Wednesday, March 29, 2023

This Old House

 We are pretty busy here, so posting will be a bit erratic. We are working on our final renovation, a sweet Craftsman bungalow with lot of cool little details - wonderful oak doors, leaded glass in the front window, coffered ceiling in the livingroom, columns, hardwood floors. Amazing place. 

When we bought the house a few years back, it was a mess. Tim and I argued, as we always do, and the argument did not vary from script:  I didn't want him to buy it. He thought it was a great deal.  In the end, I got sick of hearing him pester about it and just told him to do what he was going to do. I begged him, for the love of Pete, to just stop talking about it. 

So. We ended up with a hoarder's house. There was a hole in the roof which had been open long enough that it damaged the floor of the attic. You could sit on the toilet and contemplate the sky. The first order of business was replacing the roof. Then we had the old windows replaced. Then the hoeing out began. We are not done to this day.

Then we got side tracked, A woman had fallen in love with another little house we'd bought. She was in the process of selling her house, but the deal had fallen through a couple times. Suddenly, her house was sold, and we had 60 days to get her new home together. (We did it. We made it, but I was literally staining the floor in the dining room as she moved her bedroom set in.) 

We took a short break after our hard work, intending to get back to work after a couple months. 

Tim rewired the place. He put in a forced air furnace and all the ductwork. But then, unexpectedly, our longest tenant died of covid, a horrible shock.

I did not even remember what his apartment looked like. We'd bought the house with him in it. We never raised his rent for the 10 years we had him because he was living in our only unrenovated apartment. He never complained, probably afraid that we'd raise his rent. We did renovate his kitchen, but you cannot renovate an entire apartment when someone is living there. He'd been there for 17 years all told and when we did get in there and get to work, it was a total gut. It took several months. We got that done, just in time for our Jim to move right in. 

Once again, Tim and I decided to take a couple months off before getting back to the hoarder's house.

Then he got sick in the fall and stayed sick for nearly 3 months.

Finally, we are once again working on that renovation.  Tim was drywalling a ceiling in the bedroom. I was hoeing out another bedroom, odds and ends really. The bulk of the stuff has been hauled out already. 


Old Christmas cards signed by names that I recognized from around town, business owners back in the day, important people, The fellow that owned the house owned an insurance company. He was an important man and belonged to every business organization in town, it seemed like. He was a Jaycee. A Mason. A Shriner. An Oddfellow, and there was plenty of evidence of his busy life. I found a stack of love letters from him to his sweetheart. 1952. He was in the military, and his letters were full of his important duties even then. I felt bad putting those letters in a garbage bag along with all the other flotsam of his life, but I knew that no one would want them. They were letters to a woman he married, a woman who packed up her two sons and fled across country. That busy important man was quite an alcoholic. 

He married again. This woman worked at the local Penny's store, back when Penny's was a big deal. She had inherited her parent's home after they died, and it appears that she simply moved their things into the attic and began replacing those things with her own. Somewhere along the line, she met an attractive insurance man who won her over and swept her right into his busy life. She seemed to have really made good use of her employee discount. There are new kitchen appliances that have never been removed from their boxes. Sadly most of them are out of date and useless. (Think trash compactor for example. Still in its box!) Midcentury modern light fixtures,  still in their boxes. Drapes. Shades. Sheets. 3 sewing machines. 3 vacuums. Glassware never unpacked. You name it, Table ware. Fancy table cloths. Just stacks and stacks of stuff. 

They never had children, She ended up dying of cancer. The house went to him, all full of his wife's memories before him, all of their shared memories together, and so. much. stuff. 

He married once more, to a woman with grown children. She had a house of her own, so he walked out of that house, shutting the door on all those things and moved into her home. 

Her children could not stand him. He was an alcoholic and he had a mean streak. In the end, she too got cancer. It was then that the marriage fell completely apart. He moved back into his house, filled to the rafters with stuff, little pathways between piles of magazines and garbage bags, one bag stuffed with cigarette coupons, another with salt and pepper shakers from probably every restaurant he'd ever gone to. Televisions stacked up in order of when they quit and were replaced by newer models, and piles and piles of new things, bought, never opened just stacked against the walls. 

It is sad to think of him living in such circumstances. The house had broken windows and that roof that needed replaced. It must have been freezing in the winter. Eventually he got throat cancer from the cigarettes that he'd so carefully saved the coupons from. It could have been from the liquor. In any case, the house went to his last wife. She was too sick to do anything with it. After she died, it went to her children, none whom had the slightest interest in that filthy, jam packed, tumbledown house. 

And along came Tim. 

We spent weeks, literally shoveling debris out the broken windows on the second floor into the back of the truck. We made many trips to the transfer station to dump the things out. 

