Karen and I showered; she kicked me out when I tried to join her, so we bathed separately. By the time I was cleaned up and dressed, the apartment was once again immaculate, and Debbie was pulling shirts from my closet. For ironing she told me.
* * * *
My 924 might look nice, but it was never meant to hold three people. The back seat has zero, repeat zero, legroom. The bench is pressed tight against the back of the front seats.
This didn’t faze Debbie. She was excited; she’d never been inside a Porsche. She sat sideways across the back, while Karen took her accustomed place next to me. I opened the sunroof, under a bright blue sky, and drove off to see our future.
* * * *
A widowed octogenarian had occupied the property. When she had passed away, it had passed to her son who lived somewhere out west. The house was old, but well built, sitting on a huge lot with streets on three sides. We turned up the long, overgrown gravel loop driveway in front of the house.
From the outside it was kind of scary. The grass was knee-high, with junk scattered around the yard, including a rusted-out car and boat. Windows were boarded, and the front porch was cracked where it met the house. The front of the porch had settled, and the entire thing was leaning forward about twenty degrees. The door was new, but unpainted. Peeling paint and a clearly decrepit roof completed the ‘curb-appeal’.
The outside was the good view.
“It’s big,” was Debbie’s first comment.
“About 3200 square feet. Good size on the inside. The land is almost an acre and a half.”
“It looks pretty ratty,” Karen added.
I chuckled. “It’s worse than it looks.”
“How do we get in?” she asked, ever the pragmatist.
“That’s not a problem.” I took them around the side to the double carport. Telling them to wait there, I climbed up the carport and entered the upstairs through a huge hole in the steeply slanted ‘cape-cod’ roof.
Coming down the stairs, I opened the back door off the kitchen, letting the ladies see the inside for the first time.
“Wow! I thought it was supposed to be in horrible shape. This is nice!” Debbie gushed.
I almost laughed out loud. “The owners were going to fix the place up, then decided they couldn’t afford to, so they sold it as is. This side of the house is all that was fixed. The kitchen is almost brand new. New floor, cabinets, sinks and paint, just no appliances. The master bedroom and bathroom are fixed up, but that’s it.
I swung open the door to the living room, and exposed them to reality.
“Oh my god – what happened?” Karen cried, walking through the opening, with a dumbstruck Debbie at her side.
Most of the drywall was missing or kicked in. The hardwood floors had been charred through in several places to the underlying foundation. Holes in the ceiling showed daylight through distant holes in the roof. The broken out windows showed the need for boarding them up. Graffiti covered the walls. It smelled. Bad.
“I guess kids were using it for parties and stuff when it was empty. They trashed the place. Most of the walls and structure are still sound, but the repairs needed are not just cosmetic. In some places they pulled the wiring and plumbing out of the walls. There’s a lot of work to be done here. You should have seen the place before they cleaned it up for sale.”
The living room was huge, running most of one side of the house. Near the front door, another door stood closed to one side. Debbie opened it and stepped in.
“This is so weird!” she exclaimed.
She was in the master bedroom. It was large, in nice shape, with a new bay window in the front, and doors exiting to a walk in closet and a big new bathroom.
“I thought the bedroom would be tiny, being so old,” Karen commented.
“It was. Notice anything else weird about this level?” I asked.
“There’s nowhere to eat!” Debbie had noticed immediately. “It’s just a kitchen, a pantry, utility room, living room and bedroom suite.”
“Yep. The old dining room is now the walk in closet, the big bathroom and the kitchen walk in pantry. The realtor claims the living room could be used as living/dining room. I personally think the owner intended to add a dining room and garage on the side of the house. They had cleared some dirt on that side.”
The stairs going up were in good shape. Their original location had been beside the dining room and during the repairs they had been widened and replaced. The girls spent a few minutes carefully walking around the four bedrooms upstairs and the big central open space. There were the shattered remains of a bathroom in the middle. The upstairs was in worse shape than downstairs, with holes in the flooring, and in the ceiling. One corner was missing a chunk of roofing about four feet square.
They came down the stairs quietly.
“There’s a lot to do, isn’t there?” Debbie asked, voicing everyone’s thoughts.
The answer was so obvious no one replied.
We took a quick tour of the property, and I showed them the workshop in the back. It had survived most of the vandalism, and was in effect an office and half-bath, plus a two-car garage and a workshop. There was a driveway to the workshop; it entered the property from a different street than the main drive.
The drive back to the apartment was rather quiet. The girls talked about the kitchen and master bedroom but avoided too much comment on the rest of the house.
Once we had entered my apartment, I thought it was time to get some things straight, and started to establish ground rules.
“I hope you guys are still excited because I know I am. We are going to have a lot of fun rebuilding this place to be just what we want.”
Karen, normally the eternal optimist voiced her fears. “There’s so much to do. Do you really think we can fix that place up?”
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have sunk everything I own into this. And I wouldn’t have allowed you two to be here now under false pretenses. I’m not that much of a dick.”
“But where do we start?” Debbie asked hesitantly.