The Money Pit House Is For Sale

The mansion that almost took Tom Hanks and Shelley Long down in 80s fixer-upper comedy ‘The Money Pit’ is up for sale.

Thankfully - or perhaps not - it’s now in the kind of nick that makes it worth an asking price of $12.5 million (£7.3 million), rather than the disastrous state it spends much of the movie in.

Located in Lattingtown, Long Island, the palatial eight-bedroomed gaff with a driveway that is a quarter of a mile long has been lovingly restored.

“It’s now the anti-‘Money Pit,’ ” reckons Shawn Elliott of Shawn Elliott Luxury Homes & Estates, the real estate man who is marketing the home.

“The home was restored at the highest quality.”

But it was not always thus.

In a case of life imitating art, current owners Rich and Christina Makowsky had a Hanks/Long-esque experience doing the place up over a year and a half.

“We didn’t realize how bad it was,” Mr. Makowsky told the New York Times.

“The house was falling apart when you went from room to room. We definitely could have done the sequel.”

Now the property boasts a recreation room, a gym, a guest suite, and a rose garden.

A remake of the 1948 film ‘Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House’, the slapstick romp followed Hanks’ luckless attorney and musician girlfriend Long as they’re duped into buying what they believe is the house of their dreams, but is in fact a towering lemon.

The movie, released in 1986 and directed by ‘Westworld’ helmsman Richard Benjamin, was only a mild success for Hanks at the time.

It came at the wrong end of a cold streak which was at odds with what was deemed his big break in mermaid rom-com ‘Splash’ some years earlier.

Consequent flops included ‘The Man With One Red Shoe’, ‘Volunteers’ and ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’, which grossed a shocking $278,000 (£163,000).

Luckily, he came back from the brink with ‘Big’, and the rest, as they say, is history.

(Photo credit: Rex)