One of the pieces of paper led me to a name I recognized. There were so many family pictures and slides, and home movies. We felt as if these things should matter to someone. They did. The woman who would become his second wife had a sister, and they were close. For a while the sister and her children had lived there in that house with their aunt and had some very happy childhood memories. Once their mother was back on her feet, they moved on and years later, they asked the insurance man for some of the family things, the old pictures from their side of the family.  

He told them that he had burned it all. 

He hadn't, though.

It was all there. 

They came and sorted through. They took home movies, and slides. "Need a projector?" we asked. "Here you go. Here's a slide projector. Movie projector. Here are the screens." They went off with a truck load of stuff too. We were happy to see it go. For their part, they were moved to tears to see old movies of them as children and of their long dead mother playing with them.

Today, unbelievably, after all this time, I was still throwing away things. Old love letters from a love that did not last. Awards. Speeches. Invitations and Christmas cards, in between as I ran back an forth to help Tim lift drywall into place. 

Yet another truckload of junk leaves, and another truckload of furniture will be going to someone who refinishes and sells furniture: "Nothing. Take it. Take anything you want. It needs to be gone. They thought they hit the jackpot. Truth be told, so did we.

As the house empties out, it begins to feel spacious. As the dirt and nicotine gets cleaned away, it seems brighter.  I roll up and drag 70 year old rugs out to the truck. I sweep. The house begins to feel happier and in my imagination, I get the idea that it is grateful. 

I am a silly woman. 

53 comments:

  1. This is a novel, a brilliant short story that had me enthralled from So. We ended up in hoarder's house. You are a fantastic writer.

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    1. Everybody in this world has a story to tell, and most of our lives can be broken down into chapters. Thank you. Although, I found so many typos in this, I was embarrassed. (They've been fixed).

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  2. Great story of a house and some wacky people. It is sad that we have so many things and people don't want them. I'm at the point in my life where I have to get rid of things. Nobody wants them.

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    1. Wacky people??? Red, I resemble that remark!

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  3. How absolutely Wonderful that you were able to give back the photos, slides and home movies, plus the equipment to view them with!!!! Such a thoughtful thing to be able to do! Good for You Both!

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    1. It was the most amazing thing. I found an old coloring sheet for a store contest. It had been carefully colored and a name on it written in a childish hand. I recognized the name as a friend of a friend. I called that friend, who called her friend, and there was an excited family of siblings, to be sure. It was a wonderful thing to be a part of.

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  4. I have a house full of things I need to get rid of, I told my kids come get anything you want. My son took an old ice box his dad had refinished. I think it was just because it was his dad's fine work on it. My house is almost 3000 sq.ft. and way too much house for one person. I need a smaller house or a healthy old husband to help me. Probably a smaller house is the wiser thing.

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    1. I'd definately go with the smaller house! :)

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    2. Smaller house is smarter, I think. The only offers has been a 93-year-old man and a 55 year old,. I was 76 at the time

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    3. Quite honestly, Ellie, I don't know that I have the patience to train another one. :-)

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    4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. If I were giving a prize to the most interesting blog I read, I believe it would be yours. You write so well, and always have such good, human stories. I hope you never run out of something to write about.

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    1. Run out of stories??? If you ever met my husband, you'd know that would never happen. While we are doing this, we are starting a new build. The basement will be dug and poured as soon as we have the proper permits.

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    1. I have been wondering how you are doing, Doug.

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  7. If you still have junk that might be useful to someone, there may be orgs like Nextdoor, Buy Nothing, or Freecycle operating in your area that might help you re-home some of the junk…

    And apparently midcentury modern is having a moment 🙂

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    1. It is. Understand that any of the appliances still boxed, the lights, etc. all that goes to Goodwill. The cloth things are pretty much dry rotted and worthless, which was heart breaking, because one of the rugs was from the 40s and I would have given my teeth to have it. It simply could not be saved. The furniture was given away. I knew furniture flippers. I called them and they came over to see what we had, and took virtually everything. Metal scrap went to a salvage yard. The cupboards of liquor bottles (empty) were recycled. The truck loads that went to the transfer station were entire dump truck loads of old magazines, boxes and boxes of canceled checks, careful records of his child support payments (years and years of them). It appears that he had a home office and that room had boxes and boxes of paperwork. You just cannot imagine the amount of papers we trucked out of there! But everything that can possibly be of use to someone is saved and donated.

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    2. Isn’t it shocking how much WORK it is to give things away?? :D

      Thank you for doing this; the planet and the recipents are lucky beneficiaries of your largesse!

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  8. What a wonderful story of rescuing a house that no one has loved for years.
    We moved into the home of an alcoholic but he had just smashed up glass all over the garden!

