Dream Houses and Bridges - November 30, 2019
I love it when people get to live their dreams. Granted, my idea of my dream life could be another’s nightmare. But that’s a whole other story.
I’m thinking about this “living your dream” stuff because some dear friends of Laur’s and mine have been able to purchase a solid house in an area they’d really wanted to live in. Their yard backs onto a huge greenspace. And while they might think the interior needs updating, I don’t. I think it's perfect just the way it is.
My mind got to meandering on our hike up a mountain on Wednesday and I started to think about the time we bought 465 Loach’s Rd. Picture this. Laur and I were living in a nice enough bungalow but it had no backyard to speak of, and we had four kids, two dogs, and an indeterminate number of cats and hamsters.
The real estate agent who sold us our house and who was a friend of ours phoned me one day and said, “I have a client who really wants you to buy her house.” What?! “She’s listing it for $159,000 – but will sell it to you for $145,000.” You can’t make this stuff up. (I know this sounds cheap – for us in 1991 it didn’t seem that way.
It was a house just down the street on a double lot that went back 200 feet. (That translated into a lot of mowing and leaf raking, though not by me.) It had been a bungalow at one point and someone had added on an addition that gave it a huge farm kitchen, an apartment sized bedroom upstairs, a second basement, a garage, a balcony, a library, a glassed in sun porch, a second workshop, and yet another bedroom. I say “yet another” because – depending on how you counted them – this place already had five bedroom-like spaces, plus a gigantic rec-room and a workshop space that could function as a basketball court. Or at least it seemed so to us.
Was there a downside? Yes. There had been between 8 and 11 kids living there plus their foster parents. It was an older home, and the place had not been repaired or updated for decades. For Laur and I it was love at first sight. What others saw as “too much work,” we saw as “this has our name on it.” Lots of space for the kids and companion animals. An apartment to Laur’s and my self, pretty much. And in time we converted the basketball court and the gigantic rec-room into two bedsits. Renting those units to university students covered our property tax and utilities. And trust me, when you had a double lot on Loach’s Rd. and a house that leaked heat like a sieve, you needed that.
(Oh yeah, and the bedroom and the workshop in the new section of the house was turned into two cat rooms for newly fostered kittens and cats. Once they’d been there for a week or two, I’d let them join the general population until I could find them a permanent home. None of our kids have cat allergies. I can’t imagine why. My hubs? That’s another story, but I digress.)
Over time – over lots of time – we redid the house. OK, we paid other people to redo our house. Sometimes things got redone two and three times. We sold the house for about $350 thousand. You might think – “Wow, a profit of two hundred thousand!” And you would be SO wrong. Over the 25 plus years we lived there, we spent a heckuva lot more than that on the most basic of stuff – furnace, hot water heater, huge roof, basement leak repair, windows, insulation upgrade, jacking up the “wow” that was happening in the newer addition, etc. This is to say nothing of redoing the floors three times, painting and repainting, gutting and rebuilding the bathrooms, and creating the two apartments. (Full disclosure again. The work was done by others. We just breathed in the plaster dust and paid the bills.)
Yes, we could have spent an extra fifty or one hundred thousand and got a newer, smaller house that had everything modern and repaired. But we couldn’t afford it at the time – or at least we didn’t thing we could. And looking back, there is nothing – or pretty much nothing – I would have changed. We had an open and unlocked door policy at our house. Not because we were good parents, but because we had so much room and there was nothing anyone could wreck or anything anyone would want to steal.
We (or at least I) made really good friends with our tenants. They’d borrow our oven to cook a turkey, I’d take them to emergency because I could get them there faster than an ambulance, they’d watch part of our Friday night movies with us, Caro would babysit one of our tenant’s pet mice, and on it went.
Laur and I truly had an upstairs apartment all to ourselves. When you’ve got a lot of beings to care for and a lot of work to do, that can be a marriage saver. And that farmhouse-sized kitchen? Laur and I put two used easy chairs in there. That was our coffee drinking and chatting space when our kids got older and started moving out.
It was a unique little world. It wasn’t for everyone. My dear Mom, when we gave her a tour of the place before we moved in, said to me, “Are you SURE you want to move.” We had to get a space heater for my Dad for when he had Christmas dinner in our kitchen – that part of the house wasn’t well insulated.
Anna and Caro initially slept in the dining room (a story in itself). Elaine’s bedroom had initially been the kitchen and there was still some evidence for that. Tom’s friends wanted to repaint and redo his room and, because there was nothing worse they could do to it, we said “Have at it.” One “friend” said we should knock it (the house) down and subdivide the lot. Another said, “This house is perfect [comma] ‘for you!’”
And while I don’t miss the responsibilities, there is not a day that I don’t miss living at 465 Loach’s Rd. It’s like the happy first part of Bridge to Terabithia (as long as I don’t think too hard about it). It had lots space for imagination and possibilities.
And that is how I feel about our friends’ new place. So many memories to make, and so many potential stories to tell. Mind you it’s in so much better shape than 465 was and it’s less sprawling. They are taking out a 30 year mortgage.
And it hit me really hard as we were descending a mountain that it is very unlikely that Laur and I will live to see this place paid off. My dad didn’t live to see 465 paid off – he died in the year 2000. Shortly after that, my mom stopped travelling to Sudbury for Christmas. Sad yes, but there is also a deeply sad second part to the Bridge to Terabithia…
*****
The drawing by Tim Steven is his view of what mealtime looked like in our farmhouse kitchen when our kids were younger. So very accurate!
