Our Old House
59 Puddingstone Way
We bought this house in the summer of 1986. Matthew was two years old when we moved here. I thought I'd grow old and die here. But it got to be more than we could afford. We sold the house in May 2008 and moved into a tiny two bedroom condo. Twenty-two years in this house. Rebecca was born and raised here ... it's the only home she's known. Matthew grew up here. In the beginning, Sharon and I had great plans for the house. But for some reason they never got done.
So now we live in a condo. No more basement that leaked. Every time it rained I'd be up and down the stairs, making sure the sump pump was working. When the electric would go out during one of the major storms, the basement would flood, so we ended up buying a generator to keep the pump running. The gutters would always fill up with leaves. When the down spouts got clogged, the water would run down the walls and, guess where, into the basement. I can't tell you how many storms I'm out on the roof, cleaning those damn gutters. The roof leaked. The second floor sagged because the builders did such a poor job pouring the slab on the ground floor. The floor of the garage tilted into the middle, so in a good rain storm, water would run into the garage. We sucked at landscaping. Flowers and trees would die, weeds grew and grew. So into a condo ... no more basement, no more garage, no more leaky roof, no more grass to cut, no more snow to shovel ....
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This is our old ugly yellow house on Puddingstone Way. It's a huge house with 4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths, living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, 1/2 basement and a 2 car garage. Plus there were 3 attic spaces for storage. The basement had a home office, workshop and built in storage.
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This is the back of the house. "Big Blue" is sitting behind the garage, waiting to be worked on. Goofy dog is walking toward the camera. I had to cut this grass, and more. Out of site an the left was a good sized shed.
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It took us a while, but we finally sold the house. We drove by it one afternoon and found the new owners had started some work on the house. Becky snapped this photo on her camera from the car. Note that the garage on the right is gutted and roofless.
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Becky ran up to the house and stuck her camera through the living room window to take this one. They gutted the whole house. The kitchen was straight back, the dinning room was to the left and the living room was in front. They took the carpet off the stairs leading up to the bed rooms.
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Well at least all the ugly yellow aluminum siding is gone. No wonder he didn't care that the roof leaked over the garage. Sharon and I had talked about adding on over the garage, but never followed through. I had it all planned out, adding a nice new master bedroom and bath, combining the two smaller bedrooms, and converting the old bathroom into a laundry room. Oh, well.
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This is going to be one huge house! I've got to see the inside. I wonder what he did with my office? I spent months building my office. I had placed sleepers on the floor, with ridged foam insulation between them to raise the floor off the concrete floor to give some protection against flooding. I wired that room, sheetrocked it and painted it. I was in the process of installing a drop ceiling in it. I had my file cabinets in it, with my computer desk and railroad magazine storage in nice bookcases. I has my train workshop on one side of the room to work on all my model railroad projects. I had a TV in one corner so that I could watch my shows while I paid the bills my desk or on the computer. It was really my "man cave". I loved that room. I also wonder what they did with the bearing wall in the family room. This is the wall that supported the second floor that had the really bad sag in it. The concrete slab had a valley in it that threw off the whole center of that part of the house by about two inches. Did they jack it up to level? The whole floor of the slab needed to be leveled.
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Just look at the size of this house. It was a four bedroom house before the addition! This addition could add another four bedrooms. I hope he's going to add a great heating and cooling system ... the one that was in the house sucked. The duct work wasn't installed correctly when it was built. In the summertime, the air conditioning would come on in the morning and run all day. It would never cycle off. The upstairs bedrooms needed window ac units to make it bearable (See the first photo). My electric bill for the summer months was well over $500.00 PER MONTH! It's going to look out of place in the neighborhood. Boy, I'll bet the neighbors are glad to see us leave. A house this size is going to drive up property values.
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