My home sweet home

I remember house hunting when we decided we were ready to buy.  Was it twenty years ago? I think around that.  We got pre-approved for some exorbitant amount of money that we could never, ever afford in real life and hit the streets and the ads and the internet.  Did the internet exist back then?  I think it must have.  I vaguely remember looking at realty websites.  

We asked around and recruited my Uncle Bob and Gene, my brother's father-in-law because they were real estate agents.  I'm sure we annoyed the hell out of them.  Visiting the homes Gene recommended seemed to be a study in what he thought of us.  We walked through the weirdest homes.  One was fitted inside in every detail to look like the inside of a sailing vessel, complete with a long, narrow galley for a dining area that would certainly have caused guests to rub elbows, literally.  Another house had an indoor, in-ground pool (oh yeah!) but the room had a huge tree growing inside, with the roof built around it.  It was very pretty and interesting, but we imagined huge costs around fixing leaks in the roof (which was dripping while we were there) and there is no way winter would be good on that house.  Another house was nice, it was on a quiet street, but it had tens of thousands of dollars in security systems.  On the surface it seems a good idea, but having all that actually kind of creeped me out wondering what the heck the threat is?  It made me too anxious.  I would have felt much less safe there.  

Ultimately, we ended up buying my parents' house.  They were getting more and more fed up with the rental properties on either side of the house, the kids cutting through the yard, the constant change in neighbors that always just seemed to get worse.  Plus most of us kids had moved out and my mom was sick of cleaning such a big house.   My Aunt Dolly had a smaller house on the north side and she wanted to downsize to a condo.  We did The Big Switcheroo all at the same time, Corydon and I buying my parents' house, them buying Aunt Dol's, and Aunt Dolly buying the condo.  It was exciting, crushing my chest with fear, shoulders back with pride, joyful and terrifying.  Signing my name to that huge amount of debt felt like a life sentence of toil and the possible shame of failure and bankruptcy and also like settling in to adulthood in the best possible way.  

My father is a retired electrician.  Throughout my childhood there are many instances of things that were "unable" to be repaired.  Our front doorbell made a THUNK rather than a chime for a few years.  He tried to fix it, and finally just took it out.  I had no idea how many things my dad had half-assed until we bought the house.  My dad pretty much stopped coming over with my mom because she would see something Corydon had done and get pissed at Dad.  "A dimmer switch in the dining room?  How did you DO that?  Ken!  Ken, you told me you couldn't PUT a dimmer switch on this thing."  My dad would mumble and wander into the back yard, sometimes not returning and walking home.  Electrician's tape, pennies, and oh yes a chest freezer in the basement full of deer meat from 1978.  A huge plus in selling your house to your kid is you don't have to actually clean anything out.  

My house is my home.  No other house we looked at had the feel of what I wanted.  What I wanted was MY HOUSE and I'm so lucky we got it.  As far as the rotating neighbor kids:  we put up a fence.