While we were pondering these mysteries, Gerry, the real estate agent who had sold the dream house to us less than a year before, returned my call. Manfully hiding his incredulity, he happily agreed to list the property for us. He wouldn’t have to put in much work for his commission after all, as we had changed little in the scant ten months we had occupied it. He was on his way out of town on vacation, but brought us the Listing Agreement to sign before he left. The ‘For Sale’ sign would be put up on his return.
Gerry agreed with our assessment that it would probably take a year or more to sell our house. It was a large property in a small town. Before we bought it, the house had been on the market for two years. For once, we were actually fine with a long wait before we sold our house. We would have the year while we were trying to sell, to make up our minds about the future course of our life; time to plan and organize our major life change. While at that point we were not at all sure what we were going to do with the next part of our lives, we were pretty convinced that it would not involve this particular (expensive) property. If we decided we wanted to stay there after all, we could just take the property off the market.
Prior to this, we had bought and sold houses three times. In each case, the house had been listed for several months while numerous showings had taken place. As anyone who has been through that particular agony knows, this involves painstaking efforts to try to make your house look like it has never been lived in. With cats and dogs, this is a mammoth and heartbreaking enterprise. Every time someone wants to see your house, you have to remove yourselves and the livestock.
Including the cat, if you happen to own one of the Siamese variety. There is a Gary Larsen cartoon showing a man and a woman in their living room, both of them missing eyes, sporting bandages and stitches, while a visitor looks at the cat and says, “What a cute Siamese cat. Is he friendly?” Yup, not a good idea to let strangers into the house when the Siamese is on guard duty.
There isn’t that much personal liability insurance in the world.
Jake, the Siamese who ruled our household at that time, had been my parents’ cat. We had actually given him to them when he was kitten, thus placing us firmly in the Category of “Idiots”, Subcategory: “People who give pets to people without asking them first if they even want one”.
Right from the get go, Jake was a character. And by ‘character’ I mean a demented Tasmanian Devil of a creature with a mercurial temperament and the wit and cunning of a Bond villain.
When acquired as a kitten, he had passed the three hour drive to my parents’ house by yowling incessantly at the top of his considerable voice and jumping on our heads, claws out. He would alternate that activity with refreshing intervals of frantically clawing his way upside down across the cloth ceiling of the car at roughly the speed of a jet fighter plane. If one of us tried to remove him, he would turn into a hissing, spitting, clawing demon.
We arrived at my parents’ place, brought Jake inside and dropped him before his claws could do damage to the ‘needs stitches’ level. He proceeded to shoot around my parents’ house like an Acme rocket, clawing his way up the wallpaper to the ceiling and down the draperies to the floor, where he would take off on four stiff legs, back arched and fur puffed out, skittering along sideways on his tippy toes.
My mother asked if by any chance we had gone shopping at a pet shop in hell. My father inquired with deceptive mildness if they should call the priest and schedule an exorcism. Or perhaps the mental hospital. I’m still not sure if he intended the reference to a strait jacket as being needed for us or for Jake. We smiled weakly and opined that it was just the excitement of the car ride and he would no doubt settle down shortly. Then we made an excuse and legged it out of there before they could decide to tell us to take the demon spawn with us.
Jake did settle down eventually. Sort of. Well, mostly. He could always go from purring in your lap to mangling your arm in a blink of an eye. I still have scars.
Jake and my father conducted a running firefight in an epic battle of wills. My parents lived in the country and Jake was an indoor/outdoor cat. Jake felt strongly that whether he was indoors or outdoors at any particular time of the day or night was a matter to be decided entirely in his sole discretion. My father felt otherwise.
It wasn’t that Dad really cared where Jake was. He wasn’t a cat guy. Jake’s whereabouts at any given time would have been a matter of supreme indifference to him, had Jake simply bought into my father’s ‘live and let live’ operational policy. But Jake firmly believed that humans were put on this earth to be his servants. He had the (to him, not unreasonable) expectation that someone would spring into action to cater to his every whim as soon as it was expressed.
