Is this our house?

The dreaded 282 Alumni had its regular quarterly meeting last Wednesday, February 20th, 2013, at Browncroft Family Restaurant.
The so-called “Alumni” are the union retirees of Regional Transit Service in Rochester, NY.
For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS — “Transit”), a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and environs.
While a bus-driver there I belonged to the Rochester Division of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), Local 282. (ATU is nationwide.)
The Alumni was a reaction to the fact Transit upper-management retirees ran roughshod over union retirees — a continuation of the bad vibes at Transit, management versus union.
Transit had a club for long-time employees, and I was in it. It was called the “15/25-year Club;” I guess at first the “25-year Club.” But they lowered the employment requirement, and renamed it “15/25-year Club.” The employment requirement was lowered even more; I joined at 10 years.
My employ there ended in 1993 with my stroke (disability retirement); and the “Alumni” didn’t exist then.
The Alumni is a special club — you have to join.
It’s an Amalgamated Transit Union functionary. It isn’t just a social club.
It has bylaws, officers, and an Executive Board.
In many ways it’s just like our union-local, except it entertains issues of interest to retirees; like Medicare, healthcare, and diabetes and Alzheimer’s.
“Dreaded” because all my siblings are flagrantly anti-union, like the proper way for hourlies to parry the massive management juggernaut is one employee at a time; in which case that single employee gets trampled because he’s not presenting a united front with power equal to management.
The proletariate’s attempt to exact a living wage from bloated management fat-cats is what’s wrong with this country.
The meetings are held at a restaurant because they’re breakfast-meetings; a Transit retiree gig.
The friend who daycares my dog, while I work out at the Canandaigua YMCA, calls them “transient-retirees.”
Attendees load up on breakfast, and the club pays for coffee.
About 50 attended, a record.
Only one girl was waitressing our group; she was swamped.
As retirees, we’re all falling apart with aging.
The Recording-Secretary had quit his duties due to health problems, although he was still doing the club newsletter, which he does on his computer with Microsoft Word®. (Attracted to tech-stuff; I can understand that.)
The club president was unable to attend due to health problems of his own, and serious health problems of his wife.
Since Browncroft Family Restaurant is in a suburb adjacent to where we once lived in the city I decided to go see our old house, our first.
It’s been over 20 years since we left, and we used to visit occasionally while my wife was still alive.
This would be my first visit since my wife died.

Our first house (323 N. Winton Road in Rochester), after it was put up for sale. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

