How bad could it be? Bad, real bad...

February 2010

 

To keep up on my recording I feel that I should go back to our house search.  It will give everyone a little background into our lowered living standards and our excitement in finding our current house.  From 2009-2010 we had been living in an AMAZING apartment on N Mississippi Ave in the heart of Portland. 

 

 

This is a great area of town with restaurants, shops, theaters and generally everything you could want.  We loved it, however, we did not love our location over a bar, our lack of yard for Gus, and our need for... just a little more space.

One day, I say a listing for a house that was 3 blocks away.  It was selling for the unbelievable $169,000, I thought... how bad could it be?  I asked Josh if we could go see, you know, just for fun... I mean heck even we could afford that right?  I think this was probably the moment we both should have gotten a glass of wine and just watched a movie.  But here we go, without having any idea of what we were doing we scheduled to see the house. 

  

 

This was the house, granted a little scary but had some nice bones, original windows, looked to be a good size.  This place had been 'rented' for many years, I think it's more appropriate to call it squatting. I wish I had taken interior pictures.  There had been a fire in the dining room area, there was a weird altar in the living room (yes an altar).  Someone had carved ankh's into the staircase and I was getting the vibe that sacrifices may or may not have happened there.  We walked through a little dazed with the realtor (eventually to be our realtor through the whole process) and were generally pretty freaked out, but I could see potential. 

 

Then... we went to the basement.   What you can't see in this picture is that the tree on the right hand side is actually coming OUT of the basement.  The tree was in the house, the entire basement wall was caved in.  I think without saying anything we knew this was not really a 'fixer-upper' this was a satanic structural nightmare.  I think it was truly decided decided when I hit my head on a gas mask hanging from the ceiling joists.  We needed to escape immediately.  This was the start of a very bad movie.

 

But, the scariest part, is that instead of running home proud of our success of escaping a Wes Craven film, we told the realtor... "well there is ANOTHER house a couple blocks away for sale and maybe we should just take a quick look at that one." And that my friends, is how it happens.