The collapse

One day, when our middle child was in 7th grade, I was driving out of our neighborhood to pick her up after school. At a stop sign, there were 5 cars ahead of me and I could see a fire engine and people milling about. I wondered what was going on. When I got to the intersection, I saw an old man lying in the street with people standing over him. It. Was. My. Father. I instantly pulled into a driveway and jumped out. It appeared that Dad had been walking (?) and collapsed and people had called the police and stopped to help. He was on the ground and the fireman was trying to get him to answer questions. I explained who he was and who I was and I asked Dad if he knew who I was. I'm not sure if he recognized me.

They helped me put him in my car and I drove home with him. A kind neighbor recognized me and offered to get my daughter. I called Mom at work and told her about Dad and said she needed to come right away. Another kind Samaritan followed me home and helped me get him into my house. I plied him with liquid because the fireman thought he might be dehydrated. Dad told me he just wanted to come and see me. That was tough to hear. He had an old picture book with him for Conrad, as an excuse to come and see me. What we think happened was that he found the book and thought Conrad had left it, so he needed to return it to me. We lived about 3 or 4 miles away, way too far for him. Heck, walking to get the mail was too far for him. And, of course, Conrad was in third grade.

It was decided that Dad could no longer be left alone in the house while Mom worked her part time job. I agreed to stay with him one day a week. He went to adult day care the other days. I was very glad he wasn't on his own anymore. I had been scared something horrible would happen, and something did. I was just glad he would be all right.

More heartbreak

After the roof incident, the whole family went to Mexico for Thanksgiving. I will always be grateful for that trip. My father could still communicate, albeit slowly. He could still walk with help. He knew what was going on around him.

When the new year started (06) Dad started getting worse. He couldn't go up or down steps anymore without the very real risk of falling. I had to take his car away from him and sell it. Mom just couldn't handle that task. He would come up to me after the car was gone and pat his pocket and say, "I can't find my keys, have you seen my keys? I need to run an errand." It was sad to explain to him he wasn't driving anymore, but then it became easier to change the subject because he quit understanding what was going on.

My father in Mexico

My mother decided they had to move and found a cute two bedroom house close by. If I thought things were bad before the move, I was wrong. They got much worse, much more quickly. He quit knowing who Mom was and started calling me at least daily (for some reason he could still remember me and my phone number) telling me there was a strange woman in the house who said she was Natalie. He once told me that the strange woman said they were married but that didn't make sense to him; he had never cheated on his Natalie.  I would hear Mom in the background crying, "I'M NATALIE!, I'm your wife!" but he didn't understand. So I would drive over there and sit with him and get Mom to back off. Logic didn't work, but redirection did. I would get him to tell me about Tom, his brother who died when he was in college. Or about his childhood. He walked with an old man shuffle and a walker now, so I would take him outside. It was as if he were a toddler, regressing before my eyes. He was only 65.

Falling Off the Roof

Around the time the kitchen was being completed, I got up on the roof to clean the gutters. Heights do not bother me and I had the attitude (then) of fearlessness that I could do anything. Behind the big pitch of the front roof it was flat, so once you got on the flat part you were safe. Well, after removing all of the leaves from the flat part I got cocky and decided to blow off the leaves off of the garage. Remember, all of the sloped parts of the roof were cedar shakes so they were especially slippery.

And you guessed it, I fell off the roof. As I was sliding off I remember that sick sick feeling of OMG I'm falling but I'll catch myself I'll catch myself oh no I won't...It was about 1 1/2 stories. I landed on some of the huge azalea bushes. Remarkably, I didn't break anything. One of the azalea limbs punctured my shin and I landed on my knee. Poor Elliott felt awful, because I was the one up on the roof. We all know whose fault it was--the house's fault.

He took me to the hospital where I endured many jokes about staying off the roof. I still have a big scar on my shin. And honestly, it was just another curse of the house. Yes we were getting the awesome addition and that was wonderful, but it was as if the house couldn't let us have it without something going wrong.

kitchen miracle

 I am now up to the fall of 2005. At this time, El and I decided that we couldn't take the kitchen one second longer. We had thought we could wait but it was not happening. The irony is that in order to do the kitchen and add on to the family room and add a screened porch, we had to get a second mortgage. So now, instead of saving money, we were paying the same exact amount for our mortage as we had in the other house.

Removing the old

Adding the new!

When I started getting bids, it turned out the kitchen would cost as much as our whole budget. What were we going to do? The layout didn't work and this wasn't a luxury. And then something wonderful happened. Really. The kitchen guy called a week after he gave us his enormous estimate and said a friend of his had bought a house in Buckhead and was gutting it. He had measured their kitchen and it would fit PERFECTLY in our space, and he could disassemble it and reinstall in our house. Along with the almost new stainless steel appliances and the granite countertops. It truly was a miracle.

He did some custom work and added a range mantle, a refrigerator cabinet and a book bag cabinet. Coincidence? I think not. To us it was a miracle like water into wine. Not only could we get a beautiful kitchen, we could add a room to the back of the house

new room off back of house

so there would be a place to eat with windows to the view. And we could do a screened porch off of our bedroom. Doing all of that was what I call good stress. I turned out beautifully.

