Eep!

Well, we toured my old house. It's... really different. Somebody (probably in the mid to late 1970s) redecorated practically every room with heavy, dark wood. The honey-colored hardwood floors are now dark brown. The living room and hallway wall-to-wall carpet is gone, with the wood underneath stained dark. Dark, dark paneling is up in the living room and my room. Dark beams were added to the ceiling. It's very, very 1970s. After seeing that, I expected the kitchen to be harvest gold or avocado, but they surprised me: putty-colored fake brick, trimmed with light blue. The kitchen was pale blue in my day too; tile up to about five feet and then paint on plaster.

That was then (and that was Mom)...


...this is now:


In my old bedroom, the glass handles on the cabinets above the closet are the same ones my mother installed there. Other than that, the room looks radically different. Between the dark paneling and the dark floor, it gives the sensation of being inside a cigar box. In my day everything was light and airy, and the room looked larger.

They kind of enclosed the breezeway and garage, but kind of didn't either. Though there's paneling on the walls, I suspect there's no insulation. The garage floor is painted but otherwise looks just as it did when my dad used to park our 1952 Pontiac there -- complete with floor drain and the crack that bisected the concrete. They built another little room off the breezeway, into the back yard -- and I didn't immediately realize what they'd done until I spotted the curved edge of the original slab. The floor of the room was the patio my dad built! They'd filled in with more concrete to make the corner square, but it was easy to see where the edge of the patio was.

The basement -- ohhhhhhh, mercy. Mercy. It's hard to describe. Our wonderful rec room has stained walls, some half-built wooden and concrete structures, suspended ceiling drooping in places, ugly brick-red linoleum at one end, and a pervasive odor of mildew and cat urine. Oh, but the furnace was exactly the same coal-to-gas conversion monster that was there in my day. I'd forgotten how low some of the beams and furnace pipes were: Husband and Young'un kept having to duck their heads to avoid injury.

Outside, the tree I used to climb is gone. Another tree is there, though, at the side of the yard. The heavy iron T-shaped clothesline posts are still there. Somebody put down a concrete pad from the room that used to be the patio, all along the back side of the house. It looks awful. The two-car garage at the back of the property is jam cram full of JUNK. I'd want to be wearing a biohazard suit to clean it out; I'll bet it's crawling with brown recluses. The whole yard is enclosed in a chain-link fence which has rusted. Out in front, at the very front of the property, stands a rusty mailbox on a pole. It's the mailbox we brought with us when we moved from our other home -- it shows up in pictures taken of me when I was a toddler, so it's almost fifty years old.

Are we going to buy the place? We're considering it, and looking at our options. We wouldn't be physically doing the work of restoring it ourselves; we don't have the time. We'd want an actual rehabber-type to do that work. We could do things like painting, papering, landscaping and so on. I'd want to get rid of that nasty concrete slab, and we'd probably just dismantle the "patio room". I'm going to talk to some people at work who own rental property; get some advice.