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THE GREAT HIATUS
Despite all
our good intentions, we did not get back to Missouri to work on the house
again for well over a year. Right after August 2003, Jon and I decided to
sell our old house in Champaign, Illinois and look for something smaller
and newer that required less maintenance.
The Champaign house
was a big old Victorian fixer-upper that we'd owned for 10 years, first as
a rental and then as our home. Jon and I had done a great deal of work on
it, but there was still a lot to be done, including an impossibly steep,
and expensive, new roof; the removal of hard asbestos slate siding and a
new heating system. The house was costing us a fortune and it was far too
big for our real needs, so we listed it with our good friends, John and
Mary Jo Rogers at Coldwell Banker. As we had listed the house at the lower
end of the local market and we were located on the edge of the downtown
gentrification area, we were fairly confident of a fast sale at a decent
price.
We couldn't have
been more wrong....Oh we had lots of looks: starry-eyed young couples,
hardened landlord investors, and whole troops of handy-man carpenters
looking for a quick flip. They would wonder around admiring all the
original features, jumping up and down and declaring the house solid as a
rock, while chanting the eternal mantra: "It's got such potential."
But in the end, they would look at the steep roof and crunch the numbers
and decide it was too much work, or money, for them to tackle. We lowered
the price to an absurd figure for a 2,000 square foot livable house,
buried umpteen St. Josephs in the front yard, and collected so many
realtors showing cards that we considered using them to repaper the
downstairs bathroom, but no solid offers.
Meanwhile we were
looking at houses for ourselves, hoping to have our ducks in order when
our place sold. And we found lots of perfect new homes. There was a small
house with a huge, one-room addition that was being used by a small black
Baptist Church. It had two full baths with showers and a huge church
kitchen. It was ramped and had paved parking for 20 cars and a huge fenced
yard for the dogs. It was a block from the hospital and on a bus route.
And the price was right. But before we could make an offer, the
congregation became embroiled in a lawsuit with the widow of the original
donor of the property and things got very confused and acrimonious.
Luckily, we had the good sense to step aside.
Then there was the
little ranch house that hadn't been decorated or cleaned in 20 years, but
it sat on 2 acres of land at the end of a cul-de-sac. It had fruit
trees and was a little bit of country, smack in the middle of town. But it
sold in two days. And there was the beautiful Victorian, an actual twin
to the house we were trying so desperately to sell. BUT, it had been
completely rehabbed... even had the same wallpaper we had in the front
hall, which we took as an omen the house was meant for us. There was a
jungle of a garden with a chapel in a converted garage that looked like a
little bit of Santa Fe. It was within walking distance of our jobs and
had been used as a home for at-risk kids. AND it was wildly under-priced.
We actually got into a bidding war on that one, but lost out to deeper
pockets. So, we kept showing our house, praying for a sale, and reading
the ads.
At the same time, our dear friend and land partner in Missouri, Roger Dodd
was fighting a losing battle with AIDS. Roger moved into an apartment down
the street so Levi and Jon could be close to him to help when they could
and he could maintain some semblance of self reliance. This took a lot of
our spare time and we put the Missouri house on hold all through the
Summer of 2004. And the Fall too...
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