Nothing Happens At Ten 2009

House From Hell

We have a house.

We are going to tear it down and build a new house on the same lot.

We are doing that because it is the House From Hell.

Have you seen the movie "The Money Pit", or perhaps the movie "Mouse Hunt"? Well those houses were a cakewalk compared to our house.

Our house was built in the mid 1940's, the Dark Ages of architecture. The design of the house is horrid, being made of cinder blocks and stucco with single pane, steel casement windows. And to top off the bad design, the construction of it was botched as well.

Here is an example. The slab of our house... yes the house is on a slab.. was poured on fill that was not properly tamped down, hence, shortly after the house was completed, the slab sank at the front and cracked in the middle. This is not an insignificant drop. It has settled at least six inches over the years.

So all the floors on the ground level are slanted toward the street. If you put a marble on the floor, it will inevitably roll toward the front of the house until it disappears into the maw between the broken slab and its footing. Pens and pencils will likewise disappear into the abyss. The remains of small rodents are entombed there, the poor creatures unable to climb out against the force of gravity. We feared for our children when they were small. In fact, the grade of the living room floor is so steep that three or four times each week we have to push the sofa back up the hill into the middle of the room because it has crept down toward the front of the house.

I don't believe that the gap in the floor is capable of swallowing an entire sofa, but we have not let it go that far to find out.

I am not going to try to tell all of the stories about our house in this one post because that would take more words than you would care to read. Instead, I will do to you what the house did to us and feed the information out slowly over many agonizing months.