Jake had three methods of getting the attention of the nearest servant, since his humans inexplicably failed to provide him with a bell to ring for service.
His first method was the aforementioned unearthly yowling. The second was to stroll up and sink his claws into your leg. The last was to jump up on your chest and stare fixedly into your eyes until you stopped what you were doing and got up to follow him to the object of his desire.
If all the help was asleep, he might employ a combination of these moves. Jump onto the chest, emit an ear splitting scream and bat at the face.
When this happened to my father in the middle of the night, he would leap out of bed, grab Jake by the scruff of the neck (the recommended hold to avoid being bitten by snakes and enraged Siamese cats) and throw him out the bedroom window. My parents’ bedroom was on the second floor.
This was not as cruel as it sounds. The window opened over the porch roof. Jake would be ejected onto the roof in the hope that what he was seeking was access to the outdoors. If so, he would climb down the slope of the roof, jump the easy seven or eight feet to the ground, and enjoy the rest of the evening terrorizing the local wildlife.
If being outside was not what he was seeking however, he would spend the next several hours rowelling and howling around the house, whilst scratching industriously at the door. At least he never figured out how to get back up onto the porch roof to my parents’ window. Score one for Dad.
When my parents moved from the country into town, they decided that Jake should come and live with us. Their stated rationale was that he was used to being able to roam around outside, and it would be unsafe for him to do that in town.
Which would have made sense if we ourselves had not been living in the suburbs of the city at the time, in a much higher traffic area than where Mom and Dad were moving to.
Let’s face it. They saw their chance and they took it. Well played Sir and Madam. Well played.
So Jake came to live with us. Fortunately, this was about six months after the last of our own cats had died, so there was no conflict among cats to deal with. Which is not to say there was no conflict.
We did have my beloved Toby, who was nine months old when Jake descended on our household like the wrath of God. Belgians are herding dogs, with the instincts that go along with that. In other words, they love to chase things.
Since Toby had been an only child until Jake arrived, he was purely delighted by the new arrival. That lasted for about forty seconds. When he first saw Jake,Toby stopped dead, wagged his tail and dropped into a play bow. Jake started growling, puffed up his fur and paced forward on stiff legs. Toby accepted what he thought was an invitation to play and pounced. Jake screamed his war cry and flew into Toby’s face, all claws and teeth. It was Toby’s turn to scream. He was utterly bewildered. It was Toby’s first experience with an entity that didn’t love him as much as he loved the whole world.
Nevertheless, he got the message. To the end of his life, Toby gave Jake a wide berth. If he had to walk by him, even at a distance of several feet, he would avert his head, scrunch his eyes closed and move by sideways, very, very slowly.
We decided that Jake could no longer safely have unfettered access to the outdoors. We were worried he would get hit by a car. We were worried he would make a toilet for himself in the neighbours’ flower beds and gardens. We were worried he would traumatize the neighbour’s children.
We were in Canada so we were reasonably confident that the none of our neighbours would be getting their guns to protect their cats, dogs, children and horticultural endeavours from Jake’s incursions. But someone might decide to transgress Canadian norms to the point of knocking on our door and asking us if we would mind keeping our cat inside. Why, if they were really angry, a neighbourhood petition was a definite possibility. Sure, it would be framed in the politest possible Canadian terms, but still.
Soon after his arrival, Jake stood by the door and yowled, indicating it was his pleasure to go outside. We told him no. We told him no repeatedly. He continued to yowl and scratch at the door.
He fixed us with an inimical stare, which conveyed as clearly as if he had said it, “You keep saying that word as if it’s supposed to mean something to me.”
The yowling persisted, broken at intervals by him strolling over and biting John’s calf. Jake only attempted that with me once. My reaction resulted in his immediate recognition that John was, by far and away, the weaker vessel.
