Our First House

September Writing Challenge - Prompt #13:

Throwback

When Scotty and I were planning our wedding in 2003, one of the things we had to do was find a place to live. Scotty's grandpa and his brothers ran a produce farm in our area, and they owned a few properties around town where they placed their produce stands. One of the properties had an old house on it, and no one had lived in it for years and years, so Scotty and I talked to his grandpa about renting the house. 

We came up with an agreement, and it gave us the chance to live with some pretty cheap rent.

The house, as you can see, was in pretty rough shape, but we made it work. I don't know very many people who would willingly move into a house like that one.

When we moved into the house, there were remnants from past tenants. Weird remnants - like jars of liquids. We have no idea what was in them. The garage was full of stuff, and the cellar under the garage was full of mysterious bottles... old preserves and such... we think. We just left it all alone. 

The basement of the house was strange. It had a staircase that went up to a ceiling (Scotty's aunt had lived in the house as a newlywed twenty-five years prior and had a bedroom built over the staircase). We called them "The Stairs that Go Nowhere." There was also a big shower in the basement - like, as big as the dining area in my current house. It was a shower room. To this day, I still wonder about that shower. No one knew why it was there. The house had been purchased just to put the produce stand on the property and provide a bathroom for the stand workers. The shower was just part of the deal. 

In the shower room, there was a hatch that led under the house. If there were any bodies to be found... that's where they would have been. Or maybe in the creepy closet under the stairs... or the dark cellar under the garage... or in the field out back. 

There could have been a lot of bodies. 

The basement was mostly concrete (and tile - per the shower). It was damp and smelly and just really, really creepy. We stored some things down there, but for the most part, it was unusable, and the type of place you run from and shut the door behind you. I always kept the basement door closed and locked so whatever was down there would hopefully stay down there. 

I absolutely loved giving people tours of the house!

Since the property's main purpose was to host the produce stand, it had a gravel parking lot. It was on a busy street, so we constantly had people pulling in and out of the parking lot to conduct business at the produce stand, but also to turn around or stop and make a phone call. Sometimes people would just park there and leave their cars. We never knew what they were up to. 

The house was also next to a park, and we always had people sneaking through our back field. Our motion sensor light when on and off all night, and we were always having to crawl out of bed to investigate who was in our yard.

The house was really noisy from traffic, and we always had cops stationed in a parking lot across the street (at a boat store) that would fire up their sirens throughout the night as they responded to calls. 

We didn't sleep well while we lived there, and to add to the difficulties, we had a neighbor whose dog barked all night long right outside our bedroom window. We called the City, and they issued a warning to the neighbors, but nothing was resolved. The dog barked and barked and barked, and one night, while laying awake in bed, Scotty and I started discussing how we could kill the dog. 

And we were serious. We were going to murder that dog. 

The next weekend, after a miserable day at church, we started entertaining the idea of moving. Did we have to keep living in that house? Did we want to become dog killers?

No and no. 

So we moved into Scotty's mom's basement. Because moving in with in-laws was preferable to the crimes we were thinking about committing. 

After six brutal months, we were out of the house within a week. 

Three months later, we bought our current house, so it ended up working out. Moving in with Scotty's mom gave us a few months to save up our down payment. 

About ten years ago, the old house was demolished and the property was sold. It's been a vacant lot ever since. 

Even though it was rough living in that house, I look back on that time fondly. I kind of wish I could do it over again but with my current knowledge and skills. I'm just curious what I could make of that home now verses what I made of it when I was 19 years old and had no clue what I was doing in any area of life (though don't tell 19-year-old me that. She won't believe you. She thinks she knows everything).