The House Deferred

A Handyman's Dream.

Who falls for that these days, anyway?  

Us.

It all started with the 300 square foot cottage two doors down from Miss Josie's.  Miss Josie took care of Mimi for a few hours every day and she lived in Eagle Rock, an old  city neighborhood that had only a couple of years before been so  gang-riddled that even affordability wasn't an attractive enough incentive to move in.  

But by the time we started bringing Mimi to Miss Josie's comfortable house the neighborhood had changed dramatically because of the housing insanity that had gripped the city.  The little pre-war houses and woody Craftsman bungalows had been snapped up by flippers and angst-ridden buyers amidst the smell of fresh paint, sawdust and landscaping dirt and the prices they were paying bordered on ridiculous.  Bordered on that is until the falling-down cottage two doors down from Miss Josie went on sale.  The guy living in it had been there since he'd bought it in 1945 for $250.00 and the day the realtor visited was the day he took out his corncob pipe and blessed the amazing stupidity of city folks.   It wasn't much bigger than a garden shed and the porch sagged so much you didn't need any steps to get to the scruffy dirt patch that passed for a lawn.

The real estate company put a fancy-looking post up with a plastic box with a sheet listing the exciting 'details' of this wreck.  Two bedrooms (where?) bath (I was looking in the backyard) and cozy living room (for two standing up)  in a Craftsman cottage with lovely detailing (hmmm, I suppose the sagging porch was a miracle of nature).  Makes a great starter home! All yours for $700,000!  The exclamation mark was really there, I swear.

Whaaat?  I actually laughed out loud (and a bit maniacally) when I read this bit of realtor doo-doo.  I told Bob about it and later he took a look because he didn't believe me.  We swore up and down we'd never, never, never, never pay close to a million dollars for a wormy trailer with a foundation.  It seemed so out of wack.  It seemed very wrong.  But such were the conditions of the real estate market and we were getting restless.

Okay, the itty bitty cottage did sit on the market for this price but we were outgrowing our ancient but charming apartment in Los Feliz and with a young kid we were starting to lust after a backyard.  That plus the fact that I was tired of letting the dog out for 4:00 a.m.  pee and having to make sure he didn't run off down the street never to be seen again.  Since we had both lost our first houses in our respective (and distant) divorces we were basically starting off with virtually no equity, just what we had put away in our savings accounts and by the second year of our marriage we actually had socked away enough for a down payment on and up/down three bed 2 bath palace in a nice neighborhood.  But fate intervened and homeowner status was deferred when we chose to put all our savings into adopting our daughter, knowing full well that it wasn't really much of a choice.  House vs. extraordinary, beautiful, smart, loving human being we actually got to parent.  We'd really won the lottery on that one.

So we waited and as the market spiralled out of control we realized that we had to get creative.

Enter the house on 18th Street.

You already know I had fallen in love the neighborhood and the romance of the sea nearby.  So I was willing to overlook the fact that the house were about to take possession of was, well, a bit of a challenge.

I had heard of packrats but had never actually seen one up close.  Or to be more specific, their work.  Mercifully I was in denial during the final decision process, seeing only in my head the vision of what it could become.  The property was large enough for an addition, maybe up, maybe back, we got lost in the future, sketching out ideas and dreaming of the way things would one day be.  Which, by the way, was supposed to be in three months according to our contractor.

So we gave notice to the tenants (and a letter of recommendation so desperate we were to get them moved out in a timely fashion) and then the day came when we had the key and the house was empty.

Not quite.

The tenants, a whole family of packrats, were not very happy about having to vacate their little home and having gone through the moving process myself, I get now that they figured, screw them (meaning us) and basically took a couple of suitcases worth of clothes, their son's Army uniform, and left the rest for us to deal with.  Since it would be hard to believe what I'm about to tell you I have supplied photographic evidence below (more reliable than the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I promise).  Bob had taken a reconnaissance inspection before me and when we both arrived to 'clean up' he pulled out a box of things he'd bought on the sly so's not to scare the living daylights out of me.

1. 10 boxes of 24 count 100 gallon heavy-duty plastic lawn bags (not enough)

2. 10 pairs of industrial strength elbow length plastic work gloves (suitable for toxic materials)

3. 1 box (10 count) industrial face masks (oxygen tank optional)

4. 4 industrial size brooms

5. 2 pairs of rubber work boots

6. hairnets (?)

7. 4, 100 gallon trash containers (not nearly enough)

8. One case of handy-wipes

9. One case of Gatorade

Photographic evidence (only a small sampling) is below.  Having our own home, it seemed, was not going to be easy.

Work gloves on!