In an effort to de-escalate the hostilities, we decided we would make a trip to the local pet store and procure a cat harness and lead, so we could tie Jake outside.
This mission having been successfully accomplished, we wrestled Jake into the harness. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘me’, John having retreated in fairly short order to lick his wounds. We deposited Jake on the front walk, with the lead tied to the porch. Jake flopped onto his side, swearing a blue streak.
John, who despite all evidence to the contrary, persists in believing that he can reason with his animals, explained at great length that it was for his own good. Jake spat at him contemptuously. I admit I also talk to animals, but at least I understood that there is no reasoning with a Siamese cat. I merely advised Jake that if he wanted to be outdoors, this was how it was going to be. John and I left him there, muttering imprecations, and went back inside.
A short while later, we checked on him. He was prone on the walkway, perfectly relaxed. Lying beside him was his harness, still attached to the lead. He had made no effort to go and explore his new neighbourhood after getting himself out of the harness. No, he chose to wait until we arrived, so we could fully appreciate the big finger he was giving us.
John scooped him up and scolded him. If he was going to escape his harness then John decreed that Jake would not be allowed to go out at all.
The next few days were a battle of wills between John and the cat. Jake would go to the door and scratch and yowl. John would tell him no. Jake would come over and bite John. John would tell him no. Jake would go to another door and yell. John would tell him no. Jake would get up on the desk where John was working and clock him one upside the head.
“How long is he going to keep doing that before he accepts that he’s not going out?” John asked me plaintively.
“You do understand that he is saying to himself right now, ‘How long do I have to keep doing this before that man understands that I am going out?’” I asked in turn.
This conversation took place at the kitchen table on a weekend morning when John was reading the newspaper over his coffee. The conversation ended abruptly when Jake returned from his latest plaint at the door, jumped onto the table, turned around and launched an epic spray of steaming hot, stinking urine at the back of John’s paper.
John yelled a curse, dropping the paper like it was toxic waste (which it was), and jumped to his feet. I just sat there, laughing my head off. John grabbed Jake, reached the door in about four long strides, opened it and threw Jake out.
And as quickly as that, Jake became an indoor/outdoor cat again. The neighbourhood would just have to take its chances. His point having been made, and the hierarchy firmly established, Jake never repeated that behaviour.
Jake lived to be 19, becoming more and more frail, but refusing to give up the ghost. Finally, when it got to the point of incontinence and not eating or drinking, I took him to the vet and stayed with him while he was euthanised. He went gently to sleep and we cried our eyes out. I’ve always loved the bad boys more than the angelic ones.
However, the last time we sold a house, Jake had still been in full rampaging mode. John had already left his professional practice and was at home, so he got to manage the showings. He would clean the house from top to bottom, load the dogs and cat in the car and back out of the door on his hands and knees, wiping away all evidence of human, canine and feline habitation as he went. He would then enjoy the fun excitement of driving around in the bitter winds of March for hours with three dogs and a howling Siamese cat crammed into the car, while nameless sightseers spent these same hours examining every nook and cranny of our house. They found fault with things we didn’t even realize were a thing. They didn’t like the wall colours, our agent would announce mournfully. They did realize they could repaint, right?
Nothing would be heard for days, either from our agent or theirs. Then our agent would call with bad news, because apparently the only reason you have an agent, is so she or he can point out the myriad ways in which your house is inferior to all the others for sale within a 100 mile radius.
Finally an offer would come, and it would be laughable, except we were too mad and discouraged to laugh. This process was repeated at intervals over months. We finally accepted an offer that was $40,000 less than the identical house behind us had sold for six months previously. John insisted we take the offer. He argued feelingly that it was worth 40k to not have to go on any more animal clown car rides.
But now in 1998, we congratulated ourselves that a long period of waiting for the house to sell would finally work in our favour.
