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When the first wave hit, I shook my head at irresponsible Americans. Then I lost my income — and my home is next
This is the story of a home with red doors. A home where a family has unpacked wedding crystal, changed new diapers, buried pets, watched far too many DVDs, fought over space on the bed/couch/floor, picked the weird green stuff out of the soup, listened to the moan of the reluctant cello, eaten popcorn, thrown popcorn, and unwrapped birthday presents. This is our home. Technically, I guess it isn’t anymore; our home goes up for public auction next month. The house belongs to the lender – another statistic for the death lists.
The doors weren’t red when the crystal was freed from its bubble wrap and set, with all its symbolic promise, on the Mission-style cabinet with the fingerprint-free glass doors more than a decade ago. Back then, the house’s vibrant Craftsman beauty was still shrouded in dowdy cracked beige. My husband, Mike, and I spent the first year with hammer and sander carving out our home from this blank and bland canvas. We liberated hardwood floors with inlaid borders from the bondage of dusty brown wall-to-wall carpet. In retrospect, we should have left the hallway carpet alone, but who knew that there would be only subfloor beneath? Who takes the flooring out of a hallway?
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