Kevin’s home sick with strep today, so I thought I’d give him something to read while he sips his Edel Pils and browses the ‘Net. Get well soon, dude! (And save me an Edel Pils!)
A while back he asked me to take some pictures of this house that’s being renovated across the street from us. A local…”landowner”…has been working on the place since last August. On second thought, “landowner” really isn’t descriptive enough. Let’s try “slumlord.” Better? Mmm. Yes.
When we moved in to our house, there was a nice open lot across the street. Next to the lot was a nice-looking two-story yellow house owned by the slumlord. The college kids who rented the house would often have huge parties in the lot and play wiffle ball late into the summer night. During the week the lot’s thick grass would blink and glow with hundreds of fireflies as soon as the sun began to set.
Then one day last summer some men showed up with measuring tapes and spray paint and started marking out property lines. Before long an excavator was delivered that dug out a huge hole that would eventually be filled with a foundation. A slab was poured for a new garage. Finally, we learned that the slumlord was going to move an existing home onto the new foundation. If this had been happening in any other neighborhood but mine, I’d have been thrilled at the prospect of seeing a whole house coming down the road on a flatbed. But since the plan was to create another rental property right outside our front door, I wasn’t excited at all.
Turns out the house was coming from a property that sits adjacent to the slumlord’s residence. The slumlord decided he wanted a nice open lot full of green grass and fireflies next to his house, so he uprooted the hovel next door, transplanted it to our block, and prepared it for rental. Yippee.
The renovation work, as evidenced by the pictures here, is ongoing. You might attribute the slow pace
to the fact that it’s winter now in Iowa. Or you might conclude that a ragtag group of 70-year-old recovering alcoholics can only work so fast, after all. But I hate to point fingers. Suffice to say it’s going to be a while before this place is habitable. Well, habitable for anyone save the worker who’s staying in the house until it’s completed, that is. I suspect we may see this place burned to the ground in the dead of night as the result of an unattended cigarette before we ever see any siding on it.
None of which is to say I don’t think the house has a lot of potential. It’s cute, though it is a bit small. I’m eager to see what they do with the siding, which could really make or break the project. It’ll be nice to have the neighbors’ cars off the street and into garages for a change, particularly with as congested as our street gets when school is in session around here. And if there’s any justice at all in this crazy, mixed-up world, a nice family will rent the place at last.