My parents bought a 7 bedroom house just before I turned 14. We lived right next door to a really nice area. People hearing about it always assumed they had money.
Actually, it was a condemned, illegal triplex previously owned by a slum-lord. The 3rd floor tenants were given 24 hours to leave, their floor was filled with loose insulation, and then the whole storey was sealed off. When we started cleaning it out, we found kid’s drawings and people’s possessions under the waist deep insulation.
My papa bought the house for a ridiculously low sum. We’d been living in city-assisted housing before that. He fixed our new home up by hand, often with supplies found in business/office dumpsters, after working all day.
One year, the house was below 14⁰C (57⁰F) for days on end. He shipped us all off to a relative and stayed behind to keep the pipes from freezing.
We pulled up a carpet and found another, stained and crumb filled, carpet underneath.
We had to completely gut the first* floor (which we couldn’t do until the third floor was livable), because of all the bad renovations done to give it bedrooms. My papa kept deciding to change things, and then finding that was the way it originally was. (He decided to move the basement stairs, opened up a wall, and found a gaping hole to the basement where the stairs had been badly removed. That was a dangerous spot for a while.)
Our computer was kept in a room that was added to the original house. We had to put on two sweaters and gloves to use it, which interfered with typing. Because we still had dial-up, I’d wear the gloves while I waited for pages to load.
My bedroom got so hot in summer that I couldn’t sleep in it. When I could, I fell asleep to the pigeons cooing in the wall beside me.
One night, my parents were sleeping in the spare bedroom for some reason, and my papa woke up to a wasp sting. The next spring he broke into the sealed off porch (blocked by multiple locked doors and a layer of drywall). The ceiling had a wasp nest that extended the whole 9 feet length of the room and filled two of the spaces between joists.
That house is the reason I now have two sisters. Our family only needed 3 (later 4, when my brother got older) of those 7 bedrooms. So we gave bedrooms to people without places to stay. Depressed uncles, street people, people with mental illnesses. My Now-Sister was a street kid who had a week to find a new place to sleep. She helped out an organization my papa volunteered for. We offered a place to stay and then decided she should never leave. She kept me from starting cutting and consented to my slow introduction of hugs, I offered an ear to listen and unlimited support.
I love that house so much.
*Sorry for any confusion. I’m using ‘first floor’ in the North American sense, meaning ‘the floor at ground level.’
kiragecko 