I’m thinking about this “living your dream” stuff because some dear friends of Laur’s and mine have been able to purchase a solid house in an area they’d really wanted to live in. Their yard backs onto a huge greenspace. And while they might think the interior needs updating, I don’t. I think it's perfect just the way it is.
My mind got to meandering on our hike up a mountain on Wednesday and I started to think about the time we bought 465 Loach’s Rd. Picture this. Laur and I were living in a nice enough bungalow but it had no backyard to speak of, and we had four kids, two dogs, and an indeterminate number of cats and hamsters.
The real estate agent who sold us our house and who was a friend of ours phoned me one day and said, “I have a client who really wants you to buy her house.” What?! “She’s listing it for $159,000 – but will sell it to you for $145,000.” You can’t make this stuff up. (I know this sounds cheap – for us in 1991 it didn’t seem that way.
It was a house just down the street on a double lot that went back 200 feet. (That translated into a lot of mowing and leaf raking, though not by me.) It had been a bungalow at one point and someone had added on an addition that gave it a huge farm kitchen, an apartment sized bedroom upstairs, a second basement, a garage, a balcony, a library, a glassed in sun porch, a second workshop, and yet another bedroom. I say “yet another” because – depending on how you counted them – this place already had five bedroom-like spaces, plus a gigantic rec-room and a workshop space that could function as a basketball court. Or at least it seemed so to us.
Was there a downside? Yes. There had been between 8 and 11 kids living there plus their foster parents. It was an older home, and the place had not been repaired or updated for decades. For Laur and I it was love at first sight. What others saw as “too much work,” we saw as “this has our name on it.” Lots of space for the kids and companion animals. An apartment to Laur’s and my self, pretty much. And in time we converted the basketball court and the gigantic rec-room into two bedsits. Renting those units to university students covered our property tax and utilities. And trust me, when you had a double lot on Loach’s Rd. and a house that leaked heat like a sieve, you needed that.
(Oh yeah, and the bedroom and the workshop in the new section of the house was turned into two cat rooms for newly fostered kittens and cats. Once they’d been there for a week or two, I’d let them join the general population until I could find them a permanent home. None of our kids have cat allergies. I can’t imagine why. My hubs? That’s another story, but I digress.)
Over time – over lots of time – we redid the house. OK, we paid other people to redo our house. Sometimes things got redone two and three times. We sold the house for about $350 thousand. You might think – “Wow, a profit of two hundred thousand!” And you would be SO wrong. Over the 25 plus years we lived there, we spent a heckuva lot more than that on the most basic of stuff – furnace, hot water heater, huge roof, basement leak repair, windows, insulation upgrade, jacking up the “wow” that was happening in the newer addition, etc. This is to say nothing of redoing the floors three times, painting and repainting, gutting and rebuilding the bathrooms, and creating the two apartments. (Full disclosure again. The work was done by others. We just breathed in the plaster dust and paid the bills.)
Yes, we could have spent an extra fifty or one hundred thousand and got a newer, smaller house that had everything modern and repaired. But we couldn’t afford it at the time – or at least we didn’t thing we could. And looking back, there is nothing – or pretty much nothing – I would have changed. We had an open and unlocked door policy at our house. Not because we were good parents, but because we had so much room and there was nothing anyone could wreck or anything anyone would want to steal.
We (or at least I) made really good friends with our tenants. They’d borrow our oven to cook a turkey, I’d take them to emergency because I could get them there faster than an ambulance, they’d watch part of our Friday night movies with us, Caro would babysit one of our tenant’s pet mice, and on it went.
Laur and I truly had an upstairs apartment all to ourselves. When you’ve got a lot of beings to care for and a lot of work to do, that can be a marriage saver. And that farmhouse-sized kitchen? Laur and I put two used easy chairs in there. That was our coffee drinking and chatting space when our kids got older and started moving out.
It was a unique little world. It wasn’t for everyone. My dear Mom, when we gave her a tour of the place before we moved in, said to me, “Are you SURE you want to move.” We had to get a space heater for my Dad for when he had Christmas dinner in our kitchen – that part of the house wasn’t well insulated.
Anna and Caro initially slept in the dining room (a story in itself). Elaine’s bedroom had initially been the kitchen and there was still some evidence for that. Tom’s friends wanted to repaint and redo his room and, because there was nothing worse they could do to it, we said “Have at it.” One “friend” said we should knock it (the house) down and subdivide the lot. Another said, “This house is perfect [comma] ‘for you!’”
And while I don’t miss the responsibilities, there is not a day that I don’t miss living at 465 Loach’s Rd. It’s like the happy first part of Bridge to Terabithia (as long as I don’t think too hard about it). It had lots space for imagination and possibilities.
And that is how I feel about our friends’ new place. So many memories to make, and so many potential stories to tell. Mind you it’s in so much better shape than 465 was and it’s less sprawling. They are taking out a 30 year mortgage.
And it hit me really hard as we were descending a mountain that it is very unlikely that Laur and I will live to see this place paid off. My dad didn’t live to see 465 paid off – he died in the year 2000. Shortly after that, my mom stopped travelling to Sudbury for Christmas. Sad yes, but there is also a deeply sad second part to the Bridge to Terabithia…
*****
The drawing by Tim Steven is his view of what mealtime looked like in our farmhouse kitchen when our kids were younger. So very accurate!