House under Construction

Emptying our house in preparation for new construction revealed just how ready it was to become part of our memories and make way for our future.  The leaky roof, which Tom had patched repeatedly over the years, had allowed water to penetrate the ceiling in a number of spots, most notably in the master bedroom, where a steadily widening hole allowed insulation and cold air to come in.  Mice poop was everywhere and throughout the house along in various corners and cubbyholes, the little critters had made nests.  The crawl space had let in melting snow that saturated the huge amount of stuff that we had stored there--books, baby clothes, toys, etc.--to the point that it succumbed to a coating of black mold.  We had caught numerous raccoons over the past several years that had made their home in the attic and the crawl space and let them go miles away, but apparently our hospitality was well-known among the greater raccoon community.

It struck me as I walked in for the last time before demolition that the house was reverting to the way we found it back in 1995, when the bathroom and kitchen floors were soaked to the point that the toilet had almost fallen through and termites had occupied the crawl space from the surface of two and a half feet of standing water to the underside of floors and were eating the wallboard in the living room, kitchen, and dining room, and had already consumed the metal screens of the back porch.

We revived the house then by doing extensive renovations, but it seemed that its life span was destined to be 50 years.  The contractors were salvaging a few things--bookcases built by my dad, our natural cherry kitchen cabinets, the four load-bearing Doric columns, some light fixtures, some hand-painted crown molding, and a unique curved wall half-wall--to remind us of the home that was, but it was time for a more durable structure to take over.