The Cantaloupe House

After I got cancer, we very quickly paid off our remaining mortgage so I didn't have to worry about Ben's living situation if I died. Cancer is so fun! After treatment finished up, I had a semi-secret plan to wait until I managed to make it to the five year cancer-free mark before we bought a new house. Just in case, you know.

Then, unfortunately, our neighbor's crazy brother moved in with her, and our situation which had been comfortable for 12 years suddenly became not comfortable. He stands on the porch and smokes all the time, he drinks beer and throws the cans in our trash can, he dumps his cigarette butts out all over the parking lot, et cetera. He's just a mess and after Ben confronted him (nicely!) on some of these items, he is now terrified of us and runs indoors any time he sees or hears us. It sucks. So, goodbye to Ashbury Court, two years earlier than planned.

We started looking for houses seriously in January, and quickly discovered the market is crazy. And not just expensive - it turns out there aren't that many houses around here that suit our taste. Raleigh has not been a big city for very long, and the vast majority of neighborhoods are new-ish construction with a very planned community feel. We do not like this. We wanted a ranch or a bungalow or a 1980s contemporary - something with personality. There are older homes in the very center of town that are more our style, but they have no parking - certainly no garages - are generally as small or smaller than what we're in now, and are also wildly overpriced. So, for a while the whole endeavor was pretty depressing. 

Then I saw this listing. 

It's a 3-bedroom ranch built in 1972, on a half acre in a quiet, older neighborhood where all the houses are different. A woodchip path two houses over connects to the greenway just south of Shelley Lake. It's ten minutes closer to the center of town and also to my office, without being farther from Ben's. The yard is enormous - a big corner lot.

OK: But.

I wish you could have a picture be in bold font somehow because man, that kitchen. I saw that kitchen and also saw they were having an open house coming up and I thought, "maybe if I go look at it in person, it will be so terrible I'll get over the idea."

Ben was out of town, so I went  by myself to the open house. I stood in that kitchen and I thought, "It's not that terrible." Some other people came in and walked into the kitchen and I felt this immediate, instinctive reaction like "get out of my house!" The realtor said things to me like, "The sellers wanted to give a potential buyer the opportunity to redo the house according to their taste." You don't say!

The above is the only room in the house without terrible carpet. It's a sunroom addition built about ten years ago. The floor isn't wood, though; it's laminate. So, still useless.

However, there is a SHED in the back yard. A really nice shed!

I kept walking around thinking, "all this needs is new flooring." And paint, and new switchplates and light fixtures. And something needs to be done about the kitchen counters, and obviously we have to take the weird railings out in the front room.

And ditch the custom drapes.

Most of the rooms were a pale horrible yellowish green. This room in particular made me feel sick to my stomach every time I looked at the photos.

Argghh how did anyone live in here? And is that little pipe into the floor really the best thing they could come up with for setting up a gas log fireplace?

But this sunroom is pretty good! And has a nice big window seat!

The bedrooms were equally terrible, with bad paint and drapes and old, gross carpet. However, all three of them are enormous.

The bathrooms are not great. But they're better in real life than in these pictures.

And lots of closet space!

Here's some more of this kitchen. I discovered later - much too late, in fact, to have it factor into any potential decision - that this kitchen is painted wallpaper. My friend Leanne said the kitchen looks like the inside of a cantaloupe. A painted wallpaper cantaloupe.

But! It is also huge. And the layout is perfect. AND that room behind the kitchen is a huge laundry room that's perfect for the cat litter AND IT HAS A CAT DOOR CUT INTO THE DOOR INTO THE KITCHEN. I assume Papaya will be too dumb to figure this out, but we'll see.

Beautiful laundry room.

Hey, it's a nice refrigerator!

But here: Two car garage. In midtown Raleigh.

And the yard is beautifully landscaped. There are dozens of flowering bushes and perennials timed to come up at various times throughout the spring - daffodils, iris, etc.

The lady who lived here was 95, and she loved plants. I guess this is why she painted the house, inside and out, the color of daffodils. The realtor made a comment to me during the open house that apparently she had chosen this color less than ten years ago - he had assumed it was original to 1972 - and I was initially puzzled by him making jokes about it because it seemed okay to me. It does start to be a bit much after a while, though. It's much brighter in person.

After Ben got home from Kansas City I made him go look at it, with the caveat that he should expect it to smell exactly like it looks in there - mothballs and old lady perfume. He'd seen enough of the market to know this was a rare find, cosmetic issues aside. And the house itself has a new roof and gutters, an expensive dehumidifier in the crawlspace, a whole house generator, good HVAC systems... all of the actual expensive structural things were fine. She had taken care of the place, in her own way.

Anyway, so we bought this house. And there goes my summer, and lots of money.