Done with the kitchen

Finding pictures is taking longer than I expected. I'm still looking, but I should find some today.

My Father

While all of this was going on, my family was getting worried about my father. For a few years he had been acting "off". We first noticed it in 2002, when he was 62. He had trouble following conversations and directions. Things got worse, and in 2005 he started having episodes where his body would freeze up and he wouldn't be able to move. My parents lived 5 minutes away so my mother would call me and I would go over and help. At this point his personality wasn't affected, and the episodes were happening about once every two weeks. At first we thought they were mini strokes, but no.  In August we all went to the beach for a week. Three times Dad fell because he lost control of his body.  One evening we were sitting on the deck and he told me how frustrating it was. His mind and his body were going. I was heart broken.

We had been back a week when he fell when no one was around. He broke two ribs and punctured his lung. He was in the hospital for five nights. While he was there, he lost completely lost touch with reality. I had this "vision" where I saw him in a wheel chair, head down, grayish skin, and very old looking. I really didn't want that to come true.

My father  and I in Mexico

He was never really the same after that. He got diagnosed with Lewy Body disease, a rare disease that is Parkinson's and really bad dementia. When we researched it it looked like patients lasted seven years.  There wasn't much information on it so seven years seemed too terrible to be believed. But since we knew it was fatal (!) Mom decided that everyone should go to Mexico for Thanksgiving, their treat. It was the right decision.

Bugs

The biggest problem to me with the house was that it took all of my time and energy. I was way too embarrassed to tell my friends what was really going on so I gradually lost them. I'm not saying it wasn't my fault--it was, I took days to return calls and I still didn't have any money to go out for lunch. I let it happen. That damn house was a full time job.

We had moved in in October, when the air conditioning wasn't used. When spring came we turned it on and starting noticing small bugs that looked like the cross between a fly and a moth. They were about a centimeter square, were very slow moving, and were attracted to the light. At first it wasn't too bad, just a few here and there. But gradually as it got hotter and hotter more and more started flying around. They seemed to be coming from the basement so I called in exterminators galore. It would get better for a week then return to the old levels. We didn't know what to do. We called them fly moths. The internet called them sewer flies and said they come from open drains. So we called in the plumber, again! He found a few things and fixed them. Once again, they got better for a week or so then started coming back. By the time we had done all of this it was fall again and they disappeared. What was going on? As we were to find out, this cycle repeated itself four more summers until we found the cause. More on that later. I don't want to get ahead of myself.

I'm Not Making This Up

The thing I remember the most was that it was so stressful. Everything that happened just proved what a bad decision it was, but we were stuck. We had to make the best of it. I worked about 16 hours a day just trying to make it livable. I remember that even every single window was nailed shut--even the one on the door to the garage. Two weeks after we had moved in we got the floors refinished, so we moved to the basement for a week. The first night we were sleeping down there, we heard a scurrying sound above our heads. We got traps and caught a two and a half foot rat. I'm not kidding. Unbelievable. I was so so so creeped out. After the floors were done things calmed down some. I could start renovating.

That's me working on the kid's bathroom. After I did that, I wanted to work on the basement bathroom. There was carpet in it (ew), so I pulled it out and planned to just put some vinyl tiles in. When I got the flooring out, I discovered the floor was wet. So to figure out what was wrong we had our handyman come over. After ripping up the wall behind the toilet, he discovered why all of the baseboards were rotted. There was another pipe in the wall that had been cut in two. And not put back together. This had obviously been going on for years, but the sellers didn't disclose it, and the inspector missed it. We made phone calls and wrote letters, but we were out of luck. We just chalked it up to the house from hell. Remember we had moved here to save money? Ha! Every extra bit of money we had went to the house.

Moving Day

So...the day came for us to do the walk through. We couldn't get in. The lock box was removed and all of the doors were locked. What could we do? We called and complained, but we still closed on the house. What choice did we have? So we moved from our clean, lovely, well built house to the new house. When our moving truck got to the house, we thought that the sellers hadn't finished moving out. There was trash everywhere. There was broken mirror pieces, black garbage bags full of trash, old socks, an old vacuum, an old table, dead flowers, old carpet remnants, towels and so much other stuff. It was unbelievable. The attic hadn't been cleaned out. We called our real estate agent and he said there was nothing we could do. We had closed. But the straw that broke the camel's back was when we turned the sink on in the kitchen. They had left a bowl under it and we immediately figured out why. The pipe had been cut but not soldered back together. Water poured out. Yes, our inspector missed it. We got it fixed.

Therefore, the first thing we had to do was empty the house of their crap. Imagine how angry we were. The second thing we had to do was get the carpet out of the three kid's rooms. I mean, it was orange shag. Who knew how old it was? I think we got to sleep that night after 2:00. The rest of the weekend was spent cleaning their rooms and painting them.  I was desperate to give them some normalcy after all the horrors we were uncovering. And were we uncovering them. There were roach droppings everywhere. On top of the windows and door frames, inside the switch plates, in all the cupboards, and in all the closets. Nothing could be unpacked until it was cleaned. It took weeks.