This Old House - Part 2

 

We were committed. Our offer and deposit had been accepted and we were “pre-approved” for a loan. Next steps were getting an appraisal, a pest and home inspection, filling out the loan paperwork, and waiting. Agonizing waiting. Everything had to go through, we had no options. It was either Spring Street or a campsite under a bridge.

The pest report only called out water damage from a leaking shower pan in the downstairs bathroom, my bathroom. The whole house inspection was a horror story, pages filled with diagrams, red arrows, underlined passages, and exclamation points. We decided to ignore it. The roof was sound and that was what we needed: a roof over our heads. The house had stood for 131 years. Realistically, Colleen needed only 30 more. Inexplicably, but fortuitously, the appraisal came in where we needed it.

I’m not sure what “pre-approved is supposed to mean – in our case it meant nothing. We completed piles of paperwork, submitted them, and then the lender wanted proof my retirement income would continue until my death. I provided statements demonstrating it was adequately funded, 1099’s, photocopies of bank accounts, and nothing seemed to satisfy. They wanted a statement declaring my employer promised to pay until my death. I had no such thing, but I did have a 122-page document describing IBM’s several pension plans, although it did not specify which was my plan. I submitted it. I’m sure no one read it or understood it, I certainly hadn’t. But the lenders gave in and approved the loan.

The clock was ticking, we were on tenterhooks, but we were ready, all documents were signed and delivered to the title company. The seller just had to submit his package and escrow could close. But he didn’t. He suffered a stroke on a Friday afternoon and lay in a coma on life support in the hospital. He was single, his only relative was his 86-year-old feeble mother. If he died, we were doomed. Our only hope was that he would live and that his mother could quickly gain guardianship. Prayer warriors were summoned, and he did live. Monday morning his mother applied for guardianship; the court was cooperative and rushed it through. And we exhaled. The deal closed; we gained title, for better or worse.

Colleen moved in immediately, just as her lease was running out. The work on the shower had not been completed, so my move was delayed. However, my landlord graciously extended my occupancy a couple of weeks. The bathroom repairs proceeded. Tile was removed from the floor and the bottom 12 inches of the shower wall to access and remove the shower pan. The demolition revealed that the shower pan was intact, the pest report was erroneous, and there had been no need to replace it. However, it was replaced, and the stall was now ready for use.

Because the old toilet in the same bathroom was too low for my comfort, it was removed, and a new slightly taller model installed.

In the meanwhile, dear friends painted my bedroom. The oppressive dark green wall and the ceiling now soothed me with a beautiful shade of sky blue, complemented by the soft pink of the remaining walls. It looks clean and gentle, like a baby’s room, making me feel safe and warm.

Just as we were unpacking and settling in, a letter arrived from our homeowner’s insurance company demanding we make several repairs to keep our policy in force, or it would be cancelled July 7, just two months away. We were told our decayed front steps, porch, and the balustrade that was held together with chicken wire had to be replaced; the broken stained glass in the front door fixed, some rotten siding dealt with, and the dead ivy and tree limbs overhanging the house removed. Time was short and so were our finances.

Fortunately, Colleen was on sabbatical from her job at Blue Shield. When she was not working at getting settled, she was engaged in volunteer work with the homeless of our community. Many of the unhoused men were highly skilled and willing workers. They became our labor pool.

70-year-old Floyd rebuilt our front stairs, porch, and balustrade. He wasn’t homeless, but he was desperately impoverished and eager to earn some money. Summer heat was merciless, temperatures reached 110 degrees, often too hot to work outdoors, especially for someone his age and with a history of TIAs. The quality of Floyd’s work was beyond reproach, but the pace was agonizingly glacial. I harbored an unspoken fear he would suffer heat stroke before finishing the job. We kept him hydrated and fed, and we prayed. And he delivered.

 As we were prioritizing home repairs, sewage seeped into our basement. The insurance company demands had to take a back seat to this emergency. The drains were snaked out, but only a trickle made it through the system. After days of trying all sorts of chemical and poking maneuvers, it was apparent that the sewer pipes were ruptured somewhere along the line. It seemed obvious that roots of the huge sycamore tree lurking in the front yard had invaded the system.

