It’s been an emotional week for me. Wil and I are in the beginning stages of building a new home. Unfortunately, the hurricane put us behind schedule, but we were able to close our VA construction loan before my locked low interest rate expired.
The next hurdle was getting the old house demolished. That came with a lot of emotional baggage. This was my childhood home that my brother and I inherited from our parents. We had grown up in that home. My parents bought it and moved in when I was only 3 weeks old. It was the only home I knew until I grew up and married and moved out.
The house HAD to be demolished. Intellectually, I know that. It had foundation problems, the front wall was separating from the house, nothing was square, level, or plumb. Besides that, it was not a home I could grow old in. We learned that when my parents aged. Lastly, it was small and far from the home of my dreams, the home I really wanted.
But knowing all of those things didn’t stop the tears as a large excavator chewed through the house from one end to the other. As the machine began with the living room, all I could think about was my daddy and granddaddy adding that large room onto the house in 1964. My granddaddy was a carpenter and every board had to be precisely cut. They worked through the cold winter. I remember coming home from kindergarten on Washington’s birthday and seeing daddy smoothing the new concrete carport.
I thought my tears were done and then the excavator got to the front door, ripped it off, and chewed it up. My tears started afresh. As the machine gobbled up bedrooms, I thought of my dad working his way through the house in the 1960s and 70s remodeling one room at a time to modernize the old house. Unfortunately, not much had been done with the house since the 1970s and it showed.
I felt so guilty for tearing away all of my dad’s and granddad’s hard work. I felt no guilt over mom, who I knew would be nothing but thrilled to see the old house replaced with a new home. I saved bits and pieces of the old house—bits of trim, old wood windows, and some of my granddaddy’s precisely cut diagonal floorboards. I harvested ceiling fans, light fixtures, and a sliding glass door to reuse in the new house or other projects. We also harvested quite a bit of the new things we had put into a basic partial remodel in 2022 when we moved in.
It took the excavator a bit less than one hour to turn the house into a big pile of rubble. It was amazing to see 67 years of work and care destroyed in such a short amount of time. It has taken another week to have the rubble hauled away, a damaged tree in the front yard removed, the chainlink fence taken down, the decades old unused septic tank unearthed and removed, and all of the concrete broken up and hauled away.
The half-acre lot has never looked so spacious. The front 2/3 is bare now. Along the rear of the property we still have the new barn, Dad’s old shop, and the enormous heritage oak tree. The new privacy fence still separates us from the neighbors behind us, but never has the yard been so wide open to the front.
It has helped having a long-time resident (me) around for the demolition. I knew where the old, unused septic tank was. I could tell them where all of the sewer lines, water lines, gas lines, and fiber optic cable lines were. I watched like a hawk as they gingerly removed the fence around my daddy’s rose bush. That is the only thing I am saving and protecting in the front of the yard.
I think the sad part is over. Tomorrow the builder is coming to stake out the corners of the new house, so they can begin preparing the site for the new build. A new home is about to rise in the old site—larger and modern and designed to take care of us into our old age. I’ve dried my tears and from here on out, I hope to have nothing but smiles.
