8:32 a.m. - 2002-03-04
Hickory Hill House
"We make tour of U.S.!!" Bruce is standing in the door of my studio with his coat and shoes on. It's painfully obvious what he wants.
"I don't want to go househunting." I'm in a whiney mood, we just ended a yucky real estate negotiation, and the last thing I want to do is go look at a bunch of houses that I probably wouldn't be caught dead living in.
"No! We go! Nice bat find house!!" Pause. "Well, we're not going to find a house unless we go out and find a house. We'll just go look at the two listings David sent us. We don't have to do the whole tour." There is a note of exasperation in his voice and it's obvious he's made up his mind. Resistance is futile.
The first house on our list has actually already sold, and the next house is next to a house full of rednecks. "Necks! Necks! NECK ALERT!!" yells Bruce, and steps on the gas.
"Can we go home now?" I plead.
"Nah, let's keep going. Hey, let's go to Hickory Hill!"
He knows this will get me. Hickory Hill is a house that we have become rather obsessed with over the last couple of weeks. Ordinarily I wouldn't look twice at this place. It's a bland, suburban, 1960's house in a bland, suburban, two-kids-two-SUV's type neighborhood, and it's priced way higher than our upper limit. But Hickory Hill has something very few other houses in Huntsville have: 3/4 of an acre of exquisitely overgrown woodland.
It's obvious no one has lived at Hickory Hill for months. It's equally obvious that at some time someone must have lived there who was a terrific gardener. There is some beautiful hard landscaping - cobblestone retaining walls and little mossy brick pathways - and the woods are full of daffodils, and there's a rosebush at the side of the house and some old irises and a huge unpruned rosemary plant, and it's all wild and overgrown and, I hesitate to use the word, but it's magical in a way I haven't seen with any other house. And there is a huge workshed and the remains of a greenhouse, piping still intact.
We've gone there several times now. We wander around and talk about how we could make it into a lovely artist's house, it's such a blank slate, wouldn't it be fabulous with ceramic tile and murals and a big herb garden and Bruce could put his aquariums in the garage and I could have a pottery studio in the workshed, and maybe later on we could reinstall the greenhouse.
David thinks we could get the price down. He says it's way overpriced for the neighborhood (it's $148,000 and he thinks it should be about $125,000)and it has a lot of cosmetic problems that not many people would want to deal with. It's been on the market for a long time, and the owner may be ready to ditch it. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of hope for this - in our short experience it seems that once owners get a price in their heads they won't budge, no matter how unreasonable it is, or how long their house has been on the market.
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