This house was obviously much loved 20 years ago, but it hasn't aged well. We've stayed in lots of Fire Island homes over the years, this one is unusually decrepit. Rotting steps, damp, mildewed rooms, bare wires dangling from outlets where the fixtures were ripped off. Even the smoke detectors had been ripped out of the ceilings. The half-rotted remains of a hot tub, light switches everywhere but few hooked up to anything. Planters filled with dirt and cigarette butts, garbage abandoned by the front area, construction refuse clogging the undercroft.
The most disappointing area was the downstairs (or "murder basement" as we dubbed it) - This claims it's an 8 bedroom house. It is not - it's a 6 bedroom house, but they've walled off parts of the storage area and put bedframes on the bare concrete floor in one area (and some kind of rotting carpet stuff in the other). The beds were soaking wet and stank, wires looping everywhere. We are familiar with the eccentricities of Fire Island guest sheds and add-on rooms, so believe me when I say this was terrifying. The people who were supposed to sleep there ended up on the couches upstairs.
There were four blow up mattresses for them to use too, but all of them but one broken or missing parts.
This was someone's dream home once - there's a height chart drawn in a doorframe where someone had measured their kids as they grew up. It starts at 2003, which means the house was last painted sometime before then. Might be alright for a small group of college or high-school kids (DEFINITELY not safe for children) - but the paperwork said there was a very strict 30-plus age limit on it, so.
Anyway, you can can see the ocean out the side windows. The internet worked well. The blue couches upstairs had probably been bought within the last 5 years, which is good because they became beds. None of us were brave enough to try the washer/dryer or sauna.
I takes a lot of guts to rent a junker in this kind of condition - we all left a day early rather than endure an extra night here. We'd booked 3 and only used 2.