So of course, Gerry the agent arrived back in town two weeks later and called to say that there were already not one, but two sets of hot prospects panting at the bit to make us offers. These were people who had looked at the house when it was up for sale by the previous owner, but apparently had let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’ in the somewhat obscure words of the Bard. We reminded Gerry that we were in no hurry to sell, as we had no idea where we were going. If these people thought they were going to get my beloved dream house at a fire sale price, they could think again. Gerry assured us they were serious.
So while the For Sale sign was literally being installed, we had our first showing. The next day the second set of prospective buyers went through. In short order, Gerry presented two competing offers. We ended up selling in a matter of days for more than we had paid. And this was at a time when the real estate market was in the doldrums.
Was this a sign we were doing the right thing, or a cruel joke by fate?
When you are scrubbing the toilets yet again, because you have the third showing of your house in two days and God forbid the toilet should look like it has actually been flushed since it came from the toilet showroom, you get through it by keeping in mind a vision of the exact house you are waiting to step up to and into. I had always thought how wonderful it would be to sell your house before choosing your next dream house. You could then go looking for the new one with the confidence that you could make a firm offer. What a concept.
Now we were in this coveted position. We had just one little problem – namely that we had no idea where we wanted to go, or what type of property we wanted, because we still didn’t know what we were going to be doing in our shiny new life.
The need to find a property focused our attention right smartly on that decision. The ideal property would be one that would leave open a variety of possibilities, including that I would return to the practice of law. At this point, I was still on medical leave of absence from my firm – a broken ankle or just plain crazy, take your pick. While a large part of me felt that it would be impossible to return to my partnership, my therapist was urging me not to burn any bridges while in the grip of severe depression.
Like I was in the mood to listen to him, with all his “logic” and “good sense”.
The search for a new property did help us to eliminate some of the options we had been considering. The first idea that was quickly ditched was that we could liquidate all of our assets and retire, supplementing our income with jobs at the Quickie Mart. We looked at modest homes that might have fit the bill for this lifestyle. Alas, having grown used to loads of space in our house and an acre separating us from our neighbours, looking out at the postage stamp size backyards of the cookie cutter houses in suburban landscapes made us unbearably claustrophobic.
The dog kennel idea was still the leading contender. We took out a map and drew a circle around Ottawa to about the distance we felt people would be willing to drive to bring their pet to an upscale boarding facility. I called the municipal authorities within that circle to check out the applicable regulations for boarding kennels. They were amazingly few. Puppy mills became totally comprehensible. In most places, as long as you had ten acres and a 100 metre setback from your neighbours, you could do whatever you wanted to. There were no provisions for inspection; no standards for care or hygiene.
We started driving around within our magic circle, looking for suitable places with “For Sale” signs. We had agreed that the location of the property and its suitability for different kinds of businesses was far more important than the layout or even condition of the house itself. There would be no ‘House Hunters’ type demands for an open floor plan or granite countertops.
Nonetheless, I quickly became discouraged, ‘quickly’ being after seeing two houses. John’s not the only one who is patience deficient, okay?
First, we went to an Open House to look at a property that was of a suitable size and location. The house was modern. The vibe was horrible. There were three inches of greasy dust on the many knickknacks. The house seemed dark and gloomy. There was a great lout of a teenager lolling about in bed on a day when an Open House was scheduled. Generally the whole feeling was “ugh”.
Clearly, while I might have accepted intellectually that the house really shouldn’t matter that much, mentally, I couldn’t face the prospect of leaving my dream house to live in a place that felt like a cave.
Gerry called and said he had just taken a listing for a place that might suit. It was an old renovated log house on the river. There were two parcels of land, divided by the railroad (John’s hobby and obsession). We could buy just the 60 acres on which the house sat, or an additional 40 acres with river frontage. We drove out to have a preliminary look.
