Update on the House Next Door

Well, I don't know what to think. There's a guy who owns a bunch of houses in the neighborhood and "offices" (we're making a verb there) in a little backhouse down the street. We were standing out talking just now, and he said, "Oh, yeah, I bought that house next door to you." He got it for $35,000, he said, and he's thinking about fixing it up and renting it out.

Oh, lord. A rent house. Now, you may be a renter, and you may be the most stellar renter on the planet. You could be that, because my mother, Renter Extraordinaire, is dead. When my father was an exploration geophysicist and we moved all the time, we lived in rental houses. Before we moved into each one, my mother scoured it from top to bottom. She scrubbed baseboards with a toothbrush--I saw her do it. Then, months later, when we moved out? Same thing:  she left that house cleaner than it had been when she moved in.

Would all renters were like her, but alas. Most people don't value what doesn't belong to them. Heck, most people don't even value what DOES belong to them unless it's 1) edible or 2) valuable on eBay. This guy has had some renters in this neighborhood who would make you boil your feet in bleach if you went into their house. But whatever.

I told him he ought to have art retreat workshops there. I told him I didn't know about zoning and all that, but that it wouldn't be a permanent business and he could find out if it would work. He listened and said, "You work it out, and I'll pay you to do it."

I said, "Um, you know how to organize stuff?" And he said, "No way. If you want to do it, you do it."

About this time a friend of his drove by and yelled out the window of his SUV, "Don't believe a word he tells you!"

Well. I know this guy only vaguely from when he was in high school (and I was subbing--I'm sure I'm older than his mother) and the kind of kid you assume has a dad who has already set him up in real estate, so with maybe the teensiest bit of an attitude, understandably. He told me today he owns 100 properties in town--a lot of them right here in the neighborhood.

I have no idea what to think about all this. I am not an organizer, and the one thing I am sorely lacking right now is the time to even THINK about it. But having cool workshops next door would sure beat anything else I can imagine happening to this house, which has now changed hands twice in the space of less than a month. Three owners since the new year. Yikes.

It's not something I can do. I don't have the skill set, and I definitely don't have the time. But there's an opportunity here, maybe--like I said, I don't know the guy that well, I don't know about zoning, I don't know, frankly, squat. But I just keep putting it out there and putting it out there and hoping for the best. I can't help but think how great this past weekend would have been for workshops. Right now it's 73 degrees. Of course, it's supposed to snow tonight, but if there'd been workshops, everyone would have left today with fond memories of sun and blue skies in the middle of January.

So here's me, ("here am I," is what I mean, but who wants to sound like they have a grammatical stick up their butt ALL the time, hmmmmm?) putting it out into the universe again. Let's see what the universe tosses back, shall we?