Melancholy

This color is called "spring green" and can you tell I am so ready for warmer weather?

When the Brit and I first got married we had to live with my roomie in a single wide trailer where I had lived for the four years before meeting the Brit.  It was quite a challenge to have three adults, one cocker spaniel and one cat in a place roughly the size of a motel room.  My room was about the circumference of a shoe box with the bed taking up about three quarters of the room.  Oh, and did I mention that Sam's litter box (Rest in peace, dear Sammy...I still miss you!) was in the room right next to the bed?  So if he decided to have a poop in the middle of the night, we generally knew it. 

Because the Brit moved here from England, he had to go through the whole immigration route and basically he had to wait three months to get a Green Card and he could not look for work until he got the Green Card.  I pretty much lived paycheck to paycheck, so finding our own place was not yet an option. 

He finally got the card and started working in October and in January, we finally found an apartment and I must say that it was the coolest apartment ever.  It was a historical house and the landlord rented it out per floor, so we had the entire first floor.  Our windows in the front of the house (The living room and computer room) ran from ceiling to floor.  The floors were hardwood and just the framing inside the house was incredible.  Our living room had bay windows on the side and our kitchen had a complete "wall" of windows that overlooked the back yard.  The kitchen was huge with tons of cupboards and a little bar where you could sit and look out the windows.  We had a back porch, dining room, one and a half bathrooms, a spare room, our room and the computer room.  The only thing that seperated our bedroom from the computer room were pocket doors and both rooms had built in shelves.  The computer room had a fake stone wall, which I loved. 

It was love at first sight.  We had to do a bit of painting, especially in our room as the former tenants had painted the master bedroom pink with light pink trim.  It was like a Pepto Bismol nightmare.  So, we painted, we cleaned and we moved.  Our landlord was awesome; just a nice older gentleman who we got along quite well with.  The living room had a non-working fireplace and to the (I don't know the proper terminology, so forgive me) left and the right of the fireplace it was marble.  Our friend, Tod, came over and painted the mantle to look like marble as well.  We painted the kitchen bright yellow with forest green cupboards and did work on the spare room and the master bath.  Our neighbors on the second and third floors, also rocked (two single girls, so four of us lived in the building in total). 

We loved living there but then problem arose after we were there probably three years.  Fred, our magnificent landlord sold the property to a management company and they were not very reliable when things did go wrong.  We worried about them raising our rent (we paid $495 a month for it and it was really a steal given all the room we had) and the time had really come for us to start looking into buying a house of our own.  Renting is good when it has to be done, but still, you pay all that money each month and it is never yours.  So we started house hunting and found the place we live now and moved.  Interesting side story, from the time we saw the house, until closing when we could move in (the owners had already relocated to California) it was less than a month!  Talk about frenzied!  Anyway, we said goodbye to our first married apartment with a bit of sadness despite looking forward to new adventures in home ownership.

Sadly, two weekends ago, this happened to the old apartment:



The boarded up windows were our computer room and as you can see the whole side of the building was burned.  Thankfully, no one was hurt as one of the girls who lived there when we did, still lived there.  We're not sure what they'll do; if they'll try to fix it (wiring in that place was terrible) or tear it down, but I hope it isn't the latter.  The house is not only a piece of Hagerstown history, but also a bit of history for the Brit and I.