John fell in love at first sight with this property. He kept saying he couldn’t believe he might own a place like that. This threw me for a complete loop. He had always professed himself to be a city boy through and through. One reason we had lived in the suburbs for so many years was because I wanted to move to the country and he wanted to move downtown. The suburbs had been the compromise. It was only after he left his firm and I achieved the negotiating leverage of being the only one who had to make the commute, that I persuaded him to move to a small town.
Now here he was, the guy who made it a rule never to express enthusiasm over anything (because in his universe, saying you were happy would just be an open invitation to fate to snatch it way) oohing and aahing over a house on a hundred acres. He said he didn’t care what the house itself was like. He just wanted this property, with the river frontage and the railway at his doorstep.
I was all for a hundred acres and river frontage, but to buy both parcels would be very expensive; as much or more than the house we were selling. There was a huge derelict barn on the property just begging for a demolition order from the municipality, and an extremely long laneway that would have to be kept plowed in the winter. It was also not near any major roads, which would make it difficult to direct the public there if we did open a kennel.
I kept these misgivings to myself, and we arranged to see the house.
Disaster. The house basically had two rooms downstairs. The large kitchen was renovated, but was filthy and smelled. The living room was occupied by a nanny and three sad, solemn looking children, who watched us mournfully. Upstairs were a few small, poky bedrooms and a large rec room where John could build his model railway.
I am not a particularly fanciful person. I grew up in a house where the previous owner had hung himself in the barn. John hated spending the night in that house, but I never knew a moment’s unease. It was John who always saw ghosts and spirits around every corner. Over the years, in the spirit of ‘every wife needs a hobby’, I very much enjoyed using this character quirk to torture him. On one memorable occasion, I lured him into a purportedly haunted house on his family’s ancestral farm, then shut the door on him, leaving him alone in the dark. I still treasure the memory of him shooting back out the door like a demented jack-in-the-box, screaming like an operatic soprano.
Now it was I who wanted to run screaming out of this house, the vibe was so bad. It seemed to me to ooze a miasma of despair and misery. We later discovered that the father of the sad children had been a physician accused of sexual improprieties with patients, who had taken his own life.
Make of that what you will.
I wanted to put aside my aversion for John’s sake. While I was trying to find a tactful and subtle way to express my firm belief that if we bought this house, death and destruction would surely rain down on us, John expressed the same misgivings. We decided to look further.
We spent a few more days cruising around country roads within the radius we had outlined on our map. We passed many ‘For Sale’ signs, but most of them were on run down clapboard houses with either too little or too much land.
One day we were driving down a road just five minutes from the town where we lived. As we neared the corner from where we would turn onto the main road back into town, we saw a ‘For Sale’ sign coming up. The house was screened from our view by a small woods. We drove slowly past, craning our necks for a sight of what was hidden behind the trees.
My heart leapt as I glimpsed a mellow old stone house with a few small outbuildings nestled around some paddocks. I had always wanted to live in a stone house.
John pulled down an adjacent side road and stopped the car where we could get a better view of the house. It drew our eyes like a magnet. Neither of us said anything for a few moments. There was a palpable feeling that something momentous was occurring. But we were both afraid we were doomed to disappointment yet again by some hidden defect. It might be well beyond our price range, or sitting on only a half acre of land. Maybe it was condemned and needed tens of thousands of dollars in repairs, or there was already an offer on it.
I called the real estate agent whose number was on the sign. The house was still available. It had four bedrooms, a big country kitchen and about 100 acres of land. We were told that some renovations had been done. The asking price was quite modest compared to what we were selling. The house was set back well over a hundred metres from the road, so it met the minimum regulations for a dog kennel. We exchanged a Look. This could be it. We called Gerry and asked him to arrange for us to see the house.
The day of the showing came. Here’s what we saw.
The house was charming; warm and inviting and full of character. I loved it from the moment I entered. We went through an old wooden porch to a door which opened directly into a huge, high-ceilinged, hardwood-floored, wainscoted kitchen. The scent of a wood fire burning in a big old-fashioned iron stove invited us to come in to the warmth.
