1994: Our New Home in Johnstown
In which Teófilo reminisces about the first home he and Mercie ever owned.
Tom's country ends here: he will not pass the borders.
Tom has his house to mind, and Goldberry is waiting!
~The Song of Tom Bombadil, from The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring.
Home, Sweet Home.
Mercie and I had wanted to buy a home at the earliest opportunity. We got us a local realtor to help us in the search. In the end we settled on an older, wooden frame house in the Roxbury area of Johnstown.
The house was - and remains - located on Saylor Street. You get to it by taking Franklin Street from downtown, past Kernville, past the hospitals until you reach the intersection of Franklin and Southmont Boulevard. Drive about 500 feet pass the cable company on the left, and then turn left on Harshberger Road. Start climbing the hill, and then turn left on the second street; that’s Saylor Street. Watch for the second house to the right from the corner of Saylor and Harshberger. That was our home.
The house was built on one of the plots the Saylor family had apportioned among themselves and built up in Roxbury in the 1920's. I bought the house from Mrs. Marjorie Diehl (neé Saylor) in the spring of 1994. Mrs. Diehl was the widow of a WWII US Navy Seabee named Bruce. The Diehl's already lived in the house at the time Mr. Diehl entered active duty in 1943. In this house they had raise their whole family. They had been the first and only owners until we purchased the house from Mrs. Diehl.
The house needed a lot of work. It had shag carpeting, old plumbing and an old electric circuit box. The house used to be white and needed a new roof. It also needed a new flue and gas-water heater. Also, new windows. It had a detached garage where Mr. Diehl used to tinker and work, but it was almost dilapidated. Yet, it had the most beautiful, custom-made, wooden shelving and cabinets I've ever seen. It had a shower stall made of wood and sheet metal, and an old bathtub upstairs near the master bedroom. We had to be careful not to allow water to fall on the floor or it leaked to the floor below. We also rebuilt the kitchen which had fossilized sometime in the 1950's.
It took time but we made it a home, our home. We painted it blue, and I took care of most of the initial landscaping duties. The house was L-shaped, and had a room built inside the "L" we called "the addition." Snow and ice would accumulate over there during the winter. It would freeze and thaw and the ice would get under the shingles and leak inside. Before I had melting cables installed, I used to scrape and chip huge blocks of ice to avoid the leaking. Or, I would get on that little roof and shovel the snow and avoid the freeze-thaw cycle.
When it snowed Mercie and I would sweep and shovel everything. Dressed like Alaskans, we shovel and swept the driveway, the porch, and the walkways. We also did the front sidewalk. We did this winter after winter after winter...
The house's location halfway uphill made it difficult to reach during winter storms. One could drive down but not back up. Or you could, but often sliding to one side until reaching the end of the hill, down.
We stressed a lot about the repairs and updates the house needed. I even did electric installations myself. It was a miracle I didn’t short-circuited anything although I smelled burned wood a couple of times. The Lord kept blessing us despite my intrepid cluelessness.
We used to compare our home-related plights with those of the homeowners depicted in the 1986 movie, The Money Pit. Our situation was never as dire as the house portrayed in the movie. Yet they were some days...
Chris and Jon came of age in that house. It was the house of their childhood and early youth. We marked their increasing heights on the kitchen’s cupboard’s frame. It lacked central air conditioner, but the climate was such that we only missed it a couple of hot weeks during the summer.
The house was the place I always wanted to come back to after every business trip. She was always waiting.
The house was almost "finished," at least in our minds, when we left it, kicking and screaming, in 2012. Mercie and I remember the night we'd moved our furniture out. We went through one of the new gates we'd installed in the backyard. Shut the gate and looked back one last time.
Bonus Video
See the full playlist here.