dream house

Remodeling while living in a house is akin to ironing an outfit while wearing it – a bit too close for comfort. I tried ironing an outfit I was wearing – once, but I spent the first ten years of our marriage in a carpenter’s nightmare – I mean fixer-upper. We bought it after it had been on the market for many, many months. Many other young couples had looked at the house, but each had negated it as just too much work and time to make it livable. It probably would have been cheaper to dig a hole, shove the house into it and start over again, but then we would not have had anywhere to live. With a decade of persistent, hard work, my man brought the house into such a state of respectability that we sold it to the first young couple who looked at it. Through all those years of remodeling, my husband had many architectural daydreams. I was particularly impressed with his daydream about remodeling a barn. By the time he finished his tentative sketches of where he would put various rooms and facilities, the barn – on paper – became a cozy home with lots of room for kids and adults.
When we moved away from our fixer-upper in the middle of the corn, bean and wheat fields of northern Indiana to a brand new house in the pine forests of southern Arkansas, he quit remodeling for 15 years. After our energetic crew had bounced off to college and marriage, we redid our once new home out of sheer necessity.
I was reminded of his barn remodeling daydream by a recent article in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette regarding the availability of light houses. With the advent of global positioning and radar, the need for lighthouses has come to an end. The federal government cannot justify continuing to maintain the edifices, but neither do they want them destroyed or left to crumble. So, the Department of the Interior and the Coast Guard is giving away lighthouses to qualified applicants.
A light house is not a barn, but it does sort of look like the silo beside the barn. Because of age, most of the lighthouses need work. Future owners have to agree to fix-up and maintain the lighthouses and be willing to show them to tourists – like a couple of my brothers-in-laws who make their vacations plans around the ancient guardians of the coast. If we got a lighthouse we could live in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage. The only problem I see with a lighthouse is the location: they are only found along our country’s shores, not inland where my family lives.
However – inland, I found the perfect house on E-bay: a country home, in the green hills of up-state New York, where my family lives. The three bedroom house also has three bathrooms, a Jacuzzi, a private air strip and an abandoned, seven-story, underground missile silo built to take a a direct nuclear hit, plus a smaller parallel cylinder with subterranean bedrooms, bathrooms and living areas. Perfect for visiting grandchildren and children. Consider the noise dampening effect. Consider the opportunities to develop creative ways to use that missile silo … and a silo is so close to a barn, it would take my husband right back to his earlier architectural daydreams.
Now, all we need is a couple million dollars to meet the reserve for the E-bay auction of the house, twenty acres and missile silo. The auction goes off in 17 days, 14 hours and counting. Brother, can you spare a dime?