The two windows in the kitchen were five feet tall and inset two feet deep into the stone walls. The inset was oak panelled and each window was surrounded by six inch wide wood mouldings. The door from the kitchen to the front hall also had rich dark wood mouldings, and a stained glass transom window above it, which was said to be original to the house. There was a pantry cupboard under the back stairs which I could envisage lined with shelves instead of piled floor to ceiling with boxes as was presently the case.
John was happy that there were two staircases. He had fallen in love with the backstairs in the dream house. He was mildly paranoid about the possibility of a house fire and welcomed the additional escape route offered by a second staircase.
The hallway leading from the kitchen was wide and ended in a magnificent original wood front door, richly moulded and framed top and sides by red and blue stained glass.
The living room was long and narrow, but had three more deep, oak framed windows and yet one more original stained glass transom window over the door. The dining room door boasted still another. There was a large pantry off the hall which had been converted to a powder room/laundry room. Another of the beautiful tall windows let in lots of light there.
Upstairs, there were four decent sized bedrooms, although only one had a closet. A tiny, but functional bathroom had been fitted up under the eaves. The original broad pine plank floors upstairs were still in place.
The cellar was horrible, but we expected that in an old stone house.
Outside, there was a log stable with three new box stalls, plus two open stalls for horses. Across the yard, an old hay barn and a chicken shed were being used for storage. All of this was on a flat, square hundred acres of farmland, currently rented out to a neighbouring farmer.
Yes. That’s what we saw.
Here’s the reality, as I came to understand it, once reason had returned to its throne.
The lane from the road went through dripping, bare-branched trees forming a little copse on either side it. Halfway along, it dipped down into what was clearly a wet, marshy (possibly flood prone) swale. At the entrance to the rickety wooden porch lay a huge amount of dog poop in the slushy snow, waiting for the spring melt. Obviously the owners tied one of their four dogs to the porch to do its business, and they hadn’t bothered to clean up.
The house was about 130 years old, and the porch looked like it was not only original, but hadn’t seen a paint brush since.
Almost all of those beautiful deep, tall windows that I was so in love with were covered in plastic to keep out drafts, had broken panes and would obviously have to be replaced. One of the kitchen windows looked out to the covered porch, making the kitchen quite dark. That window actually disappeared below the level of the kitchen counter and both the frame and the glass were in splinters. (The photo above is post-renovation.)
The reason the windows were so deep was because of the thickness of the stone walls. Those walls contained no insulation. The chinks in the stone would let in the winds of winter. With the high ceilings, it would be a bitch to heat.
The kitchen counter was sad looking arborite, circa 1967. The stainless steel sink did not, alas, live up to that adjective. It was stained. Oh yes, it was definitely stained. Under the sink, the drain pipe dripped dismally into a pail.
The kitchen cupboards were knotty pine which had been finished in a shiny, orangey stain. They matched the knotty pine that had been installed on the ceiling with hundreds of screw nails. Ugly doesn’t begin to describe it. It was the decor that Satan might have ordered for the area of hell reserved for evil interior decorators.
The kitchen drawers were sticky and difficult to work. Once we pried them open, piles of disgusting mouse droppings were revealed. Someone had placed heavy vinyl in the drawers, in a clearly futile attempt to keep the mice out.
The dishwasher had cobwebs in it. The refrigerator was circa 1974 and clumsily placed on the wall just inside the door to the porch, far away from the equally ancient stove.
The wainscoting was painted in a shade that was called “ox blood” when I was a kid, and was reserved for men’s shoes. The walls above the wainscoting seemed to be rough plaster, or perhaps some sad attempt at stucco. It looked like they had never been painted.
The hardwood kitchen floor had numerous scars and burns from the wood stove. In the corner by the kitchen door, there was actually a hole in the floor that looked like the kitchen pump might have lived there at some point. Either that, or it was where they disposed of the bodies.
