Shown below is our house circa 1988, a few months before we bought it. At this point the nicest thing about the whole spread was the asphalt driveway, which was in surprisingly good shape. Except for the trench that the tenant farmers had cut across it in an effort to keep folks from driving in. People had figured out that it was a good place to dump their trash; everything from used diapers, tires, construction debris. No one had lived here for at least ten years. Before that it was rented to a group of teenagers with a rock band - looking for a place to practice their music that wouldn't disturb the neighbors. Had I not been the one who had to help clean it up, I would have found the amount of beer bottles and cans truly impressive. I was impressed, however, that someone had carefully peeled the labels off bazillions of bottles, and stuck them onto the plaster walls surrounding the windows in the room that was to become my office.

The west-facing windows were broken AND the plywood boards covering have been kicked out; rain and snow had been blowing in for years. Someone has stolen the garage door, and the big sliding door from the barn behind; the tenant farmer had stopped using it for storage after his equipment was stolen, too. Frustrated with the dumping, theft and vandalism, the farmer was in the process of tearing the place down - a building at a time - as he found time to do it. There's a pile of timber next to the grain bin on the right in the picture above; that USED to be a perfectly good livestock barn - but they tore it down.

Depending on how you want to frame the story, it was either a blessing, or a curse, that we were able to buy the place before they got to the house with the backhoe. Wanna read what happened next? Click here