Again, Colleen employed a couple of her acquaintances -- skilled handymen with strong backs and empty wallets. Digging out the leaking sewer line was a nasty job. We soon dubbed the hole in the front yard the poop pit. The effort involved much more than simply digging; roots as big as the largest limbs overhead had to be sawed through and removed – some weighed as much as 100 pounds. And there were large rocks as well. The ancient terra cotta pipe was a shambles.

We sparingly used the toilets. Water from the dishwasher, shower, and laundry flowed through easily. On a daily basis, it was necessary to access the broken pipe in the poop pit and use a hose to flush the sewage into the main.

The digging began at a point near the front edge of our property. The pipe went under the sidewalk and joined the main somewhere in the middle of the street. The city of Placerville informed us we were responsible for everything up to the main, even though it ran through city property. So, as work progressed, the poop pit became a poop tunnel, all excavated manually in the summer heat. Six feet deep and twice as long, the hole could accommodate a couple of bodies. Possibly insurance adjusters. After two months of living with an open sewer, the main was reached; roots, rocks, and terra cotta shards were removed, and PVC pipe was installed.

In the meanwhile, work continued on the insurance company’s demands. Rotten siding was replaced, the stained-glass window repaired, dead ivy still clung to the house and the tree limbs of the evil sycamore tree drooped over the roof. The house needed paint – the new porch and replaced siding were bare, the ivy destroyed the paint, and the house was an icky shade of dirty yellow, like a mixture of mustard and mud. This time we called in the pros. They had the scaffolding and ladders needed to reach 30 feet where the ivy clung. Days of scraping and power washing preceded the application of the beautiful sea-foam green paint. Dark green, white, and a burnt orange front door accented the decorative Victorian details that made the house worthy of Placerville’s Registry of Historic Homes.

On July 4^th, just 3 days short of the insurance company’s deadline, the tree in the front yard came down. Again, a couple of Colleen’s underemployed acquaintances signed on to the job. Bob was a certified arborist who had difficulty managing his life and his business. But he had tools, skill, and the need for cash. Until that day, I had never thought of tree felling as a spectator sport, but I was enthralled. The removal was challenging. Picket fences extended north and south from the trunk; immediately to the east was the sidewalk and busy Highway 49. Overhead utility wires were laced through the heavily leaved branches and the house with many windows was due west. The tree had to come down limb by limb with Bob climbing into the highest reaches more than 30 feet off the ground. While still on the tree, limbs had to be cut with a chainsaw into small enough pieces to be carefully lowered with pulleys and ropes, threading through the utility wires. And all of this in 110-degree heat. The tension and anticipation of horror I experienced evoked my memories of the bull fight I had seen in Mexico City. Like the bull, the tree had met its match, and Bob was in my eyes, a more glorious victor than any matador.

 

This Old House, Part 1

 

My landlord gave me notice. I had to be out by the first of May. Coincidentally, my daughter had also received notice to vacate her home by the same date. The housing market was nuts; rent and home prices were skyrocketing. I needed wheel-chair accessible housing. She had two cats, and a son. We could see that our only hope was to pool our resources and move into something, somewhere, somehow, together.

And so began the search. No rentals could be found to accommodate our combined household; the tight market meant landlords were not interested in feline tenants, and I needed stair-free access. Buying something, anything, became our only option. Our budget was tight; we could only afford a place at the lowest end of all the listings -- obviously, we would no longer be living in El Dorado Hills. We cast our net 25 miles in all directions and found that anyplace affordable to the west was in a scary neighborhood, so we looked eastward, higher into the foothills, and zeroed in on Placerville.

The idea of Placerville appealed to both of us: not too remote, charming historic downtown, and deep ancestral roots. By combining our resources, we just might possibly qualify for one of the least expensive listings on the market. I only cared that it was affordable and that I would be able to navigate in my wheelchair, other than that, the choice was entirely up to Colleen. I’m 82 years old and it’s not likely I will spend many years anywhere. Colleen on the other hand, could end up spending decades in the place we landed.

At least I thought I didn’t care about anything else. When she told me she had found the place and made an offer, I thought our troubles were over. And then she took me to see it.