The rest of the floors downstairs were covered in cheap peel and stick tiles, except the living room, which had ugly carpeting, covering who knew what. You could feel soft spots in the underfloor as you walked across the carpet. There were rust stains on the cheap flooring under a large chest freezer, which improbably resided in the downstairs powder room. The powder room amenities consisted of a toilet and a cheap sink bolted to the wall. The walls were painted a virulent shade of bubblegum pink.
The dining room was completely empty of furniture. A stepladder stood on a chipped tiled floor which was of a decrepitude surprising even in this house. There was another mysterious hole in the floor of that room, this one about two feet square.
The floors upstairs were indeed the original six inch wide pine planks. But they had all been painted over in a depressing shade of dark brown, except for one room which boasted an eye blistering turquoise finish. Unpainted plywood had been cut and fitted to cover the holes where presumably, stove pipes had originally come through. All the floors upstairs were riddled with gouges, scrapes, gaps and splinters and sloped at such variable degrees that you felt like you were walking through a fun house.
The only full bathroom was about three feet wide and ten feet long, crammed into a space under the eaves at the top of the stairs. It looked like it had been installed in about 1964 and not updated since. Okay, in fairness, that wasn’t strictly true. Under the cheap peel and stick floor tile that was peeling and not sticking, one could discern two earlier generations of peel and stick tile.
The bathtub was crammed under the sloping roof, into a dark space barely big enough to hold it. That area boasted a surround made of thin boards that tried and failed to pass themselves off as tile. The silicone between the tub and these boards was crumbling. There were rust stains down the tub under the tap, a dead giveaway that the water was full of minerals and would have to be treated.
There was nothing at all in the way of storage space, model train/hobby space or workshop space. The basement was a dirt floored, stonewalled cellar, with channels around the edges of the walls. Frogs were swimming there. I swear some of them were albino mutants. A sump pump made ominous gurgles.
So of course – we fell in love with this house on the spot.
With a few, a very few, renovations, this house would be perfect!!! It would be perfect for a bed and breakfast. It would be perfect to live in if I kept up with my law practice. The hundred acres meant we could easily put in a kennel. We could board horses in the stable to supplement our income. Perhaps the stables could be converted to a kennel? We could even farm if it came to that.
Visions of ourselves as self-sufficient country folk dazzled our minds. There was a boarded up well in the front yard. We could raise chickens and sell eggs at the roadside. John waxed lyrical about an apple orchard.
Yes. Okay. The house had a few drawbacks. We weren’t so far gone we didn’t know that. Broken windows, slanty floors, no insulation or storage, a disgusting kitchen, horrible bathrooms – if you said it like that, sure, it sounded bad. We would get a building inspection to tell us whether there were structural problems. But everything else could be fixed. Deep down, we both knew that, short of being told the house was in imminent danger of collapsing on our heads, we were home, baby, home.
We put in an offer the next day, and concluded the agreement in about a week, subject only to the building inspection. To no one’s surprise but ours, we got it for substantially less than the asking price.
The engineer who did the building inspection found the house to be in remarkably sound shape for a 130 year old structure. There was evidence of bats in the attic – a lot of evidence. We agreed upon a price rebate equivalent to the cost of getting the bat guano removed. As we knew, the windows would have to be replaced. Some of the stone work would eventually have to be re-mortared, but otherwise, it was a go. John was going to get his acreage (albeit without the waterfront and railroad), and I was going to get a stone house with charm and character.
We set a closing date for June, one month before we had to give up my dream house, because even in our love-sick state, we knew we should do some renovating before moving in, specifically the kitchen and bathrooms – and the bats of course.
It was now about six weeks after that fateful partnership meeting. We had sold our house, bought another, and were on our way to our new life, whatever that might be. I still suffered anxiety about the future, but undoubtedly not as much as I would have, had I been in my right mind. My fears and depression had mostly turned to hopefulness and exhilaration.
Yay!!!!
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