We found this house just because we decided to drive down this particular road.... we liked the name on the street sign and on a whim, we made that turn to have a look-see. All that week, we had been up here in the Hill Country, looking at houses and trying to find one that would make it 'worth our while' to leave the Clear Lake area. We had gone through two hurricanes...... two evacuations...... and thankfully, our Gulf area house had not been damaged, but we didn't want to wait and see if we could get away with that kind of miracle during the next hurricane season.
So my husband searched the real estate listings on the Internet.... looking for houses which had years of character and acres of property... a house that said 'home' to both of us. We didn't even bother looking at subdivisions... my husband said that if we did indeed move, he didn't want another backyard surrounded by a six-foot-tall wooden fence. He wanted land, and lots of it. If we were going to move, I wanted vintage charm and original details.
Down this road we came that day.... it was the 17th of March in 2009. The road was a typical country lane that was shared by two lanes of traffic but the width of the road was about a lane-and-a-half. You had to drive slowly, in case another car was coming the opposite way... and plus all the properties along this road were spread out and there were horses and cows to look at, and wildflowers popping up along the fence lines. And the trees.... mostly all of the road was under a canopy of tree limbs that shaded your car as you drove along.... live oaks and pecans and pines... and even some flowering trees alongside the creek that we didn't even realize was there till we were driving over it.
We got to the end of that road and discovered that a big old Victorian house was sitting by itself up on a hill, surrounded by pastures filled with green grass and a large pond and the promises of wildflower blooms. "Now there's a house," said my husband..... "Why couldn't we find something like that for sale?"
He had stopped the car in the middle of the road and we just looked up at that house... a wrap-around porch that went all around the house... three floors of vintage windows, some of them stained glass... a gazebo in the side yard... a guest cottage in the backyard.... a barn on the back pasture.... wherever you looked, it seemed to be just perfect. I suggested that we drive further up the hill leading to the house, so we could have a look from the other side of the property.... and my husband did just that.
That's when we saw the "For Sale" sign... right by the mailbox. I told my husband to pull into the driveway... we could see if anyone was home, maybe they'd let us look at the inside. "We'll just take the phone number from the sign and call the agent," was my husband's answer. Not good enough for me... we were right there!
"Don't get your hopes up," my husband told me as he pulled into the driveway. (Hopes? I was already thinking of places to get packing boxes for everything in our Clear Lake house.) Before he had turned off the engine, I was out of the car and walking up the back steps of the porch. No one answered the doorbell when I rang it, but I didn't see that being much of a problem. I started looking into every window that wasn't fully covered with a curtain..... I saw part of the kitchen, all of the foyer, most of the living room, part of the dining room..... and I told my husband "This is our house."
"We don't even know the price," my husband told me. Details.... details.... men get caught up in such non-emotional details. I was already picturing our living room furniture in that living room... and I knew that our dining room table could be opened up with all its extensions and there would still be room to dance in that spectacular dining room.
My husband insisted we take down the number from the sign, check out the listing on the Internet, see how long it had been on the market, and then make an appointment with the agent to come back and see this house. Fine. Let him have his manly way. I was already making up a floor plan in my mind and deciding where I would place the sofa and the chairs.... the paintings and the mirrors... and our antique French telephone table would of course be put in the foyer near the stairs. In my mind, we were already 'home' and all I had to do was start packing.
We came back to see the inside of the house on a glorious day... birds were singing, goats and cows and horses were grazing in the property across the road, barn swallows were building nests on 'our' property, wildflowers were starting to bloom with sincere promises to transform the green pastures into Impressionist paintings. The inside of the house was more than I could have asked for... original wood floors, original stained glass windows, original built-in cabinets in both the kitchen and the dining room, French doors connecting the breakfast room to the dining room, the main staircase had two landings and a leaded glass window, and there was a second stairway coming up from the kitchen that met with the second landing of the front stairway. All of the bedrooms had their own bathrooms.... the second floor hallway was a room in and of itself... the third floor would be the library of my dreams. This was it. We were home.
"What will we do with all of those bedrooms?" my husband wanted to know. Details... details. I told him we'd do the same thing we did with "all" the bedrooms in our other house... the largest would be the master bedroom, the next largest would be his office, the other two would be my sitting room and my dressing room. "And what about the master bedroom that's on the first floor?" he wanted to know. Well, that was easy..... that would be the TV room, and I could keep the cats in there as well, to keep them from going all over the rest of the house. It all sounded so simple to me.
We moved into this house on Memorial Day weekend, 2009. The moving men were astounded that they never had to move a piece of furniture twice. I followed them around this house as they carried each piece inside..... "That goes over there.... that goes in the corner in this room.... that goes right near the window in that room...." I knew the furniture plan by heart.... as I spent all those weeks in Clear Lake packing up decorative and fragile treasures, my mind was back here in the Hill Country, picturing our furniture in this house.... I knew where everything would be placed even before the movers had taken our furniture out of the old house.
Even before we signed the papers at the closing, this big old Victorian felt like the house where I was born, in Woodhaven, Queens. The same three landings on the main staircase.... the same narrow slats on the vintage wood floors, nearly the same parquet designs on the dining room floor.... even the leaded glass windows. Not only did this house match up with that Woodhaven house, but it also reminded me of Grandma and Grandpa's home in Queens.... the same archway between the living room and the dining room, the French doors, the old windows, the history of the house itself. The only difference was that this house had been fully renovated.... central air-conditioning, a pantry converted to a laundry room, a second pantry converted to a first floor half-bath.... and the kitchen tiles were identical to those in Grandma's house. A little miracle there, one that I hadn't noticed that day I was on the porch and peeking through the windows because no one was at home.