Our first house was built about 1865, and at that time was probably the first farmhouse in the area.
The area had since become a city neighborhood; our house was surrounded by homes built in the teens and twenties.
The area used to be in the Town of Brighton, but was annexed by the City of Rochester.
The original structure was a small two-story on a stone foundation. Its frame was large barn-beams, and the cellar was dug with an earthen floor, with about a five-foot clearance. You had to stoop.
Later a one-story addition was added south of the two-story. It didn’t use barn-beams; it was wood-framed, but more modern construction.
A shed was added behind that addition, and later that shed was converted to living-space: the kitchen.
So our bedroom was in the original two-story, the living-room was in the addition, and the kitchen was in the converted shed.
The upstairs of the two-story was unheated. Its ceiling was about six-feet on-center, but the roof-pitches angled the ceiling at the sides. You had to duck. We always called it “the attic;” use was near-impossible.
In the early ‘70s we lived in an apartment across the road from this house. The apartment was the upstairs of a house.
We always were attracted to this house. It was painted yellow with green trim, and it remained true to its humble beginnings.
No picture-windows, nor any out-of-character improvements.
Then the house went up for sale.
It was interesting, but I worried about off-street parking. —I couldn’t see any.
Turns out it was a double-lot. The property went clear back to the next block.
A two-car garage was out back facing that back-street.
You accessed that garage from a long driveway up from that back-street.
At that time I wasn’t working, but my wife was, so we purchased the house based on her income.
The house only cost $15,000, and was a first-time FHA mortgage.
I should have known, being old, there were many things wrong.
Worst was the heat-loss. The house was such a sieve we were heating the outdoors.
Many of the windows were original, that is, 19th century.
There were even bubbles in the glass.
The windows were double-hung, and sealing was so poor they were drafty in Winter, very drafty.
The bathroom plumbing would freeze. It was inside the envelope, but right next to a north-facing exterior wall, and uninsulated.
The house lacked closets. There was no closet in the bedroom.
We made one, except it was standalone, not part of the house.
The original owner made closet-space in the addition by making a long hallway from the living-room to the kitchen.
The so-called closet was a long space parallel to that hallway, and had a window.
My wife removed that hallway wall to make that area a dining-area, but it was narrow.
A tiny bedroom was in one corner of the two-story first floor.
It had a rudimentary closet under a steep stairwell to the upstairs. The closet was in an area that had once been the stairs down to the cellar.
The roof over the kitchen also leaked.
And so much heat was exiting the house, ice-dams formed on the roof.
The reason we built a new house was because the old house needed so much work.
The shed/kitchen was built around the original chimney. We had to have that removed, and a new chimney built. The new chimney was behind the two-story section, was brick, and built by masons.
The leaky shed-roof had to be replaced. In so doing we were remodeling the kitchen. Out with the ancient Sears fixtures and in with new.
The contractor who did this is the one who eventually built our new house.
The shed was poorly attached. An employee of that contractor said it reminded him of construction in the outback of West Virginia, very rudimentary.
Remodeling the kitchen of the old house was a challenge. A new floor had to be installed to level it, and the foundation under the shed wasn’t square. —It was skewed at least eight inches.
Most challenging was the unsquare foundation.
Construction atop it couldn’t be squared, which made making a corner-countertop very difficult.
We had to refuse the first countertop. It didn’t fit right —too gappy. The countertop-supplier had to toss his first countertop and make a second.
That fit much better; it had the proper skew.
So the house ended better, but there were still a lotta problems. Worst was the gigantic heat-loss, and the drafty windows.
All the windows needed replacing, and the house needed to be gutted to properly insulate.
The layout was unsatisfactory to my wife.
You were always tracking mud to get anywhere in the house. Getting to the bedroom or the bathroom from the kitchen was a long hike through the living-room.
The only way to solve all these problems was new construction.
We could afford it.
The only problem was moving out to the country. Our only city option was to completely tear down the house and start over.
So we looked for land in the country — my wife was a country-girl anyway.
The only disadvantage to country-living is long travel-times to various errands.
But we never really became aware of that until we moved out here; 25 minutes from everything, and almost an hour from Rochester.
So we put our old house up for sale.
We had to do various fixes to make it marketable. A new 60,000 BTU high-efficiency furnace had to be installed. It exhausted through a sidewall; the new chimney was for naught! 60,000 BTU for only 900 square feet is ridiculous, but we were heating the outdoors.
We also had to install a new electric water-heater. A gas water-heater couldn’t be properly flued in a cellar with only five feet of clearance.
The new furnace required removal of the old furnace, a gigantic asbestos abatement. The old furnace and heat-runs were lined with asbestos. Everything was inert until removal.
Everything had to be sealed off, although I don’t know how safe things were in the cellar. There was no way for us to get down there, yet the guys removing the furnace were relatively unprotected.
Furnace-parts and worker-clothing were buried in a landfill.
We had to heat the house with a gigantic electric heater that needed its own circuit. It just about quadrupled our electric-bill.
With the old house sold, our new house was built.
But we couldn’t move until our new house had a Certificate of Occupancy.
Construction of the new house took over five months; we weren’t cleared to move until the end of 1989.
When we moved our new house was still unfinished. We were camping out in our new house. The only water was the master-bathroom shower; no working toilets yet.
But we only camped out a couple nights — the house was almost finished.
The other insanity was the bank. It was slow issuing us a mortgage, and refused to give our contractor a builder’s loan. He needed the mortgage-proceeds to finish our house. His workers and suppliers went unpaid for a week or two.
The new house solved all the problems with our old house. New draft-free windows, and a tiny heat-load due to heavy insulation. Also a much better layout.
Its only problem is distance from errands.
So now to see the old homestead — house number-one.
I drove languidly into our old neighborhood.
There was Mayer Hardware on the corner of Winton and Blossom — we lived on Winton Road.
Mayer looked pretty much the same, except for dark-green exterior paint.
I wonder if it still has “the paint-lady,” who always muttered to herself while puttering her department.
I doubt it has “Gary” any more; I saw him at another hardware. He told me Mayer laid him off; he cost too much.
How many times did Gary and I solve housing problems?
And there was “Bill and Earl’s Garage.”
I wonder if Bill or Earl still exist?
Bill, who was slightly older than me, and somewhat a loose cannon, told me he didn’t expect to see 60.
Earl may have already been 60 when I patronized. Earl was the Parts and Tool guy, Bill the mechanic.
Bill and Earl’s Garage was two sections, a service-bay, and the Tool and Parts section. Earl was off by himself; Bill was milking Granny.
How many times did I just walk up the street from our house to solve some car problem with Earl?
I drove past our house. For one thing all the green trim, like the shutters in the picture, was gone, and it looked like the windows might have been replaced. It also looked like the roof was new.
I noticed the porch-railing I so exquisitely fixed was still extant.
I drove around the block, then down the dead-end street that ended at our old driveway.
Surprise!
It looked like our old driveway was no longer being used, since it was partially grown in. Our old garden was completely grown in — it’s been that way for some time — but the lawn behind our garden was also grown in.
That was lawn when we lived there!
Garage-doors to the south bay of the garage, the doors I never opened, were hanging open. It’s an old garage; the garage-doors are not retractable. The doors are hinged, and swing vertically.
I re-roofed that garage, an awful project. I did it in June, and the sun was beating down.
A car was up ahead of the garage in the immediate backyard between the house and the garage.
I never parked there; only once to wash our van — which got stuck.
That area was backyard as far as I was concerned, not a parking-area.
I forgot to see if the deck we built was still there. My brother and I set the lumber for that deck, and when we did I could see it wasn’t level to the house.
We set it with a giant water-level.
“The deck is level, but the house isn’t,” my brother declared. He was right. One corner of the house had settled some on its foundation.
So it goes.
Our old house is no longer ours. I’d say the guy who bought it from us has since moved on, and sold it to someone else.
Most surprising was all that undergrowth in the area that was once lawn, and that car parked up ahead of the garage in what used to be our dog’s running area.
It’s our old house, but no longer lived in by people obsessed with its historic appearance.
—Apparently!
And it’s the first time I’ve seen it since my wife died — and I’ve had other opportunities.

• My beloved wife of over 44 years died of cancer April 17th, 2012. I miss her dearly. I have a picture of her painting an exterior wall, which we called “the wailing-wall,” on that house. There was a lot of paint-scraping.