Memorial House Tour

Our tour of the Memorial House starts with the living room, and its Bright. Green. Carpet. (These previous owners were no where near as bad as my previous owners… in fact, they even stripped all of the white paint off the wood trim and cabinets. And I don’t even think they were responsible for the, um, bold carpet color choices. That might have been the previous-previous owners.)

Luckily there are some wood floors located under all of that carpet, as you can see in the dining room.

(Don’t mind my feet… I was hanging out in the house by myself for a little while yesterday, just getting a feel for the place and jotting down ideas. I know that souds a little woo-woo, but it works for me.)

Through the door straight ahead you’ll find the little galley kitchen, which has about nothing to recommend it. (Except that one window overlooks the wheat field)

I’m not trying to be hard on the house or anything. The cabinets are old, the floor is linoleum, and the space is small. It needs some love. And tile. And, please god, a 6-8′ addition on the South wall. (When MysteryMan reads that he’s going to start banging his head against the keyboard… his new mantra for me is: One. Project. At. A. Time. And right now that project is getting the roof on the gas station fixed.)

Anyway, the 2 bedrooms are small and box-like with little closets and bright blue carpet. And the bathroom… well…

… even MysteryMan said “No way I am showering in there.”

You might look at the outside of the house and see those 2nd story dormers and think there was a loft upstairs or something.

You would be wrong. All there is, is this…

Why go to the trouble of putting the windows up there then? I have no idea.

I’m hoping we’ll have enough space up there for a master bedroom (and if the fates are smiling down upon us, a master bath). But first we have to figure out if it’s even possible to put stairs in the place anywhere.

Relationship Lesson For the Day:

I first got a hint of the fact that MysteryMan and I have different process-related styles on our way back from Vegas. After our plane touched down on theopposite side of the airport from which we took off (and therefore parked) we started to walk in the general direction of the car which we hoped to reach sometime in the next two hours. Since all we had eaten in the previous seven hours was a $5 bag of peanuts on the airplane, which worked out to about 12 nuts apiece, I started talking about our options for dinner as we walked. I was all… we could do this, we could do that, we could…

At which point MysteryMan was all, WOMAN. CAN WE PLEASE JUST FIND THE CAR BEFORE WE START TALKING ABOUT DINNER?

Because me? I like to multitask. We were walking in the direction of the car as fast as we possibly could and since we were still like a mile away from it and I didn’t need to be intensely concetrating on finding the one bright yellow SUV in the entire lot, I figured we could move on and solve problem #2 in the meantime.

MysteryMan figured that once I started babbling about the merits of pizza vs. take-out chinese, one or both of us was going to get distracted and we could end up wandering around the multitude Detroit Airport parking lots for the rest of our natural lives.

We both feel similarly about the house. I want to think about the kitchen, and the front porch, and the possibility of dormers in the attic all at the same time, because I see all the possibilities in my head now. MysteryMan wants to focus on our first project and not talk about anything else until its done.

At first we were both a little weirded out by the way the other person wanted to work through the process of renovating the house. But now I believe we like to think of it like this… I’m the vision, he’s the motivation.

First problem, solved.