We bought our starter home in 1987 for $91,900, choosing to stay in it as long as possible, making minimum wear-and-tear repairs for 30+ years.
Zillow now says our home is worth about $155,000.
However…
Thank goodness, we wisely managed a stock, mutual fund and bond portfolio as our primary source of retirement funds, not our house, whose price hasn’t kept up with inflation!
What’s the treehouse worth?!
Our first and only house, our starter home, if you will, we bought new.
The house we look at now is younger than ours by 20 years but needs a little TLC…
So, how much of the needed TLC repair work do we negotiate in offering a lower buying price?
The new place definitely offers a different view out the front than our current one…
…but the view out the back is similar…
Artistically, what does my gut tell me?
Why is the first thing that pops into my thoughts a Bob Hope film?
Five pallets treated, three to go…
Meanwhile, the frogs keep busy getting warm…
…and, being childless, little concerned about global warming/climate change (not our future offsprings’ survival to worry about), we stop dreaming about going the offgrid tiny house route, planning for something similar to this, instead…
After living 30+ years in the same domicile, which requires walking up/down a short flight of stairs from the garage to the main level, we’ve decided we require a one-level home in which we can age in place as long as possible.
We’ve compared notes, our life companion and ourselves, and agreed that although we want a maintenance-free place in which to die (assisted living facility? hospice? hospital?), we wish to live in a place of our own for the next few years/decades.
This, of course, disrupts our plans for building a backyard writer’s cottage in the woods.
Honestly, though, it’s not a bad thing.
For some reason, we’ve always hesitated tearing apart a wooded backyard, seeing that the main house, with a study/workshop/laboratory, sunroom and garage should have sufficed for our writing and mad scientist tinkering.
Therefore, we’re going to take the leftover wood from our old backyard deck we disassembled in 2001…
…using most of it to construct the pirate-themed treehouse…
…and build an art exhibit of some kind, we’re not sure what, where the rebar is mounted in the rock outcropping up in the woods, adding a few of the the cedar logs we harvested. Hopefully, it will inspire the new owners to take it to the next level of artistic expression for themselves. Regardless, they will be free to do as they please.
Meanwhile, we keep playing with the electronic development boards and getting rid of junk in the house in preparation for moving, all whilst working the midnight shift, saving lives every day with preparation and delivery of the vital fluids we call blood products, thanks to volunteer blood donors and laboratory blood processors.
Our new life, 2018 and onward, free of social media influences, free of social dancing pressures (including social drinking), is more free and fun than ever, quietly getting to know our spouse/wife/life partner/companion all over again.
Now that we know the recycled material we’ve collected will be used to build a sunny garden of our dreams, complete with orchid/tree fern greenhouse and pallet wood gardening shed, it’s time to ride our motorcycle again!
A bucket list photo opp we finally achieved today! Lighthouse on Lake Guntersville…
Who can pass up photographing an old lighthouse and paddlewheel river boat in the same photo?!
Our life partner and us are thinking about moving. Think this fixer upper is worth it? 😉
The new discovery of High Falls only an hour’s drive from our house prompted us to take our spouse to see it for herself the first time.
Well worth our revisit! View the waterfall from the other side, see wildflowers, walk moss-covered trail through rhododendrons…
Today’s historic photo tour takes us through the li’l mill villes that sprang up around cotton processing factories in west Huntsville…
Some are revitalised, some have lost their vitality.
For us, the journey continues…
Today’s historic photo stop:
J. C. Brown General Merchandise
Jesse Charles Brown was a native of Falls Mill, Tenn., near Huntland. In the late 1890s, he came to Huntsville after the deaths of his parents.
He was brought here because someone saw him perched on a fence post – the universal symbol at the time that someone was in need.
For a year or so, he worked for P.F. Dunnavant, the legendary owner of Dunnavant’s Department Store.
In 1898, he opened his general merchandise store in west Huntsville, where business was thriving with the development of the textile mills.
Located near a row of microbreweries…
With an interesting brick building across the street…
This corner has potential for something, but what? The neighbourhood has many Hispanic businesses. Perhaps a Latin music dance hall with a bar that serves Cuban food?
Writer's oasis 