They don’t make ’em like that any more
A Facebook friend and I post pix and trade comments & daydreams re gingerbread follies. We’re both very into turrets (no phallic jokes, please.) Alas, she lives in an apartment and I in a white rectangular box that resembles a slightly oversized and less efficiently laid-out mobile home. At least I have a rococo yard (a jumble of flowers and a naked-man statue and a chain-saw carved dragon and a ritual circle and a cobblestone firepit area and two cat runs and a gazebo and…).
I live in the old central area of town, and many other of the houses are interesting, idiocyncratic, or at least period. Despite the general air of decay, I find them preferable to the neat identical (expensive!) houses of the outlying suburbs, with their surgical landscaping.
Okay, I recently visited one of these and once past the off-putting front I felt something of a pang – really wonderful kitchen and cozy LR with fire (fake?), and the tiny backyard was private and cozy, and probably the upkeep took a hour a week, as compared to the hour+ a day, and never catching up, that I have inflicted upon myself with a big yard, the lawn of which I smothered and turned into a little park. (The time saved in this suburban backyard I visited was probably needed to keep up with the house interior.)
A pity that the construction biz figured out mass-production. When I was a kid, you wanted a house you hired a “contractor”, who built you the one-of-a-kind house himself (he lived in one down the street) – and these were affordable (working-class neighborhood).
Guy who drops off my ready-made meals when he brings his own to town is putting his house up for sale. Half a million. Squashed in a small faux neighborhood of identicals, but interior (pix on line) fantastic – 4 beds, 3 baths, state of the art kitchen (which he evidently doesn’t use), “high-end” furniture he’ll throw in (not the dog), pretty snazzy, and a postage-stamp back yard facing the highway that he calls “spacious” (the yard, not the highway). If I had half a mil., I wouldn’t use it for that.
But if I had $4 mil., I would use it for this:
12/05/2020 @ 5:01 pm
When the home was ‘your castle’, was it supposed to look like the house in the photo?
12/09/2020 @ 2:57 pm
If you were rich, yeah (the more ridiculous, the more you were showing off)
12/06/2020 @ 12:39 am
That house is spectacular.
12/09/2020 @ 2:58 pm
That’s one word for it
12/06/2020 @ 9:22 am
I see a maintenance headache. (I live in a 107 year old non-gaudy home I can’t keep up with.)
12/09/2020 @ 3:00 pm
Yeah, well, I left a 150+ year old log house after 35 years partly for that reason (now feel sad/weird/jealous seeing photos of what the new owner has done to it)
12/06/2020 @ 10:10 am
Amazing house Myriad. Maybe the yard upkeep is easy, but I’m glad I don’t have to pay a painter every six years to maintain all those colors.
My house began life c1850 as a horse stable that belonged to my neighbor. Downstairs is one room that encompasses a kitchen area, living area, dining area. A wall of what were once three stable doors are now floor to ceiling windows, delightful in the summer, kinda cold and drafty in the winter. Upstairs used to be the hayloft, with a big window now where the hayloft door once was, 36 panes, floor to roof line. One side of the hayloft is my bedroom, the other side is my studio. Both look out on the hayloft window. 939 sq. ft. I feel like Heidi living here, in her grandfather’s attic.
I bought this house for about a fourth of its current market value. If I was willing to move, I could buy a huge house with an acre of land in a different state, but when you’re older, you know yourself, and what you need and what works for you, and your home is your everything. While I love those big old historic houses, owning one would make me crazy and use up all my retirement dollars to maintain it.
Your yard sounds dreamy, like a Whole Earth Catalog hippie heaven. If I had a naked man sculpture in my front yard, I’d be soon hearing from the historic commission, but what fun, and a great place to hang the garden hose 🙂
12/09/2020 @ 3:29 pm
Your home sounds wonderful – as an artist’s home should be. I have always had a yen for a house that was originally some other kind of building. When I bought my log house years ago, I was really tempted by a small stone church with a choir loft. But I figured it was beyond my capabilities to fix up whereas the log house was easier. But I had dreams about that church for years afterwards…
I bought my log house and its acreage for a ridiculous price…and when I sold it was for much more (even taking into account the differences in figures in the years) – a miracle I still marvel over. I’d thought I’d die there…but as I approached 80, and after visiting my daughter on the west coast, I decided I wanted a more manageable scene and climate for my last days. (New owner just sent photos of snowfall and how pretty it looks – I had a pang, but basically am happy with my rain-forest soggy scene.)
Hah! The naked-man statue is in the back yard. If it were in the front, it would have been ripped off by now. In the first months of our living here, someone stole solar lights from the front path and a broken wheelbarrow (they did me a favor taking away the latter). Backyard is safe – no access from sides or back – well, from back for someone strolling along train tracks and willing to wade through yards of blackberry bramble and climb over a six-foot chain-link fence. Access from the front is thru gates (it’s a small duplex, younger daughter in other unit, so a gate on each side) that were installed by someone with odd ideas about latches – one of them is pretty much guaranteed to baffle anyone.
12/09/2020 @ 5:48 pm
“I was really tempted by a small stone church with a choir loft”.
Wow. Were there stained glass windows? I’d be tempted to buy it even if there was only one. I’d be concerned about heating it though, a high ceiling would suck up your heated air and make you need to heat more. But if there’s really a jesus, he’d know where he could find you 🙂
Ditto, buying cheap, and the shock of my next door neighbor, a real estate agent, who gave me an impromptu appraisal. Your new owner is probably really happy there. You didn’t sell to a developer or a flipper, but someone who loves it enough to take a picture of it in the snow and send it to you. That’s important to me too, that someone who will love the place as much I have gets to be the next steward. I still find little clues about how much the previous owners of my place loved it up.
Anyone who’d try to steal your naked man sculpture, you might want to invite in for coffee, because Fun Person With Sense of Humor and Taste.
12/09/2020 @ 5:57 pm
No stained glass (yeah, that would have been irresistable), just a plain no-frills country protestant thing – had previously been lived in and there was a giant furnace at the pulpit area…but yes, the high ceiling and all those single-pane windows in an Ontario winter…I was semi-practical
12/06/2020 @ 1:42 pm
Where’s Levon’s porch swing?
Cool venues for the Xmas Star 21 DEC 20…800 years last time for star bright!
3 wise guys, 99 red balloons for you Myriad, and God Bless the Child! Where was I? !O! door to door with my clipboard soliciting signatures vs. polychlorinated biphenyls…I’d a way cool safari helmet and Blues Brothers’ shades…Like the way U do the things you do! No dancin’ in
the streets for time and light being…reflexive pivot mite be the 21st…just around the corner…!& does the house look out over the ocean? Or can you hear the cell doors clank faraway from Folsom…quite some swirling ship…wondren’. All but the moat. Hey if there’s a polar bear rug it’d be a bit much…who wants to walk to the Aleutians any. WAY! Irish Setter and bentwood rocker from Augusta? Rose’ toast to that 3′ x 4′ portrait of Jimmy Doolittle? May rain tomorrow.
Snowed early with sunflower seed sized pellets…evening cool at high noon in FDR’s Rustbelt. {LO;}
hello
12/09/2020 @ 3:31 pm
Almost bought a (single size) porch swing at Goats on a Roof but got a couple female buddhas instead.
12/07/2020 @ 2:29 pm
I always thought that Victorian architecture was the macrame’ of wall art.
12/09/2020 @ 3:32 pm
a good comparison! (I like macrame as well, tho not to live with or in)
12/09/2020 @ 7:12 pm
Oddly, my room on the second floor of a house my senior year in college had a stained glass window. I have no idea how it got there.