The 131-year-old Annie Jaeger House, listed on Placerville’s directory of historical homes, is located on Spring Street, AKA Highway 49, just four houses from Highway 50. Spring Street is a narrow two-lane road, with no shoulders for parking and a constant stream of traffic. When she took me to see it, we waited for a break in the flow before she pulled into the driveway. I began to absorb some of the details. A scabious residue of dead ivy covered much of the baby diaper yellow front of the house. The sagging and unusable front steps led to a porch with a rotting balustrade that brought to mind the meth mouth of the pedestrians who passed in a steady flow on the sidewalk. The sense of dental decay was reinforced by the fence sorely in need of numerous picket transplants. A huge sycamore tree planted in the middle of the front yard laced its limbs through the utility wires and draped its boughs over the roof thirty feet above ground level. The lush green front yard was filled with some sort of lily-like plant with small white blooms. I broke off a bit of one of the flowers and inhaled deeply. My eyes watered and I began to crave a hamburger. The entire front yard was a patch of wild onions.

The clapboard siding was nearly intact, the porch and entry near the driveway appeared serviceable, but steps made it inaccessible to my wheelchair. We passed the three towering locust trees shading the porch while shedding leaves in the rain gutters and made our way to the back of the house. The back yard presented a vertical climb of around 20 feet over 30 feet of horizontal space. Through a masterful engineering feat, it was terraced into five usable levels, three of them paved while weeds flourished on two. The hillside seemed sound even though a huge dark brown house loomed menacingly just ten feet on the other side of the back fence. The hillside had held for more than a century with no evidence of slippage.

We entered through the back door, unlocked because apparently no skeleton key could be found to fit. Surprisingly, the interior was empty and undisturbed, no one else seemed to have discovered the ease of entry. I worked my way over the threshold in my wheelchair with some assistance from my daughter and made a mental note that some accessibility accommodation would be necessary. Old house smell came flooding into my nostrils and opened chambers of memory. I had spent my teen years living in a derelict 1890’s Victorian farmhouse. The olfactory sensation was a smoky blend of cigars, wood fire, dust, and more than a century of human habitation.

 In front of me the original wood floor extended through the dining room to the living room with nearly opaque windows facing the street. Some of the windows were original glass, others had been replaced. The floors were as wavy as the old windows. Rising over the hump in the floor between the dining room and living room took a bit of effort, but I coasted down the other side with ease. Gaps between the floorboards had been filled at one time, but chunks of the filler had broken loose in places leaving small trenches perfect for collecting debris of all sorts.

I made a right turn through the doorway at the far end of the living room and found myself in the entry hall. The front door, with its broken stained-glass window was straight ahead. To my right 15 stairs with a wobbly banister rose to the second floor – territory that would forever remain an inaccessible mystery to me.

Just a bit further along to my right, next to the staircase, the door to what was to become my bedroom stood open. As I scooted into the room, I noticed at just below eye level the beautiful rose-colored intricately worked hardware of the door latch and hinges. The door itself was solid, and although scarred, still beautifully crafted. In the room, charming details in the woodwork, picture rails, and window frames lay beneath the grit and grime of the surface. The flickering blue pilot light of the propane stove standing on a brick hearth at the far end of the room indicated that it was in working order. It stood against a dark green wall that made the 12 by 15-foot room appear smaller. No closet existed. A door in the green wall led to the lowest terrace of the back yard.

I retraced my path toward the back door we had entered, but instead of exiting, I made a right turn into the kitchen. This room was a one-story annex obviously added to the original two-story home. Further, we had been told, it was completely rebuilt in 2008 after a tree had fallen from a neighbor’s property smashing it and a car parked in the adjacent driveway. Granite counters, lots of cupboards, stainless steel appliances, and great lighting, while not in keeping with Victoriana, held promise of a good working environment.

Oddly, the only bathroom downstairs opened directly into the kitchen, an arrangement today’s building codes would not permit. The cramped bathroom with its tiny shower had been rebuilt and seemed to be in good condition. The toilet was too low for my convenience and would have to be replaced before I could move in.

How could I tell my daughter what I really thought? She loved it and only saw charm and potential where I saw decay, insurmountable defects, and unaffordable repairs. However, the alternative seemed to be couch surfing or living out of my car; this was clearly an instance of Hobson’s Choice.