We added a half bath upstairs and a large walk-in closet, but basically it's still an old house that would have to be redone from scratch to really be at its best.

It hasn't always sat where it is now. It used to be in Ft. Worth, on what originally was a gravel farm road. The town grew out to it, the road was paved and widened, and the farm property was sold off a little at a time. When we bought it, it was next door to a barbecue joint on one side and a carwash on the other side. The property had been sold again to a fast-food chain and they wanted the house gone so they could build a new, modern building.

My husband and I had bought 40 acres in the country with only an old "box" house on it--3 rooms and a path as it turned out. (A "box house" around here is a house built like a wooden box--there is no framing to it; there is a floor with four walls attached and the walls hold up the ceiling. Window and doors are cut into the sides and there is no interior wall. The window and door frames stick out into the rooms. That house was over 100 years old and there used to be quite a few of them around, but most of them are gone now, including ours.) More about that old house later.

We had looked into building a new house, but all we felt we could afford at that time would have been a very small 3-bedroom brick house on a slab. We had 3 children, all small, and we needed more room, plus we wanted to build at the foot of a hill, and when it rained, a lot of water was going to run down that hill. So we preferred pier-and-beam construction to a slab foundation. As an alternative, we looked at older houses to be moved.

Well, let me tell you the ones I looked at were pitiful. They were old and shabby with the original kitchen and bath that hadn't been updated at all. Some had termites, most hadn't been properly cared for over the years and although some of the rooms were large, most were inadequate for our needs. Believe me, I am not very picky and wasn't looking for a castle, but I was beginning to feel like there was nothing suitable for our family when I found this old house.

It was in good shape on the outside, and all the inside needed was fresh paint. It was a typical old house of the period when it was built; a living room, dining room and kitchen down one side, and 2 bedrooms on the other side with a hall and a bath between them. But it had an upstairs that had been added to the original house.

The people we bought it from, who had been living it in until shortly before we saw it, had raised 4 boys, and a "boy's room" had been added upstairs. It was 18' X 22'--adequate space for 4 growing boys. When the boys were grown, their father had used it for his office. How the six of them functioned with only one downstairs bathroom is beyond me, but of course we learn to make do with what we have. I paid for the house and we started making arrangements to get it moved 30 miles to our property.

That was the good news. The bad news was that they can't move a 2-story house in town. Too many electric & telephone wires overhead. So we had to have the upstairs removed down to the bottom of the window frames so it wouldn't be too tall. We were 30 years younger at that time, so we decided to do that job ourselves, as there was plenty of time before the house movers could put it on their schedule.

We could have just knocked the upstairs off, but when we got it to "our place" it would have to be rebuilt, so we decided to salvage the lumber to use in the rebuilding of the room. Talk about hard work! Not only did we have to take it apart board by board, but we had to pull all the nails sticking out of those boards in order to reuse them. The kids and I had our own pry-bars and while my husband took boards off, we pulled nails. After a while we were pulling nails in our sleep! Before we finished that job, we were thoroughly sick of nail-pulling, and I must say I haven't done any more of it to this day that I recall. However, our resources were limited and we had to save money where ever we could. We had sold a business if Ft. Worth, but had paid cash for our land, and we still had to pay for a foundation for the house to sit on and having it moved down there and placed on the foundation.

On top of that, the house was still too large to move in one piece, so the living room and front bedtoom had to be cut off and moved as a separate piece. When it was set on the foundation, it had to be put back together and the upstairs rebuilt, so our moving expenses were far from over.