House Crazy

Just call me house crazy…but I love buying an old place and making it mine. I’ve done it twice and both times it was what the real estate market call “estate” home. That’s short-hand for cheap and in bad shape but the price was affordable, a mere $19,000.

I bought my first house in 1971. This home was a 50-year-old, 2,000 sq. ft., two-story Cape Cod in the city on a small lot. It had great bones but needed a LOT of TLC.  But I was young and full of ideas and energy.

The exterior was "shabby chic" painted traditional white and in sore of work. It had old windows, crumbling front steps, a brick fireplace and an old roof but it was located on a quiet dead-end street with a wooded backyard, in a nice starter neighborhood with a good elementary school. The good defintely outweighed the bad.

It also came with a large formal living room with an attractive brick fireplace (with built in open shelves on both sides) and a very large dining room. Downstairs it had a small galley kitchen that hadn’t been touched since the 1950’s with a wonderful adjoining butler’s pantry. There was also a summer sun porch in knotty pine and a small bathroom with a walk in shower off the butler’s pantry.

Upstairs it had two bedrooms and bathroom with a tub (in 1950’s pink tile!) and it best of all it had wonderful hard oak floors throughout that were in very good shape. It also had a good sized, unfinished basement with another oak floor of all things.

I lived and worked in this home for 25 years, raising my two sons there and since on one income a total remodel was out of the question, I painted, papered and decorated it a bit at a time it… on a shoestring – a real DYI.

I see now that by today’s standards it was but a simple starter home, but at age 21, I was in heaven to own my house and I worked long and hard to make it my own

Sorry no photographs are available since this was in the day long before digital cameras! But I promise that photographs are coming in the next post with my current home.