The house had been abandoned to the government for unpaid taxes (and HUD was the mortgage-holder). Which was a good thing, because our new house was a definite fixer-upper. So I was not looking forward to selling another house.īut lo and behold, in the year or two leading up to our latest need to sell, the real estate market for our part of town underwent a small boom, and we ended up selling for a fairly substantial profit. It took two years to sell (in the mid-80s), and we ended up dumping it for a loss, just to get rid of the monthly payment. ![]() We had owned another house previously (the one whose neighbors were burned out, if you recall), and that house had nearly broken us, trying to sell it. The only thing that remained was to sell our old house, which presented a whole separate obstacle, both real and psychological. Within less than a month, she found a 2300 square-foot house, four blocks from both the school and church (we had been two blocks away, but four was well within 'walkable' distance), with four bedrooms, and a little efficiency apartment carved out of the basement (which wasn't even counted in the square footage), for the exact price I had specified. I should have known better than to throw that kind of a challenge down in front of my wife (or, you know, maybe I was dumb like a fox). ![]() But, I added - I didn't think she could (yeah, just call me Mr. So I told her that if she could find a house of at least 2000 square feet (since it would hardly be worth moving for anything much less) and four bedrooms (five would be better), walking distance from school and church, for a price we could afford (I did some quick mental math to arrive at a dollar figure), I would buy it. Living, as we did, walking distance from the kids' school, and even from church, made for some nice efficiencies, which I didn't really want to give up. I couldn't argue with her logic, but I countered with the positives of our situation. We can add bedrooms, but the dining room will be just as tiny. "Our house simply isn't big enough to have any kind of extended-family gathering in it. Our older kids, by then, were in high school, and she was envisioning the day in the not-too-distant future when they would be marrying and having children of their own. I started to explain about my plans for expanding on our then-current domicile, but she just shook her head and waved me off. "We need a new house," she said to me, very matter-of-factly. We had a great, refreshing, relaxing time, but Jen was saving the real point of the weekend (at least, as far as she was concerned) for the drive home. That fall (which, coincidentally enough, was just after 7M's accident), the two of us went on one of our infrequent getaway weekends to a bed-and-breakfast Up North. I was just about to draw up plans to add a second story to the rear addition, and possibly even carve an office for myself out of some 'third-floor' attic space. Jen and I had even taken to sleeping on a hide-a-bed so that our 'bedroom' could function as the kids' play room during the day. We'd tried all manner of space-saving and space-multiplying expedients - I built a loft so that three boys and all their toys and clothes could more-or-less fit into a 12x12 room. At the time, we had lived in our previous house for 17 years, and the two of us, with seven kids, were just a bit much for 1400 square feet. We bought our current house a bit over ten years ago. But of course, first you get the history lesson ('context setting', dontchaknow). Which, as it turns out, is a fairly current topic at our place, too. ![]() My friend Lime has been blogging recently about some once-and-future home-improvement projects over at her house.
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