Category: houses

‘We need to re-do the kitchen: it’s soooo dated’

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn houses, writing

Not that we’re addicted, but we watch several of the house hunter shows on HGTV. They’re not quite what they seem. If the rules are the same as when I last looked, those hunting for a house have to actually buy a house before they visit three potential properties on the show. One of them, they already own.

My historic preservation background makes me a bit of a purist in that I think older houses should generally not be redone so that the inside looks like an open-concept 2022 house.  Well, nobody asked me, so it is as it is.

It’s hard for me to imagine looking at houses and making a list of move-in projects. Quite often, the prospective owners want to overhaul the kitchen with new paint, new appliances, removing the wall between the kitchen and dining room, new countertops, and a larger, more-spectacular island. Sometimes they ask the real estate agent how much a new kitchen would cost, and hear that it’s a mere $10,000 to $20,000.

Hell, the people are already spending a million bucks on the place, so what’s another twenty grand? It all seems so materialistic and excessive. I don’t get it. If I buy a new house with cream-colored kitchen cabinets, I’m not going into a snit to repaint them white just after we close on the house. I didn’t grow up with this kind of money and, with parents who lived through the depression and ran the household on a teacher’s salary, I’ve ended up with more of a make-do attitude than the spoilt brats buying the houses.

And here ends today’s rant.

—Malcolm

Where I used to live: what have they done to the place?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn houses, writing

I recently wrote a post about how nice it would be to have an age feature on Google Maps so writers and other researches could see what streets were around twenty years ago. What I have done with Google Maps is use the street view feature to see how the neighborhoods where I used to live have changed.

I remember most of the addresses of places where I lived after leaving home. I know earlier addresses because my folks always put the family’s address in our Christmas letters. In most cases, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that the houses are still there and that nobody built a tar factory in the vacant lot next door.

Crap, it didn’t look like this when we left.

After my parents died, we sold the house in Tallahassee (where I grew up) in the 1980s. When I look at it now with street view, I’m horrified to see that the front yard has basiclly been paved ovee with a circular driveway. What an eyesore. Maybe I should write the owners an anonymous letter, “Dear Homeowners, you ignorant sluts, what have you done to the once-beauful front yard?”

In most cases, what I find is more of a natural progression over time of homes going back to when I was in kindergargarten. The trees are larger. Flower beds have been added. Sometimes paint colors have changed. Sometimes the usage has changed. An apartment I lived in in San Francisco has been converted with the other apartments in the building into a residence; the same is true for my aunt’s apartment just up the hill.

I don’t know whether looking at these old places is craziness, nostalgia, or a writer’s typical curiosity. But in looking at the old places, I can sometimes see the notion is correct: one can’t go home again. That’s because subsequent owners have screwed up the place.

—Malcolm

One of the short stories in this collection is set in the house where we lived in Tallahassee. There was a large wooded area behind the house. As I grew older, I figured the families who lived there in several houses would eventually sell out and my playground would become a subdivision. In “real life” that’s what happened (as Google Maps shows me). In the short story, the woods are left alone. I like my version of reality better.