Our House

Our house

is a very very very fine house

with 2 cats in the yard

life used to be so hard

now everything is easy cuz of you 

~ Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

https://youtu.be/tKYjUn-SBcg

Our Dad loved our house.  Besides his family and his accounting business, it was probably the major focus of his life.  Who can forget how he dug out the basement, one bucket of dirt at a time, before refinishing it, paying the neighborhood kids 5 cents a bucket? (5 cents!) 

Recently my siblings and I sort of out-loud wondered “what did he do with all that dirt?” and my childhood memory doesn’t include that detail but most likely he used it to grade the front yard where he built a retaining wall.  He also built a wrap around deck on which we had more cookouts than can be counted.  He wanted to get a wood-burning stove for the rec room basement and talked about finishing the attic also. 

And who knows, he may have actually gotten to these projects if not for his untimely death back in 1996.

Our Mom maintained the house pretty well in the intervening 25 years (with a lot of help from her family and friends). Even so, we found there was quite a bit of work to do fixing the few critical items we found with inspection completed last spring, and to overall make it look “clean and fresh” - hoping that some lucky buyer is going to pay top dollar for it, since it’s really our Mom’s only remaining asset.  All of that plus just getting all the STUFF out of there, before the fixing up even started, has been an intense experience. 

This last visit to Seattle, unlike the one in March, my sister and I couldn’t stay at the house like we normally do when we go “home” because of course it’s emptied of all furniture, and my two brothers have been moved out for a few weeks now.  But we made multiple trips from our nearby Airbnb and each time the house had transformed a little bit more, and now I am seeing the final changes from afar.

Our house transforming - until it’s almost unrecognizable as ours.