wow please discuss the process of burning the old house more
So I grew up on my stepdad’s family’s farm, from the time I was six until I left. The original house was built in roughly 1880 as a one-room house, and was then added onto haphazardly until there were four bedrooms (two upstairs and two down), an attic, living and dining room, a closed-in porch, a summer kitchen, plus halls and stairs and a bathroom and cellar.
Anyway all that adding on meant that there were gaps in the foundation and old rotting beams buried in new walls and all kinds of stuff. One winter when I was about 13 the mouse situation got really bad, to the point where they would die and stink in the walls and sometimes inside furniture. So we looked into what it would take to fix the house so the mice couldn’t get in as easily. Turned out that fixing the foundation would mean lifting the house, but we couldn’t lift the house without first shoring up all that haphazard adding on.
All that would have cost us as much as building a new house, so we decided to just build a new house. We ended up going prefab because we were kind of in a hurry and didn’t want to spend another winter in the old house with the herd of mice, so that’s what we did. The property was 5 acres, so we built the new house in what had previously been about ¼ of our pasture.
When they finished assembling the new house, they dug a hole and pushed the old house into it and then set it on fire. Now a garden stands on the footprint of the old house.
And that’s the story of when we burned our house down to get rid of a mouse infestation.
If you turned this into a novel and added an ailing parent and some infidelity you could probably win a Pulitzer
Mooncustafer 