Ridgewood West

Colonial and Cape Cod are two products

A Cape Cod is a story and a half: living space on the main floor with bedrooms tucked under a sloped roof upstairs, usually dormered, and generally with less usable second-floor area than the square footage implies. A colonial is a full two stories with a formal plan and headroom throughout.

They serve different buyers and they do not function as comparable sales for one another even at the same nominal size on the same street. Sloped ceilings, knee walls and stair placement change how a Cape Cod actually lives, and buyers either want that or they do not.

Two checks belong specifically to the Cape Cods. Insulation and ventilation in the sloped upstairs space is a common weak point and shows up as ice damming in winter and unusable heat in summer. And any later dormer addition is worth confirming was permitted, because dormers are structural work and not all of them were done properly.

So the discipline in a mixed subdivision is to match on form first, then on size, then on condition. A per-square-foot figure averaged across both types will misprice both.

Brick at fifty years

Brick is durable rather than maintenance-free, and on houses of some age the masonry has its own agenda separate from the mechanical one.

Mortar joints have a finite life and eventually need repointing — tuckpointing a full elevation is a serious expense when it comes due rather than a small repair. Lintels above windows and doors are steel in most construction of this kind and corrode over time, which shows as cracking in the brickwork above an opening. Weep holes at the base of a brick veneer wall exist to let moisture out and are frequently painted over, filled with mortar or blocked by landscaping, which traps water in the cavity.

None of that is exotic and all of it is visible to someone who knows to look. It is worth asking an inspector to comment on the masonry specifically rather than accepting brick as a shorthand for sound.

Alongside it, the ordinary systems cycle: roofs, furnaces, air conditioning, water heaters, electrical panels and sewer laterals all have dates worth establishing, and a camera inspection of the lateral is the highest-value small expense available.

A note on what brick does buy, since the paragraph above is a list of obligations. Masonry construction of this kind is genuinely durable: it does not rot, it does not need repainting, it holds up to a century of Michigan weather with periodic attention rather than constant maintenance, and it insulates against sound noticeably better than frame with siding. The items above are the maintenance a brick house asks for across decades, not a warning against the material — which is why brick subdivisions of this age are still standing in good order across this county.

City or township

Plymouth is two municipalities sharing one name. The City of Plymouth is roughly two square miles containing the downtown; Plymouth Charter Township wraps around it and is considerably larger. They are separate governments with separate taxes, separate services and separate elected officials.

A Plymouth address does not distinguish between them, and the difference is real: a different millage, township rather than city services, and the downtown as a drive rather than a walk. Neither is better — they are different products at different prices, and comparable sales drawn across the line without adjusting will produce a wrong number.

The town itself was settled in 1825, when Keziah and William Starkweather, farmers from Preston, Connecticut, bought 240 acres from the federal government on March 11 at a dollar and a quarter an acre. It was incorporated as a village in 1867 and became a city in 1932, which is why the two governments exist today rather than one.

Three high schools on one campus

Plymouth-Canton Community Schools runs an arrangement with no real parallel nearby. The Plymouth-Canton Educational Park puts three separate high schools on a single campus of about 305 acres: Salem, which opened in 1970, Canton, which opened in 1972, and Plymouth, which opened in 2002.

Each has its own building, name, colors and mascot — Salem's Rocks, Canton's Cobras and Plymouth's Wildcats — and each serves grades nine through twelve. But students can take classes across all three academic buildings, and facilities are shared rather than triplicated: one auto shop, one culinary facility, one robotics shop and one varsity football field, alongside three swimming pools and three soccer fields.

It is a structural fact about the district rather than a matter of opinion, and it regularly surprises people arriving from somewhere with a conventional single high school. Elementary and middle school assignment follows the home address, but the high school does not: students are assigned randomly among Canton, Plymouth and Salem. The district also reaches into Canton Township, Salem, Superior and Northville Township.

The park is named for the man who invented the center line

Hines Park runs through Plymouth as part of a seventeen-mile chain of Wayne County parkland following the Middle Rouge from Dearborn out to Northville — one of the more substantial pieces of continuous public riverside anywhere in suburban Michigan.

Edward N. Hines sat on the Wayne County Road Commission from 1906 until his death in 1938, having come to it from a Detroit printing business. In 1909 he was responsible for the first full mile of concrete road pavement in the world, on Woodward Avenue between Six Mile and Seven Mile. Two years later he had the idea of painting a line down the middle of a road to separate opposing traffic — the account has him watching a horse-drawn milk wagon leak a line down the street — and the first painted center line was laid in 1911 on River Road in Trenton, in this same county.

Around 1925 he set about building a parkway along the Middle Rouge. Acquiring the land and the money took years. In 1937, the year before he died, the Middle Rouge Parkway was renamed in his honor. Hilltop Golf Course is nearby too — eighteen public holes built in 1927, redesigned by Jerry Matthews in 1982, and run by Plymouth Township's parks department.

Windmills, then BB guns

Plymouth's industrial identity came from an unlikely pivot. The Plymouth Iron Windmill Company was formed in 1882 to make windmills, a business that did not prosper. What did prosper was a premium the company gave away with them, and in 1895 the firm renamed itself for it: the Daisy Manufacturing Company.

Daisy made millions of air rifles at its factory on Union Street, southeast of Main, and it was not alone — the Markham Air Rifle Company had been established in Plymouth in July 1886, and the Markham Chicago is generally credited as the first commercially successful BB gun. The Red Ryder, introduced in 1940 and familiar to a great many people from A Christmas Story, was originally made here.

Daisy left for Rogers, Arkansas in 1958. The Union Street factory was used as office space afterward and was occupied until it was demolished in 2005. The Plymouth Historical Museum holds the company's archives.

None of it is visible from a subdivision street today. It is worth knowing because it explains why a farming township on the Middle Rouge grew into a town with a downtown of its own rather than a crossroads, and why the street names and the museum are what they are.

Parks and recreation beyond the neighborhood

Plymouth Township Park on Ann Arbor Trail is a useful public destination north of this southern-township setting. Walking paths, a pond, playscapes and seasonal outdoor activities make it more than a single-purpose recreation stop. Hilltop Golf Course on Powell Road offers 18 holes nearby. A visit to Compari's on South Main, the Penn Theatre or the district library can be combined with exploring downtown.

Buying or selling here

One hundred and fifty houses of consistent construction produce a genuine comparable set once form is accounted for, which makes pricing here more tractable than in most of the area.

For a seller, name the form plainly and attach the systems documentation. A well-kept Cape Cod is a good house and a different good house from a colonial; blurring the two reaches fewer of the right buyers, not more.

For a buyer, match on form, look specifically at the masonry and — on a Cape Cod — at the upstairs insulation, camera the lateral.