A Yellow Bungalow

My first house cost $12,500. That's not a typo. Three bedrooms, a nice yard, a big barn, mature trees, all on a quiet street. 

It's been almost 50 years now, but even by real estate prices from 5 decades ago, $12,500 was inexpensive. The reason it was so cheap is that it needed work.

It was a Sears kit house from 1926, never upgraded or modernized, and when we bought it in the 1970s, it still had a dirt cellar floor, coal furnace but no ductwork, and antiquated, rudimentary electric wires. Original plumbing was no longer working and there was no sewer line -- everything (yes, everything) drained into a pipe that emptied into the river below the property. It was not habitable.

It needed more than fresh paint.

We did paint. And strip, and sand and gut and rebuild what had rotted, and modernized it to 1970s standards and had the yard dug up for a septic field. The current me is in awe of what the 20 something me (with much help) accomplished in those years.

The barn, which had been a blacksmith shop, needed a rebuild too.

We put in a concrete floor in the basement, and a gas furnace and baseboard heat. And we had insulation blown into the basically empty shell of the walls, but you can tell by the icicles on the eaves that it was still a leaky house even after all our efforts.

Every inch of that house was rehabbed. The kitchen most of all.

There was water damage, exposed plumbing pipes, curled up linoleum and a lot of wallpaper and varnish to remove.

My job was stripping and painting. Stripping and painting, and then doing more of it. I have no idea how I got so much paint splattered on my rear end.

But we brought a derelict old house back to life, revived the old barn, and lived in a cute bungalow when it was all done. I have no pictures of the house in its finished, furnished, final state inside. I don't know why.

I do have photos of the freshly painted yellow house and me beside it on a winter's day.

That was long ago, and several houses ago, and now I live in a pueblo style stucco home with vigas and portales and a gravel courtyard in another part of the country where we don't get dirty snowbanks in winter.

This little yellow bungalow has had other owners and other rehab projects, and even an addition that I saw on an MLS listing when it was for sale again a few years ago. It's no longer painted bright yellow. The barn is long gone. I do hope the heat is more efficient and the eaves don't drip icicles any more.

So that's it - a tour of my first house. Something a little different for the blog today, since I am running out of things to write about in Santa Fe two years into our home-bound pandemic life.