If these walls could speak!

Every once and awhile I remember this GREAT website that our local county tax assessor has. You can plug in any address, and it will give you all these details about the house. The last sales, the square footage, a floor plan, and even pictures! Today I decided to check out the details on my neighbors' houses. I learned a few things!

1. The people to the east of me DO rent. This explains several things.

2. The people to the west of me have a *huge freakin' house.* 1800 square feet. In my neighborhood, that's like... dinosaur-huge. They built the add-on themselves. He's a fireman and very handy.

3. Most interesting (hah, to me!), is that both of these houses on either side of me were built in the 1930s! And here I thought I was living in a post-war neighborhood. In fact, most of the houses on my street were built in the 1930s. Mine was built in 1950. Doesn't that seem odd? That a house would be built some 15 years later, *between* two existing houses?? I wonder if mine really wasn't built in 1950? I don't know, I thought that was very strange.

I suppose I could just ask the people across the street, as they are the original owners to their 1944 bungalow. They saw my house being built! I learned from my kind-of-nosy to the west neighbor that the people across the street got married when he was 21, and she was 12! He's 95 now. And they've lived in that one house since it was built. Can you imagine?


I just find my mind wandering off to strange places during the day, like, "I wonder if the grout on my bathroom tile was always that dark, or what color it was originally..." or, "I wonder if all the baseboards were painted aqua like that one in the living room...."

I know that, since the 1990s, I'm the third owner of this house. I wonder how many there were before that? Today I looked up another house that I had considered buying, and holy moly! That poor house has had no fewer than seven owners since the late 1980s. And more than two of them were quick flippers, buying and selling it in under three months' time.


I guess it's just the historian (and the geek) in me that wonders how this house effected other peoples' lives.