Somewhere in my humanities-major past, I learned that I really enjoy looking at a scene, and trying to divine the motivations some person had for making it just so. I spent so many school nights trying to decide exactly what an author meant by her word choices, or what a painter meant by making his artwork skewed with flesh tones that don't appear in nature. So naturally when I take real estate clients to a vacant house, I try to imagine what the place looked like full of stuff and of life. It's especially fun for me when we go into really weird houses, with shoddy construction or oddly customized fixtures and features. The house I showed today was just such a place, and I am not sure I have been as intrigued as this by someone else's living arrangements in quite some time. It was downright bizarre.
We went to a horse property in that gray area between the city and the deep rural country, where I had to drive past factories and a feed lot to reach. It was an older house, with the original construction begun in 1961, and by 1961 standards, it was probably quite neat. Someone put an inordinate amount of time, patience, and skill into plastering the ceilings. The upstairs bedrooms had concentric circles of unending figure-8 work, all done by hand. They were flawless. The family room downstairs had an elaborate fan shape, which I cannot describe. I took a picture to explain it. But the photos in the listing were deceptively kind, and this side of the house looked like it had been a rental for a while, without a whole lot of love or money invested into its upkeep. There was an addition built nearly 30 years ago, and this is where our detective work really began. The addition was not accessible from the main house, which indicated a rental. It didn't make a whole lot of sense on the inside. You enter it through the very large hot tub room. The main floor was all one giant open area, and in the corner, sort of between the kitchen and the fireplace, there was a bedroom closet minus doors. The bathroom was enormous, with a roll-in wheelchair-friendly shower. Upstairs the one bedroom didn't have walls on two sides, but instead overlooked the downstairs like a loft, but its bathroom up there had privacy. I came up with the theory that somewhere in the 1980s, one of the original homeowners or core family members became disabled, and they built the addition to house them and a caregiver. The large open area had a hospital bed or at least a lot of medical equipment that needed to be plugged in, because there were outlets in the floor around the most logical spot for a bed to be placed. The caregiver slept upstairs, but had the overlook to the ground floor so that they could check on the patient without having to come downstairs with every cough/sigh/groan/whatever. The handicap-accessible bathroom was a telltale sign, but the feature that really pointed to someone with mobility and pain issues was the giant hot tub that was half sunken into the floor, so that someone could slide to its edge from a wheelchair without raising or lowering.
The part that made me laugh my ass off was the art in the hot tub room. After we had toured the main house, we had to put our shoes back on and walk through snow to get to the addition. While I was still head down, paying attention to the lock box, one of my clients said, "Volcano." I looked up to see a mural on the wall, and realized that was no volcano. I doubled over laughing, and eventually wheezed out, "That's Devil's Tower." I looked at him and said, "You remember Close Encounters?" At least this copy of the image wasn't made in mashed potatoes. But it did have a little spaceship flying off from the tower on one side. Now I am desperately curious what sort of person the disabled resident of this property really was. Were they a conspiracy theorist? A movie buff? A true believer? I will never know, but it was great playing detective for the day to try to figure it out.
This means something.
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