I mean seriously - just look at the pictures of the outside around that Houston spot. The one from the concrete bunker is especially 'peak Houston'. Hope you like spotty grass (and that god-awful st. Augustine stuff that feels like weeds at that) along with scraggly ass 'oak' trees. Man I hate Houston.

Not a fan of snuffing out the lives of animals or living in the middle of nowhere, so that rules out Oregon.

Texas house is killer. Love the kitchen, especially the counter-tops, and the workout room.

How do you become a millionaire? Make a billion dollars and then start raising horses.

Been there once and all I remember is concrete, homeless and crazy people, heat and humidity, and monsoon like rain but that's a cool house. Houston and San Francisco are the 2 most anticipated but disappointing cities.

I've only been to Houston a few times, and mostly on the outskirts so it doesn't count. When I lived in Austin in grad school, people would offer sympathy if a person got a job in Houston. I always thought that was kind of funny.

Then I went and spent a couple of days downtown on business, and I couldn't shake a spooky feeling there. I don't know if it was just the weather at the time with weird lighting or something, but the downtown area felt creepy to me. The only other place I've felt that kind of negative energy was Virginia Beach. In both cases it had to just be some fluke of weather, but I've never felt it anywhere else in the other 99.999 percent of my existence.

I'd consider putting Atlanta in that group, but nobody expects Atlanta to not be a shithole.

Seattle was incredibly disappointing. Get 10 miles outside of town and it's incredible, but man - downtown Seattle sucked hard.

I hear you. And largely agree. But it’s hard to cast stones when you willingly move (back to) Western Kansas.

Plus I’ve got a buddy in Houston that needs beer drank with.

We're on the same page. The cities that most disappointed me when I first visited them were:

1. San Francisco - Hard to get around, and you'd find yourself in very unpleasant areas without warning.
2. Seattle - I couldn't find a cool neighborhood at all, and it required far more driving than necessary.
3. Houston - Generally spooky feel.

I think I told the story before, but I did a lot of walking in San Francisco for a couple of days back in 2018. I ended up walking down a street that looked like the aftermath of a holocaust. There was some dude walking unsteadily about 50 feet ahead of me and I slowly gained on him.

He turned around to look at me, and I realized that he had covered his entire head with clear packing tape. I mean his entire head, too - he'd taped over his hair, his face, everything. It distorted his features, and for some reason he'd run the tape over his eyes where one eye was taped closed and the other one was taped open. So he turned around and stared at me with that one open eye, and I immediately made a 90 degree turn.

I don't mean to laugh at your experience but that is funny to me in a weird way. I wonder if it was some vestigial part of your lizard brain kicking in or something more.

Oregon for me. No thanks to hot, sweaty, evil Houston.

I dig the modern deco of the Houston house, but give me Oregon. I love the rock face and the acreage, but I'll have to borrow the wardrobe that leads to Narnia so I can chuck all the dead critters through to that world. And the cowhide wallpaper in the theater room, too. WTF??

I've stayed close to what is now a hockey arena (formerly Key Arena) and really enjoyed both stays... close to the Needle and not a terrible walk towards Pike Place and things, with some good places to eat and watch a football game in between.

Not sure I'd love living there unless I was out of town a bit, but have enjoyed the city.

I bet my distant ancestors faced great danger in a coastal pleistocene swamp that smelled vaguely of petroleum.

Oregon, but not really excited by either of them.

I actually kind of hate Oregon though. Portland is an awful mess of homeless people, tents everywhere, people shooting up on the street at 2 in the afternoon, bad traffic for a smaller city.... a lot of big city problems.

Many people are just now learning how to pump their own gas, so you'll overhear conversations like "it'll just stop when it's done, right?" and "just slide your card there, then push that button"....

I got one weird look at a gas station from some guy telling me I could go ahead and pump my own gas... and I was like, uh, yep, on it. I went inside to use the restroom and got another weird look.... oh, the bathroom is outside. The same guy was like, uh, you're not from around here are you?

No, I'm from the future... it's 2018 and people have been pumping their own gas for decades, and restrooms are on the inside of gas stations now! And there are no more Blockbusters!

Houston is an absolute shit hole. NO thanks

I am glad I am not alone in my estimation of Houston as the least charming city in America.

There are some fabulous places in Oregon where I would love to live, Cannon Beach may be the most beautiful place I've ever been, but that ranch does nothing for me.

Which one is Clay's house?