Considering the advanced age my kids think I am, I have not lived in that many places and have not owned that many houses. During my married life I've lived in two apartments, one mobile home, one parsonage that belonged to the church, and just four houses that we were fortunate enough to purchase. I've known some who kept buying, fixing, and selling houses over the years and moved from one to the next after each was sold. Too much moving for me. I echo the words of my wife during the past few months: "I hate moving!" These are the houses that brought me to where we are today.....house-wise anyway. Nobody really wants to see an apartment or a mobile home. Okay, maybe I'll show the mobile home since it was a purchased house-type space. We appreciated the privacy after two-and-a-half years of living in apartments. We were in it only two years so we got most all our money back in the sale of it.
Our 14x70 Mobile Home, the original Tiny House (1983)
The church parsonage in Warren was a home built in 1879. While Kathy loved the charm of that home, I could not abide the lack of insulation, the drafty old original windows, the sagging floors and doors, and the list goes on. I put a lot of work into that house, and that was before I had any experience in remodeling and renovation. Over time it turned into an old home worthy of the Warren Tour of Homes while we lived there and it was warmly received by the community. After living in it for seven years it was worth double what the church paid. Sadly, it wasn't our own personal house so we wouldn't make the profit to put into the next home.
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Church parsonage in Warren (built 1879) |
The first home that we personally bought was when we first moved to Lincoln. It was our first home purchase and a difficult one to find and pull off. It doesn't matter how much you watch HGTV you are never really prepared for that first one.....or any of them for that matter. What I remember most about that deal was making the 5-hour drive from Warren to Lincoln even though the bank had told us they didn't have all the paperwork for us to sign. Our devotional time with friends early that morning convinced us of God's faithfulness in providing that home. When we got to the bank at noon, they asked us why we came and we told them. Then they told us that the paperwork had just come in before we showed up. What a miracle! We had that house sided and I added a couple porches. Work inside was minimal since I still had little experience with reno but near the end of our twelve years there I put in a furnace and air conditioning system based on experience with doing that at the church.
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The Ophir house, our first house in Lincoln (built 1958) |
Following the conclusion of the church building project in Lincoln, Kathy decided she would like to sell this house and find another. Why, you might ask? Because she had remodeled all that I would let her and she wanted a new challenge. All I wanted was to be finished. But there we were two months after the church dedication making an offer on a wreck of a house. This might have been just like on HGTV, except there would be no crew of dozens of people to get this done in a month. I had wanted to move to the Mayfair subdivision when we first came to Lincoln but couldn't afford the prices. This house had been on the market for seven years with most people running for the hills after just opening the front door. We gutted the entire house and built it back up, moving many walls in the process. I had always wanted to build my own house like my dad did, and this was as close as I figured I could get. It was not the same house when we were done with it. The neighbors cheered. A neighbor bought our house. And then we moved again.
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| The Mayfair house, closest I got to building a house myself (built 1960) |
The Rockford house was a foreclosure as that was just a few years after the housing crash and there were thousands of them available. There were many foreclosures in the Rockford area and I saw the effects of a housing boom gone bad. After having purchased two homes built around the end of the 1950's I had hoped for something newer. This one had been built in 2004, a year that would eventually haunt me twice. It turned out to be a home with many builder shortcuts that affected the stability and livability of the home. Over time I fixed many of them but I quickly learned about the term "builder grade." Otherwise I liked this house a lot, and it was the only house I have had with a 3-car garage.
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The Rockford house, loved that 3-car garage (Built 2004) |
After purging our lives of accumulated stuff during our time in Illinois, we moved to the Atlanta area. My wife and I found a home in the town of Hiram that was pretty much the smallest house we would ever buy. It was a small 2-story home but there was no basement. That left precious little space in which to store stuff so we embarked on another round of purging. We would do that several times until everything fit in the house. This house was also built in 2004. I should have seen that year and left running. Sure enough, I had some of the same issues, some of them worse. Again I fixed up what I could and made it a safer house. Kathy really loved this house. It was home to her.
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The Hiram house, lawn care provided for the front yard (Built 2004) |
So, if an 1879-era house is too crude and a 1958-1960-era house lacks up-to-date systems and airtight qualities and a 2004-era house shows too many shortcuts, what does one look for if building a new house? My goals were: concrete poured correctly and as thick as possible, a structure that was over-built for sturdiness, full wood sheathing on walls and roof, sealed as airtight as possible and insulated well, efficient Energy Star appliances and systems, a large tankless water heater, and upgraded features throughout the house. You may notice I am more concerned with what is below the surface. The structure of my prior houses was lacking and not something easily corrected after the fact. But build a structure correctly and you can always change out a finishing item, like vanities or lights. Since Kathy and Myric were more interested in the design elements of the house we left those things to them.
It was B.J. Neblett who wrote: “We are the sum total of our experiences. Those experiences––be they positive or negative––make us the person we are, at any given point in our lives. And, like a flowing river, those same experiences, and those yet to come, continue to influence and reshape the person we are, and the person we become. None of us are the same as we were yesterday, nor will be tomorrow.” In the narrow focus of building a home, the positive experience of building a church with its lessons learned, or the negative experiences of a home with issues and problems all contributed to this point in time where one could benefit from all of them.
Arktander
(aka David Andreasen)
( Be sure to check out "Home Sweet Home, Part 3" which follows)
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