Want to Buy a House?

I know I'm receiving bunches of comments on the blog and in my personal mailbox asking, how on earth are you keeping your house so CLEAN? And I even got a comment wondering if it's even MY bathroom?

And I'm *tempted* to say that it isn't really my bathroom, it's just the BOYS' bathroom and we let them use it when we release them from their cages each afternoon. But somehow, I thought if I typed that I would get a visitor from the state requesting, nay, DEMANDING, to come in and smell my French Toast candles for themselves. So I'll have to tell the truth. (Doggone it! It would have made my day to see the British nanny show people come over as well. I coulda been on TV!!)

The bathroom and the kitchen you see are actually taken from a REAL house in which REAL people had been living just before the photographs in question. It is about a mile up the road from us and was a very old and in its day surely a very beautiful place. History tells us that the owners of that house also owned the tiny house across the street as "slave quarters." It's a place you can't see from the road and the lot is situated SO nicely. Someone has bought it and is doing extensive work on it.

At the time it went up for sale, we weren't really aware of how structurally bad the place was, or how thoroughly mouldy. These aren't things you can see from the sidewalk, and the lot is large enough that quite a few of the major defects of the place are not visible from the road. So Dh toured the place with our ever-patient Realtor, and snapped these pictures about two years ago. Actually, the really sad thing is, you could see little childrens' toys about this place and KNEW they had kids living in that filth. Did you guys click on the kitchen pic to make it bigger? It's actually MUCH WORSE than it looks at first glance. I will have to dig around and see if I still have a photo of the sheriff office eviction notice and the yard, etc.