The Old House Comes Down

Mother always wanted me to build a new house where her old one stood. Before I could do that, the old house had to be emptied and removed. The emptying was quite a chore. All those things she saved that she might use some time, and 40 boxes of fabric and yarn.

To make the demolition quicker (and cheaper), we engaged the Eureka Volunteer Fire Department to use the house as a training site and then to burn it down. I didn't go to the actual conflagration, but my kids did and they got some neat pictures of it.

Incidentally, it wasn't out of love of the old place that I didn't go to the burning. It was too early on a Saturday morning.

The Fire Department people were wonderful and I can't possibly thank them enough.

Bug's* First House

My parents lived in the house at 617 N. Webster in Eureka for 34 years, and Mother hated the house the whole time she lived in it. She often said that if she had known how much money Bob had squirreled away, she'd have had a new house.
The old house was not well-built and had not been cared for before my folks moved in. The basement was perpetually wet, the rooms were small and there was an odd one that didn't adapt ttself to any use anyone could think of. The bathroom was 3-1/2 feet walled off of the end of the kitchen. The upstairs had two rooms, sort of, but you had to walk through the first one to get to the second one. The septic system was inadequate and a constant problem.
I inherited the house with her death in 2007 and finally decided to do what she always told me to do, "When I die, I want you to tear down this house and build a new one."
I had looked into the cost of re-modeling the old house, and when I reached $150,000, I decided we might as well build a new one. She liked the houses built by Homeway Homes, and I did, too, except there always seemed to be something awkward about every floor plan. For example, in one design you entered one of the bedrooms from the kitchen. And I don't want a humungous bathroom with a tub with gobs of squirters. I don't want to tie up gobs of floor space in bathrooms.
So the logical decision was to tear the house down and build a new one. It would be Bug's second house.
*Bug was my mother's nickname.