I loved that house. I hated that house.
My first apartment was just shy of 600 sq ft. and located on the side of town I could afford. When I moved out of that apartment I moved into a mobile home with my wife. A few years later at the first home my wife and I purchased together, a house that had been built 26 years before Oklahoma became a state, we once found a person living between our bushes and the exterior of the house. We later determined this was the same guy who had broken into my shed and huffed all my spray paint.
In twenty years I went from sharing an apartment with cockroaches to living in a house where when people asked me how many bedrooms we had, I had to stop and think. Technically the house had five bedrooms, two offices, three bathrooms, and three living spaces, but can you really call a room a bedroom if it's full of toys and doesn't have a bed? The house sat on over an acre of land, had an upstairs deck that looked out over a private pond, and had more space than we knew what to do with. My wife turned the upstairs landing into a guitar wall because when decorating 4,200 sq ft, sometimes you have to get creative.
I loved so many things about that house. I loved having so much free space. I loved sipping my morning coffee out on the rear deck while watching birds on the pond. I loved having 30-40 people over for holiday parties and never feeling crowded. And, call me an asshole, but I loved what other people thought of the house. I loved when people saw pictures of it or came to visit and watching their jaws drop. As much as I loved living in that house, I loved what it represented.
I was bummed when I learned the producers of Storage Wars occasionally planted valuable items in the lockers up for auction, and how many of the customers on Pawn Stars turned out to be friends or relatives of the cast and crew. YouTube, Instagram, and yeah, even Zillow can be pretty deceiving.
Of the just-over-an-acre of land we owned, half of it was taken up by that private pond. (Think of it as land you can't use, but have to pay property taxes on.) When we purchased the house we weren't told that the pond leaked water into the ground. Some summers, it was completely dry -- just a muddy hole full of snakes and dead fish. The HOA once delivered a letter to us requesting we "mow the empty pond." (A few minutes of spraying out the remains of dead fish with my riding lawnmower was enough for them to ask me to stop.) At one point we were "gently nudged" into putting $5k into a fund (along with the other ten home owners whose homes backed up to the pond) to fix the pond. The company we paid (owned by one of the HOA board members) promptly went out of business. It took two years to get (most of) our money back, and the pond was never fixed.
Over time, we began to suspect the water leaking out of the pond was causing our house to sink. The bricks in the front of the house began to separate, and we started seeing cracks in the walls and ceiling inside. We reported the damage to our insurance company, who said the damage wasn't bad enough to warrant action. We even called a company to check and potentially lift our foundation. They took one look at that leaky pond before getting back into their truck and driving off. Before the man left, my wife was interested in having an in-ground pool installed and I asked him if it was a good idea. "I wouldn't," he said. Eventually, the house shifted so much that the upstairs deck began to separate from the house.
I remember the first summer our electric bill surpassed $500, a result of running two large air conditioners non-stop. The primary unit did a pretty job of keeping the downstairs comfortable, but the second unit, which had to deal with the heat rising from the first floor, always struggled. One or both units blew up every year. One repairman suggested we replace and upgrade the ten-year-old units.
Then there was "The Dude," our next door neighbor with a mullet any Lynyrd Skynyrd fan would be proud to rock. Every time we went out to grill on our back patio, The Dude would come outside to see what we were up to. The Dude enjoyed mowing every day, chain smoking in his garage, and sitting in his truck with the engine running and the stereo cranked for hours on end. Living next to The Dude was funny, until it wasn't.
Did I mention that a beaver gnawed down a tree in the pond causing it to fall and land on our fence? Because technically this happened on our property, we had to pay to fix our fence, pay to have the tree removed, and pay to have the beaver trapped. How does a beaver even end up in a pond in the middle of a neighborhood?
It took me a few years to admit that the house was too big. None of us ever saw one another. My son was a year away from graduating high school and moving awa to college. With him out of the house, we were looking at 1,400 sq ft per person. In the evenings when we would watch television, Susan and I would sit in the front living room, our daughter would go to the rear living area, and my son would go to the upstairs den. By the way, if you want to feel like a privileged asshole, start complaining to your friends that your house is too big. You'll get a lot of sympathy.
The Dude. The bills. The cracks. The pond. The HOA. The size. The beaver. None of that shows up on Zillow.
After lots of hand wringing and a few tears, we sold that house and downsized -- er, "right-sized." We listed the house in November of 2018 and were assured it would sell within a week. After carrying two mortgages for six months and being told by our realtor that the house was "simply too big to sell in this market," we changed realtors, who managed to sell it two months after that. Our new home, the one we moved into in 2019, is smaller with a larger yard, which allowed us to build both a workshop (which I'd always wanted) and get an in-ground pool, mostly paid for with profits from the sale.
I haven't thought much about that last house until this weekend, when we discovered it was for sale. I ran to Zillow and the pictures of the house are breathtaking. It looks even larger than I remember, partially because they've painted everything white. Most interestingly, they've added a swimming pool and a bunch of concrete to the backyard. I guess they got a second opinion about digging a hole back there. Looking at those pictures makes me feel a little jealous and a little regret. Maybe someday the current sellers will look back on those pictures after they've moved and feel the same way.
