Home sweet home

My family calls my childhood home 'The Faye House.' It's on Faye Street so go figure huh?  My parents bought it in the early 70s for a mere $20,000 and spent the next 15 years of their married life raising their family there and decorating it with a charming green color scheme.  My Dad still owns the house and has been renting it out for the past 25 years and it in dire need of some love.  He's only really holding onto it so he can retire someday (he's self employed) and I guess it's finally about that time because he keeps asking if I want to buy it.  The sentimental /  nostalgic side of me is like hells yeah I want to restore that house to its former glory and keep it in the family.  The other 99% of me is like hell to the no.  The neighborhood is not what it used to be, it's not going to appreciate much, and I don't want to be a landlord and watch lame ass renters ruin all my hard work. blurg.

Anyways, this last weekend Dave and I met my Dad at the Faye house to assess the damage from the last batch of renters and see if we could help outl.  He is slowly fixing things here or there as needed, but in general the house is all original.  The fixtures, the windows, the wall furnaces are original to the house, and my Dad was finally forced to replace the roof last spring which was the end of the very last shake shingle roof in the neighborhood.  He has a lot of pride that this house is in it's original state because he is very nostalgic and thinks of it as a collectors item / antique.  It was built in the 50s as part of a new suburban development in the heights (back then it was the on the outskirts) and they were advertised as being "wife planned" homes with new add-ons including linoleum, formica counters, and garbage disposals.  When I was in the fourth grade my Dad took me to the Smithsonian in D.C. just to see the Princess Jeanne exhibit they had.  He is very proud.  One of the token decorating features in our house: Copper drawer handles, copper stove hood, copper light fixtures, copper flakes in the counter tops...very old school. 

The house had just been coated with a bright flat white paint and as I wandered around looking at our old bedrooms it was hard to believe we had lived so fully in this blank, sterilized space.  The rooms aren't nearly as tall and spacious as I remember, and there isn't much evidence that my family ever lived there.  Renters would never guess that the kitchen table was the center for all birthday and graduation parties, the back yard is where the cousins camped out, and the living room was trashed with wrapping after every Christmas morning.  It's so bizarre.  That time passes and there's no evidence of all the experiences we had there.  It's all just little attachments and memories stored in my brain.

I won't be buying it, but hopefully it will stick with us for the next few years and will get some good love and fixing in the meantime.