If we were to move, we’d have to have a two car garage and a fireplace. These are things we don’t have in our house on Rusty Hinge Road. So this is the criteria I use search the real estate web sites.
Recently a really interesting property popped up, so I called my old real estate buddy, Bryce. He was happy to get us in. In fact he’d bring along his significant other, Lily, and we make a day of it.
The property itself was an old creaky cape, not very photogenic, but cheap, and it had a two car garage with a rentable apartment - plus it was on 7.5 acres of land!
It had snowed that week and the weather had stayed chilly, so the ride up into the back country was lovely. Somewhere, as we chatted away, Bryce and Lily told us about their crock pot.
I think I can pin point when crock pots suddenly became such a huge part of our lives. It all started at our lazy, family Christmas in Vermont where my Sister, Barbara, and her husband, Charlie, non-chalantly pulled a vintage Rival two and a half quart out of the pantry and put together a beef barley stew right after a gut-busting country breakfast of butter-smeared pancakes drowned in Charlie’s own maple syrup and hickory smoked bacon from the smokehouse down on the highway. While Melissa, my son Alexander and I draped ourselves like wet mittens on comfortable chairs around the wood stove, Babbs and Chaz put dinner on, slow and low.
We thought nothing of it, eyes at half mast, intoxicated by the Green Mountain ambience, and would not have even been aware of their labors had the house not slowly began to fill with a delicious aroma that seeped out from around the heavy Pyrex lid, stimulating our appetite glands, making us quickly forget that after that huge non-Jenny Craig breakfast, we’d sworn off food for the duration.
No matter, Christmas night, we inhaled the sumptuous stew, mopping up the last rich, brown, dribblings with redundant slices of buttered bread.
So as we sank up to our elbows in the equally sumptuous leather upholstery of Bryce’s car, we were hearing wonderful tales of hearty stews, and fricasseed chickens, all prepared far in advance, spending the day simmering and filling the house with a wholesome, heady, heavenly bouquet. So, when you walk in the door – rode hard and hungry – dinner meets you at the door like the old family dog: kissing your face and filling your senses with love.
We could imagine just such a scenario as we arrived at the old creaky cape. Built in 1918, she boasted of a stone fireplace and wide-plank floors (gaps chinked with rope, of all things), two need-to-be-redone bathrooms, an unremarkable kitchen, several teeny tiny bedrooms, and a (real) wood paneled den. A total fixer-upper.
The apartment over the two-car garage definitely needed work. Most of the walls were painted shrill lilac and chartreuse.
Through the kitchen window of the apartment, right on the edge of the tree line, you could make out the unmistakable, weathered colors of barn board, put together in the form of some sort of shed. Against our realtor’s advice, we trudged through the ankle deep snow to inspect what would be, were we to go so far as to actually buy the place, a potential art studio/junk storage/source of kindling.
An “outbuilding” is on our wish list of any potential property we may, in our dreams and in the future, buy.
This particular out building grew more interesting as it came into focus over the field of snow. It appeared to have originally been some sort of tractor shed, judging by the two garage-style doors on the long side.
We wrestled the operating door open and when the low light streamed in, the four of us gasped in unison.
It felt as if we were the first people to set foot in the space in 30 years. A 72 inch Locke mower sat rusting, right where it had been parked the last time it had been run over the lawn. There were work benches wrapping around the space and multi-paned windows on three sides. There was a table saw and a radial arm saw and jars of nails and screws. There were old cracked fan belts and ancient, empty beer bottles and old wooden crates filled with darkened chunks of who-knows-what and cob webs.
In the center of it all: a pot-bellied stove. And rust: rust on everything. It was a man-cave on the brink of crumbling back into the soil. But it was also a place that a few replacement panes of glass and a few trips to the metal recycling center, could be transformed into a remarkable work space that Melissa and I could spend our dotage competing for.
We talked about making an offer. Bryce advised against it, citing “too much work,” and uttering my two least favorite words “tear down.”
In spite of the huge potential, the initial attraction to the property and the acreage, did not push us into a place that we could comfortably consider complicating our lives and our budgets for untold years to come. In spite of the possibility of income potential from the apartment and the romantic charm of the pot belly stove in the dilapidated shack, we decided it was much too far away from civilization so we passed on the property with a bit of reluctance.
We did, however, buy a shiny new crock pot. Now, our old house is full of the wonderful smell of winter.
Now we don’t have to get a dog. ben.guerrero@sbcglobal.net
