WHERE TO BEGIN

At the closing I began to get this panicky feeling in the middle of my stomach. What if I hated living way out in the country? What if it was going to be too much for us to restore the place? How many times can you hear “money pit” before you have a total meltdown? We had made a final inspection of the place the night before the closing. The previous owners still had not cleaned up much of anything, and the barn was full of junk. We insisted that they put $1000 in an escrow account to cover the cost of a dumpster if necessary, and gave them thirty days to finish cleaning the place up. This was actually the first time we had met the owners. I asked a lot of questions like, “do you know why there is water in the basement?” and “how much does it cost to heat the house in the winter?” The woman said that they had never had water in the basement and that the house was always toasty warm using very little fuel oil. It was too late to back out, so I signed the papers and turned over the check. We were committed, or should have been committed to some institution where the walls and the food were very soft.

I was anxious to get started cleaning, so my daughters and I drove out to the house that evening. All three cats that we had seen on our first visit were still in residence. We put them outside with bowls of water and food on the porch. Thankfully all of the dogs were gone, but the dog shit was not. It was a hard to know where to begin. I handed everyone a garbage bag and told them to dig in. They were not happy.  I must add that my children were extremely unenthusiastic about moving into this house. The first time we brought them out to see it they thought we were kidding, that it was some kind of sick joke we were playing on them. Ha ha. Most everyone who saw it for the first time had a stricken look on their face; I could see the wheels turning as they tried to think of something to say that was less than totally negative.

When we came back on the following day, the cats were all in the house. We discovered that there was a broken window in the attic. The cats climbed up a tree, out onto the roof, and in the window. We succeeded in boarding up the window, and eventually had to cut down the limb which hung out over the roof. One of the cats soon presented us with a litter of five kittens. We were now up to eight cats. This led us on a desperate search to find a veterinarian who would spay and neuter them without putting us in the poorhouse. That is a whole other story.

The first time we used the washing machine, which was in the kitchen, all of the water drained into the basement via a rusted out waste pipe. That provided a more accurate answer to the first question. (Maybe the woman never went into the basement). We soon realized that the dryer vent went through the wall and behind the refrigerator.  The end. The lint and humidity just spewed out into the kitchen. I’ll just throw in here that we did indeed use thousands of dollars worth of fuel oil the first year, and I wore long underwear from October 15^th until well into April. Answer to second question.

A month went by, and the barn was still full of crap (literally), so we got the $1000 and the joy of cleaning it out. We rented a two yard dumpster and started filling it up. It was emptied every Friday, so on Thursday we would get all excited, “it’s dumpster day, it’s dumpster day!” There were bags of garbage in both barns and on the hillside behind the house. Piles of miscellaneous refuse were just about anywhere you cared to look. There was an entire room in the basement that was three inches deep in composted dog manure (we still call it the dog shit room). The farm was over one hundred years old; you’d think you might find some treasures digging through all of that stuff. Not a chance. Nothing that you could take to the Antique Roadshow and find out it was worth $$$$$. It took us months to finally be done with the dumpster.

We cleaned and painted the inside of the house for three months before we moved in. One weekend we invited all of our friends and relatives out for a painting party. I promised to feed them and many of them were actually crazy enough to come. These are the kind of people I love to have in my life. The one’s who see me jumping off a cliff and come to bid me farewell. We made the house (barely) livable, and transported all of our belongings from town out to the farm. We hummed the tune to Green Acres for weeks.