houses and pieces of houses

The whole 20 years I've lived in my house, the house catty-corner from me has been deserted. I've always thought that was such a shame, because it's clearly a house with a lot of character, construction-wise, and it also had a friendly, happy feeling to it. You know how some houses--mostly older ones--just make you feel welcome? I never went inside this house, but it just sort of exuded good vibes.

Well, the neighbor two doors down has bought it and is tearing it down. They had a garage sale today, and since they'd advertized Little Tykes toys I walked over to see if they had one of those toddler climbers for Taenzer. They didn't, but they had pieces of that house, some external trim and some internal woodwork. And it was just all I could do to walk away from it. I've got more junk than I need now anyway, but it was so beautiful and had that happy vibe, and I thought--you know, if you built one of those little garden/artist sheds that are all the rage now, you could use the interior pieces as shelf brackets, and the exterior pieces, which look like miniature pickets for a fence, you could stick in along the path to your shed. I'm sure there'll be other pieces as deconstruction continues, and you could easily incorporate them into something wonderfully whimsical and pretty and welcoming, a real showpiece.

*heavy sigh* If I thought there was one chance in a thousand I would ever be able to have a construction like that, I'd call those people and ask them to hold those pieces for me and go back and buy them. But I know they'd just languish down in the basement until they haul me off to the nursing home. Damn it.

I actually left the house early. It was crowded. I go home to get away from people demanding things of me, but Annie was there demanding food (yay!) and love, Timber brought me three different balls hoping I would find one of them worthy of throwing, and Taenzer just tried to prevent me from interacting from anyone but her. There wasn't enough of me to go around and I would have felt guilty ignoring them all, so I decamped prematurely. It'll be worse tonight because it keeps raining and the puppy pen is too wet for them to go out in (can you say "mud puppy"?). Yiiiiiii.