object #3

My house. This is the oldest picture I have of the house from the late 1970s.

I bought this house in the summer of 1975 with a Fannie Mae loan and my father, who co-signed the papers and loaned me the 10% of the $19,000 purchase price needed for the down payment. I was 25, had just started my little studio doing etched glass, and was scared spitless that I had just signed a paper that indebted me for $17,100 plus interest. The payments were less than $200 a month. I wasn’t able to take possession of it until October as the old woman needed the time to pack up and move to Arizona to live with her daughter. By then Marc and I were together but he didn’t move in until the following year.

I loved this house on sight. It was about a hundred years old when I bought it and was in good shape, solid, built of first cut timber with shiplap on all the interior walls which was so hard you couldn't hammer a nail into it, had to drill a little hole first; three bedrooms, two baths, 10’ ceilings, 10” baseboards, lots of windows with diamond mullions, deep eaves, hardwood floors; the plumbing was old and Marc spent many years under the house repairing broken pipes, the wiring was inadequate such that in one part of the house if too many things were on I would blow the breaker when I tried to vacuum, and drafty with no insulation. After the first winter or two we put insulation in the attic. But I loved that 1,250 square foot house. We got married in that house, it sheltered us, we raised our two children in that house, we operated our studio out of the two car garage. 

We finally sold it in 2014 for many reasons…nearly 40 years of living hand to mouth on an artist’s income was not good for an old house that needed more attention than we could afford, the ignored inner city neighborhood was getting gentrified and property taxes were becoming unaffordable, the new people moving in felt us long time residents were bringing their property values down, and we basically had been living and working under the radar of the city and the neighborhood was coming under the scrutiny of city inspectors with all the new construction…but those of you who have been reading here for a long time know how hard it was for me to let go of it even though we were spending less and less time here. We had moved out to the house we're in now, coming in only three days a week to work in the studio when we had work.

We sold the property to a small home builder who promised to move the house off the property if possible (it wasn’t), promised to save the trees and build a single family home (he didn’t). He tore the house down but was overextended I guess because he sat on the property for a year and then sold it to a developer who clear cut the lot cutting down all the trees including the 30+ year old magnolia we had planted, and built two ugly lot line townhouses.

mid-1980s, daughter Sarah standing by the front door.

2003

Also 2003, the backyard and the small extension off the garage/studio which we had just finished rebuilding one wall at a time because termites had eaten the bottom 12” of the frame and the only thing holding the walls up was the sheetrock and metal siding.

2012, we were living out in Wharton by then coming in only to work and our son and daughter-in-law had moved into the main part of the house after we closed off part of it for a little apartment while we were there. 

2014, the year we sold it. 

This is from the post back in 2014 after we had gutted the shop, moved Big Mama, dug up plants or taken cuttings, hauled away every brick, paver, and concrete mortar block, and were leaving the house for the very last time.

“I walked through the house, my last time, and touched the walls and thanked it for giving us shelter and holding our family together. We weathered three direct hit hurricanes over the years in that house with nary a creak. I apologized for not taking better care of it and for abandoning it. I told it I loved it. Then I walked out and closed the door.”