Our $25,000 House

Here she be, just as we found her: Our $25,000 house

hov·el

noun ˈhə-vəl, ˈhä-
a small, wretched, and often dirty house

OK, OK, we didn’t move to a hovel three years ago. 

Truth be told, it was much worse than a hovel. We aspired to live in a hovel. We thought we might be able to fashion a hovel out of what we’d purchased. We dreamt of wretchedness, and are still doggedly trying to clear away all the debris just to get to the dirty part, so we can live in it and be happy. 

About four years ago, we became Househunters. Unfortunately, the earlier generations of househunters and gatherers, appearing on the far left side of the homeowner’s “walking upright” chart,  had put out a neglect-and-wreck salt lick and jacklighted our house to death long before we could get to it. I’d make a joke about crawling inside the carcass of our dead house to get warm, like a tauntaun, but they’d ruined the heating system and other assorted plumbing by abandoning the house in the winter and letting all the pipes freeze, so it was usually colder inside than outdoors. The weather’s generally balmy two or three days a year here in western Maine, but we are unreasonable, and hell-bent on living in the place for more than one long weekend in late June, so stuff was going to have to get done, and I was going to have to do it myself.  Why would we move to such a place, you ask? We had become instantly broke, and the house was free. That’s a great combination.

OK, not really free, but pretty close. We bought a fairly big, 1901 vintage Queen Anne house for $24,400. I consider any house you can buy for less than a Kia to be “free.” It wasn’t the “Detroit” version of free, either. I know you can buy a crackhouse in the Motor City for a double sawbuck, or trade it for a couple of syphilitic chickens or something, but then you’ve got to try to defend its walls against all comers. And those walls have all their copper pipes ripped out by crackheads to give your new home a proper crackhouse vibe.

No thanks. We moved to what’s considered a nice neighborhood in a quiet little town in western Maine. And in addition to a lack of Mogadishu-level crime, the taxes here are comparatively low, because there’s a huge, stinking paper mill right in the center of town paying half the town’s freight. That means our free house didn’t come with a bent number followed by a vapor trail of zeroes after it for back taxes, or front taxes or sideways taxes. Everyone at the local credit union that was stuck with our White Elephant Victorian, before they stuck us with it, was in their office, more than happy to make a deal, and our new neighbors greeted us like Americans rolling into Paris in 1944. Actually, Paris isn’t too far from here; it’s near Norway, which is just a few miles from Poland. Don’t try liberating Paris by driving there and asking around, though. The Post Office has called the entire town of Paris “South Paris” for so long now that no one in Paris knows exactly where Paris is.

The last time I saw Paris, well, I was buying corrugated cardboard to ship a table, so let’s move on. We got a house for twenty-five large, and no one gives you a house for that kind of money if all it needs is a good dusting and waxing. Generally that $25k sort of house needs an air strike, or if it’s like ours, looks like it’s already had one or two. Our house had a bad roof, where there was a roof instead of informal skylights where the squirrels and rain came and went. It had no heat, and no working plumbing of any kind. Much of the electricity was supplied by the original knob and tube wiring, which was still safer than all the newer stuff that had been installed by a series of inebriated electricians. Why inconvenience any future occupants by requiring them to bring a toaster into the shower just to electrocute themselves, when you can make it possible at most any outlet? The general fabric of the house was sagging and swaying and collapsing like the first twenty people Mike Tyson punched, except where it had already fallen down, of course. And the basement — which is one floor below the other basement, because the place is built on a riverbank and is slanted like a major newspaper — the basement was a horror.

It was boarded up like Hannibal Lecter’s waiting room. It hadn’t had a fire down there. No! Why settle for one fire in your basement when you can have two? The roof above had been neglected so long that you could poke your head right through it (I eventually did, and fixed it) and the rain and snow and rodents had worked their magic throughout the whole back facade, all the way down to the foundation, which wasn’t there anymore.

The former occupants had taken everything with them, including all the light bulbs in the fixtures. They had dragged some sort of corroded and oily apparatus they still coveted up the stairs and through all the rooms, leaving an undulating rusty gulley in the maple floors all the way to the front door, but they couldn’t take the foundation with them, could they?

(to be continued)

[Update: Thanks to the Instapundit, Ace of Spades, American Digest, Maggie’s Farm, Execupundit, and anyone else I’ve overlooked for sending their readers my way this week. Sooper-dooper thanks to everyone that’s hit our assorted tipjars, bought my book, purchased my furniture, supported my children’s musical career, and used my Amazon portal. It’s enormously appreciated. And thanks, period, for reading and commenting. No man writes for no one]