It took some time getting used to.... this house was larger than our Clear Lake house, plus it had three floors instead of one.... the garage was bigger, and then there was the guest cottage and the guest rooms above the barn. And then the property.... 23 acres was indeed more property than the quarter-acre we had in Clear Lake. But wasn't this what we wanted? A larger home with vintage charm, far far away from The Gulf and out of hurricane range.
I walk around this house and see all of our furniture sitting in their just-so places.... our furniture that we bought during the past 20 years, plus furniture that had belonged to my husband's mother and both of my grandmothers. Everything is in just the right place here, and everything looks as if it has all been right here since the day the house was built in 1907. It's like living in a three-story Victorian doll-house.
Tucked out here in the Hill Country, I never gave a thought about the wildlife that surrounds this house... all of those night-time animals living in the woods at the perimeter of our property. It seems that once the sun sets and darkness falls, the woods come alive with all those creatures. Coyotes, armadillos, possums, raccoons, foxes, bobcats, snakes, and heaven only knows what else is out there during the night that I don't see. And who knew that scorpions by the millions were up here in The Hill Country, along with some of the largest spiders I've ever seen in my entire life.
During the day, the horses and cows and goats on the neighboring properties look serene and beautiful as they graze and roam around the fields. But then there are days when the baby goats are crying out for their mamas and they sound like human babies who have been abandoned. On other days, I can hear the mama cows crying for their calves who were taken to market. When I hear those poignant cries, I can't even sit outside on the porch... I come into the house and close the doors and either sit here and type or go up to the third-floor library and read.
When we had finished settling into this house, my husband turned an existing dog kennel into a chicken coop. Fresh eggs! What could be better? We bought six pretty hens, discovered they each had their own personalities and I named them all and they would come running across the yard when I called out to them. And the eggs every morning... those beautiful little miracles left in the nesting boxes for us. And then came the hawks, and the coyotes, and the snakes. One by one, my beautiful hens were 'lost' to the wildlife around us. We tried again, buying six new hens, each with their own personalities, and I gave them names. They all ran across the yard when I called them. And then... the coyotes... the snakes... it all happened again. When the last (and my favorite) hen was killed by a snake, we turned the chicken coop into a screen-porch for our outside cats. I went back to buying eggs at the store like the rest of the world.
When we first moved here, we had a lawn service come out to take care of the grass around the house and the cottage and the barn. Before too long, my husband bought a riding mower and now he does all that landscaping, and I help with a smaller mower that gets into the tight spaces. I'm probably the only woman out here in the hills who's wearing makeup and earrings while walking behind a lawn mower. I've weeded and mulched flowerbeds, watered a vegetable garden, and I don't even scream anymore when I find a green and black ribbon snake behind the azaleas. And when the gardening gloves come off, I have to stifle a little scream when I see a broken nail and a ruined manicure.
In the long summer that stretches on for months and months in the state of Texas, we have gone through countless weeks of over 100-degree days that have scorched the pastures and turned green grass into something that sounds like cornflakes when you walk across it. Our beautiful pond is filled with swimming ducks and croaking frogs in the spring-time, but a long hot summer will dry up every bit of water from one end to the other, making the pond look like just a big hole in the ground.
And then the short winter months have turned into frigid stupidity up here in the Hill Country these past five years. We watch the daily weather broadcasts and when the temperatures drop anywhere near the freezing point, we drip all the faucets and turn on heaters in the barn and the cottage, in the hopes that no pipes will freeze when the winds come whipping through these hills. Everyone's property is so large that there are no buffers for the wind.... a 40-degree dot on the thermometer can turn into 29 degrees with the blessed wind-chill factor that the weather wizards on TV are always talking about. The first time we had such weather, pipes froze by the water-well in the barn..... the water coming into the house was non-existent. We called a plumber for a quick fix, but half of the County had the same problem..... totally unexpected weather conditions.... it was a nightmare for the Hill Country. As a result, my husband taught himself to be a plumber and he re-plumbed every blessed pipe that had frozen.
There are days when I truly love every square inch of this big old historic house. And then there are other days when I wish I could snap my fingers and have this house reappear on a quiet street within thirty minutes of the Houston theater and museum district and within a ten-minute drive to a SteinMart and a really good shoe store.
We left very good friends back in Clear Lake, and we have made very good friends here in the Hill Country. We left a perfectly good house on a Clear Lake cul de sac, and bought a perfectly grand house on 23 acres in the Hill Country. Our Clear Lake house was too small for the big parties that we hosted for every holiday and occasion imaginable, and this vintage Victorian house is too big for the small parties that we have hosted here. No one has yet danced in our spectacular dining room and large living room in this house, but I can still remember the Conga Line that weaved through our small Clear Lake house when the steel drum band played at our Christmas party one year.
I sometimes wonder if our 'old' house had too many memories that we still keep so close to heart, and maybe this 'new' house just hasn't had enough opportunities to create more memories that we can add to our hearts.
I could live without the threatening wildlife, especially the snakes. I would miss the deer and the barn swallows and the wildflowers. I could live without the water-well and the pumping system, and would give anything at all if 'city water' was available out here in these hills. I would miss the sunsets and the zillions of wildflowers and the full moon shining through our pecan trees, but I could easily give up the scorpions.
If we hadn't bought this house, where would we be now? We were determined to move out of the hurricane zone near the Gulf. We were determined to have property not surrounded by subdivision fences. We now have everything we wished for, and then some.
Maybe it's the "and then some" that gets to me from time to time.
