weird story...but true

My friend Heather has been going through an interesting experience(s) while moving into her current house and it got me to thinking about one of my particularly weird moves.

The year 1985...around March or so. I was a senior in High School (yeah, I'm THAT old!) My mom and her second husband (they divorced about 4 years later) had finally bought a house. Up until that point we had been living in a very nice 14' X 70' trailer. And looking at Google Maps it appears that the trailer is still there! LOL! Anyway, they had been searching for quite some time and had found a house that they could afford.

The reason they could afford this house was that the seller had basically let it fall appart. See the seller was a single mom with 5 kids. The three older ones should have been out on their own, but weren't. The two oldest were stoners...and the next one was an unwed mother. Her two youngest kids were mentally handicapped and lived in the room upstairs near their mom. This was a long skinny room and they had decided to put up a wall in the center of the room to divide it into two rooms. This "wall" was just 2x4's and it might have been cardboard attached to it. The boys still wet the bed and they had put the mattresses directly on the floor, so the hardwood floor was warped.

There were many other lovely features to this home like the upstairs bathroom not being functional. The crank out windows (a feature I've only seen on houses in FL) was broken in a permanently open position. They wanted the banister to be silver so they spraypainted it while it was still attached...thus ruining the hardwood stairs.

But that isn't what made this moving story so interesting...

The interesting part is this... When they had the closing the seller asked if she could rent the house back from us for an extra 30 days to give her older kids time to move out. My parents agreed to this since we didn't have a buyer for the trailer yet.

So the day after they were supposed to have moved out we went over to clean and paint. But when we got there we were in for a HUGE suprise. The two older kids had not yet moved out! They seemed totally confused that they were even supposed to be out by that date. It seems that their mother had not told them anything (especially where she was moving to!) she had just left. I guess this was her way of finally getting rid of them.

Since the house was now ours the boys were rushing to collect their things and get out of the house. It was pretty comical. Another suprise was that the seller had not bothered to take many of her things. So we got the added expense of hiring a dumpster and hauling out all of her old furniture and stuff. It was a mess! I forget how many dumpsters it took to get rid of everything (AND NO, none of it was worth keeping.)

So after we got rid of the furniture and other things that we didn't want, we went to work taking down the wild animal print wall paper with silver highlights. My mom's second husband took out the toilets and poured muratic acid threw them to clean off the years of crud. The poor carpet cleaner service that we hired tried 3 or 4 times to get the dirt out of the carpets. We ended up just ripping them out. I forgot to mention the cat feces. And she left her cat too!

Oh and the two youngest boys had shaved this long haired cat to make a sweater for the new baby. Poor kitty. Our nextdoor neighbor took him in when he finally let her.

Eventually we got the house into something that people could live in. The walls were redone. The staircase was stripped and refinished and finally carpeted since we couldn't get all the stains off even after using paint stripper numerous times. For a very long time we only used the down stairs bathroom because the upstairs one had a leak we couldn't find...or maybe it needed to be entirely redone...I forget.

Once we got the front yard looking decent we noticed many For Sale signs going up. It seemed that the neighbors were waiting to sell their house until our eyesore was fixed up so they could get a good price for their house.

The very sad part of this story is that the house is in a very nice neighborhood. Our house is the one that is about 4 down with the L shaped pool* in the back yard. My grandmother's house was in the same subdivision and many of the rich kids from my school lived there. Of course our moving there did not increase my status in school to rich kid. And I didn't live there for too long. I moved out in January of the following year.



*The house did not come with the pool. A while after I moved out my grandmother & grandfather moved in and my grandmother paid to put in the pool for my grandfather. The pool has a special ramp on it so they could get him in and out.