Welcome to "Lots of Potential" .... (Dateline May 2004)

When my husband and I began our married life in N. Michigan eons ago (dinosaurs, swamp gas, etc) we began the perennial, slightly psychotic all-American dance called “looking for a home. Having spent most of my life in Virginia I had visions of a big old southern style farmhouse with a huge wrap around porch. The kind of house you picture when you think of “Gone with the Wind”, mint juleps (hold the mint) and an 18 pound, 17-year cicada buzzing down your shirt.

So much for visions. Seems in Northern Michigan they don’t have summers (see above), you have winter. Lots of winter. Winter = cold temperatures. Cold temperatures = high heating bills. Heating bills = money (lots and lots of money). Therefore most houses here are built small (well, ok, there are exceptions for people in the ionosphere wage bracket but we won’t go there).

The houses we looked at in town were two storied older homes (circa 1900) with narrow street fronts. Seems in 1860 when the town fathers were still planning the local neighborhoods space was limited (why else would they build perpendicular to the street?)

Want to have your psyche stretched to the breaking point? Try living in a house that is the exact opposite of the layout you are used to. By this I mean if you are used to living with your house parallel to the street – switch house types. Try living in a house that goes perpendicular to the street. You will quickly find yourself running into walls where doors should be, especially on your way to the bathroom at 3 a.m. You will begin to finally understand that your neighbors aren’t married to abusive spouses, they just have to go potty at 3 a.m and just moved into the area just like you.

Your body will constantly tell you to walk out the side window enroute to the kitchen, or out the side door to the spare bedroom. Nine times out of ten you will find yourself trapped in the garage, blindly fingering tools and cinder blocks, muttering to yourself about pots and pans and where did your #$@#4 husband put the sink this time. As time progresses you will slowly become aware of a growing psychic uneasiness: feelings of being watched, a shortness of breath, a need to reach out and touch your neighbors house to see if you can really do it. Until finally you find yourself pacing up and down the five feet of sidewalk that front your property at 11 o’clock at night, just to get a little normalcy back in your life. Here is a little known fact of life – “back and forthness” is necessary for life on earth. Without it, you die in agony, waving your hands in front of your face and muttering about the sink. If you escape in time, you will probably find yourself in a long line of newcomers taking a long midnight walk back to someplace like Virginia where they know how to build houses.

So…after about eight months of living in psychic hell my husband and I began eating the real estate ads in an effort to ensure we didn’t miss even one potential house we could afford. Like all things that come to people who wait (and wait, and wait, and wait) I spotted one of those teensy weensy little ads in one of those pocket sized real estate fliers that some company puts out. There it was. Finally. My dream house. A one hundred year old house with some very large trees out front, off a county road. (Little known fact #2 – in order sustain life in N. Michigan you need a road in front of your house that the state snow plows will drive down. Otherwise you never get to the store and you die. It’s called food withdrawal).

So, after a very long afternoon of trying to find the house without the aid of directions or a realtor we gave up and called the number at the bottom of the screen….

(End of Part I - snack time!)

With the help from the realtor we finally located the house. It was built by a family in 1895 that had moved into the area from a more southerly county (probably on the advice of a real estate agent). The house stayed in the family until right after WWII when the house was sold and the family moved even further north. Originally, the homestead had been one of the first in this part of county, sitting on about 80 acres of farmland. But over the past century it had been reduced to just the old farmhouse, an old milking barn and a few broken down sheds.

The first thing I noticed when I saw the house (other than it was real old and parallel to the street) was the gravel drive way. It started at the road, went to the front of the “garage”, took a hard right and headed over to an old pig shed then turned left again and headed to who knows where. I couldn’t tell from the overgrown grass, weeds, bushes, trees, etc that decorated the property.

The 2nd thing I notice is the current tenant’s dog tied up in front of the “garage” – with a chain that had been strung through a hole in the wood. Nice dog. Broken down milking barn.

The house was described in realtoreese as “unpolished gem”. Actually the words she kept using were “lots of potential”. I must have heard it 386 times as we toured the property, each time her eyes getting just a tiny bit glassier as we viewed the “Michigan” basement (a hole dug for potato storage under the house), the “Michigan” bathroom (a closet with a toilet and a sink you banged your knees on when you sat down), the “Michigan” view (see driveway description), the “Michigan” open floor plan (all bedroom doors missing).

But it did have a porch, albeit a “Michigan” porch (just a floor and roof). The porch stretched from one side of the house to the other and was over eight feet wide (oh shades of mint juleps!) There were beautiful ancient lilac bushes in full bloom along the side of the house (hollow and full of bugs – but that’s another story), and a spectacular wild rose bush in full bloom (planted right where the old out-house had been).

So, just before the realtor ran from the house screaming, “It has LOTS OF POTENTIAL” we bought it. We bought a house with warped window casings that let the snow in during the winter (natural air conditioning), a leaky roof (natural cleansing), an overgrown yard (natural wildlife habitat), floors scarred from old wood burning stoves in every room (Michigan heating), and a back porch that sat directly over the septic holding tank (outlawed in 1943 but never removed).

The house was eventually renovated into a more livable condition, to the point where people have actually stopped just to gawk at our outdoor color scheme (it’s cream colored, not yellow, damn it!) They gawk at the place where the lilac and rose bushes used to be (the bugs are all dead now, rest their little souls), the beautiful paved driveway (can you say AMEN!) and the mowed yard (mostly – had to save some space for the gophers, I mean yard squirrels to live). Our neighbors have stopped gawking in awe now (it’s been over 5 years) but there is always someone who mentions that the yard hadn’t been cut in over 30 years before we moved in, or that the garbage hadn’t been hauled away in allthat time either.

Part of the fun of renovating a house this old is being able to gape and gawk at the workmanship. Without a level plane Mr. Kettle and a couple of his sons put up a house that has lasted over a hundred years. That’s a hundred “Michgan” years’… windstorms (60 knot winds not uncommon), snowstorms (September through May), rainstorms (any old time) and red wing blackbird infestations (March-April).

The real fun begins when you try to renovate a house with no square corners. I have to give my husband credit – he told me if I just tilted my head about 8 degrees it would look great and it does! During the latest renovation (making the back room even bigger to accommodate “just one more”) the local contractor remarked after about five minutes of looking: “This house isn’t square! There are no square corners or straight lines!” Such a nice guy – we got him saying “Lots of Potential” in about two days.

Stop by sometime. The roses and lilac bushes are gone but the occasional stray pony stops by to say hello, the local domestic duck population has stopped raising their babies in my bushes (thanks to the neighbors electric fence), but the house is still cream, the septic tank is new and the coffee is on. Just remember to tilt 8 degrees off of true north and repeat, “Lots of Potential”.

And if you forget there’s a sign on the freshly renovated front porch that says: “Welcome to Lots of Potential”