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Let’s Begin at the Beginning

Jane Doe. fresh snow, February 2011

It snowed today, just like when we made our initial assessment in February of last year. So today seemed like a good day to look back and remember how this whole mess got started. The GWH and I made a trip to the farm to celebrate Mamaw’s birthday and drove the mile and a half up the road to Jane Doe to take some pictures and talk about how to proceed.

So I guess the question is: “What were we thinking?!” Or more accurately, “What was he thinking?!”  because at this point this was GWH’s idea.  He wanted to turn Jane into a deer camp by November, when bow season opened. We got out and looked around.

By November. Really?

A pile of rocks!

The snow actually made the place look better. Cleaner. But closer inspection heightened my sense of foreboding. The porch that wrapped around two sides of the house was rotted away. Half the windows were broken and boarded up. And then there was the asphalt siding. Lovely, tattered grey and black asphalt roll stock imprinted with a brick pattern almost completely covered the exterior  wood siding. Most of the original porch posts were missing, replaced by landscape timbers or two by fours. The roof sagged precariously in places. But, still…maybe a little potential? No, no wait! What was I saying? This house had the potential to fly up into the sky in a tornado, like Dorothy’s, because it isn’t even tethered to the ground. It sat on piles of rocks!

What's left of the porch...

We didn’t know much about this house other that it had been used for storage since about 1975. Mamaw kept her big freezer and an extra refrigerator in the old kitchen. Other than that, it was her nine hundred square foot attic, a mile and a half from her house.It did have a bathroom, scabbed on sometime in the 1950’s, sitting precariously on the rotten porch, right next to the front door. The water was turned off, it hadn’t been used in years. The house was perfectly square, except for the bathroom, four 16 ft. square rooms, no hallway, each with a door to the next and each with two sets of windows and an exterior door. The room that adjoined the bathroom was the exception, it’s exterior door had been replaced and another interior door had been repurposed into the bathroom door.

Next to the house was a smoke house, probably the same age as the house itself. Nearby there was a barn and an old shed that also needed attention. At this point, I was officially overwhelmed. But there was something about Jane that would not be denied. I got that “let’s build a treehouse” feeling you get when you’re eight and all you see is the coolness factor and how great it’s going to be, while you push aside all the glaringly obvious red flags and drawbacks and reasonable adult arguments against proceeding down a path fraught with pitfalls and obstacles.

I could tell GWH was going to do this and without my help he might really screw it up. I think Jane knew this, too.  I was in a quandary–I had a life 250 miles away, but Jane was tugging at my heartstrings.

Just west of Jane Doe, the smokehouse.