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    1. It is hard to tell exactly when the house was left for good, but the man died in 2013. We acquired it about 6 or 7 years later. The attic held the very old things We found a box of photographs up there that even contained a Victorian death photo, and post cards showing the destruction of Paris during WWI. Our fellow seemed to vent on people, not his 'stuff'.

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  9. So the hoarder's house had good bathroom ventilation. That's a good thing.
    What an amazing history of the house you've collated. The house and its life speaks.
    My mother told here children and grandchildren to take what they wanted from her house before it was sold and no one really wanted anything.
    You and Tim must be such practical people to do such extensive renovations. Tim's skills in so many areas seem amazing, rather like my late father.

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    1. Initially, Tim had very limited experience, but he learned electrical and heating from my brother in law, His uncle had helped him build an addition on to his house, so he had the skills for that. He fine tuned them watching others work. He taught himself tiling from you-tube, and if he comes across anything he doesn't know, he heads straight back to you-tube.

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  10. What a wonderful story you tell of past history in the house and things returned to rightful owners.

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    1. We have always tried to make sure that anything left behind goes where it is meant to be.

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  11. Looking forward to the walls singing after being muffled so long.

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    1. It is kind of cool to see things slowly coming together.

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  12. I have always been attracted to that occupation, buying old houses, fixing them up and selling them. I know one forum that I read suggests renting/selling them as an income like what you and Tim do. But the area we live has been the poorest in the state in the past which makes margins slim to non-existent. It won't be long until I physically won't want to do such a thing anyway and allow that dream to officially pass.

    I had a great uncle like the horder you describe. It always saddened me that our family "allowed" him to live in such a manner but in reality, we didn't have much of a say. He wasn't endangering himself that I could see, but it was a tremendous amount of work to clear and clean the house after he died.

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    1. Our county is very poor as well. We lost one of our biggest employers and are hearing discomforting things about another. This house is a few blocks from the hospital, so we are hopeful that it will maintain value, and attract someone who works there. Tim has a very shrewd eye for things like that, and every house he's picked has done well for us, either as a rental or as a flip.

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  13. I don’t think silly, maybe industrious, maybe indefatigable.

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  14. "This Ole House'- Shaking Stevens.

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    1. You have an amazing mental jukebox. You shuffle through a few disks and come up with a perfect song for the occasion!

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  15. Goodness, you are a busy couple! And so productive! Good Job!
    I am glad that Tim is feeling well enough to work again.

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  16. What is unbelievable to me is that Tim would want to take this sort of job on and that you would join him in it. That is so much work! It is a beautiful thing to have done but my god!
    You are Tim are certainly not afraid of work!

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    1. Our first house was an American four square that needed to be jacked up and rebeamed. That was scary.

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    2. This is probably th 15th or 16th renovation.

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  17. Bet the house is breathing easier now! Whew! You two be careful! Linda in Kansas

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    1. This renovation is not scary really. Some have been.

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  18. I have lived in my house for 50 yrs. I am far from being a hoarder but I do have stuff. After reading your blog today, I am going to start going through all my crap and clear it. Don't want the neighbours seeing some one piling it in a dumpster. My brother did this with Mom and Dad;s place and it was sad. Thanks for the push Debby. Love your blog. Barb in Canada

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    1. When we make our last move, there will be some serious downsizing. I find that I am not nearly as tempted by 'stuff' anymore.

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  19. I wonder if a trash compactor still in its original box has value as a collectible? I hope your furniture dealer is able to make use of all that Penney's overstock! I am fascinated by hoarding although I must admit I don't really understand it. Anyway, glad you're able to free the house of its burden and ready it for a new life.

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    1. The light fixtures are just going to Goodwill. I peeked. One is a wrought iron chandelier thing and the others are brass lights on arms that swing out and direct the light where you need it.

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  20. So much STUFF!! I can't imagine having to deal with that. I've noticed the older I get the less sentimental I am.

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    1. Knowing that I'll be downsizing is really a push in the right direction for me.

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  21. Your posting was a push in the right direction. My daughter has just returned from helping her cousin clean out my s-i-l's house. She had worked hard to declutter but it's still work. Now my husband and I have GOT to do the same.

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    1. We will be having the basement dug for our new house, and the basement will be poured this summer. It is a much smaller house which will require quite a bit of downsizing. My kids are probably cheering over that!

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  22. Holy cannoli. Will we ever get to see before and after pictures? Best of luck bringing this one across the finish line.

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  23. What a couple of hard workers. You are doing such a kindness to distant family members -- and the PLANET -- by making sure that everything gets to its new or rightful home. I salute you and your tired muscles! I saw a restored Craftsman online within the last couple of weeks, and it has always been my favorite style. They feel very home-y to me.
    Bonnie in Minneapolis

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    1. I'm going to start getting pictures on. I am experimenting with that new camera.

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