pirate treasure

Eilene and I robbed our first house a few weeks ago.

Well, not quite. We trolled some estate sale listings one Saturday, and found a house in a nice part of town that was having a “pre-demolition sale”. We were interested in a lot of cabinets and countertops, a lot of the stuff was really good. The guy wanted absurd amounts of money for most of it, so Eilene took down his number and waited.

After a few days the house was being turned over to the builder to be knocked down. Eilene then got the builder’s name, and gave him a call. The builder told her to stop by and “take whatever the hell you want”. When asked about payment, the guy wanted none.

So we rented a Penske truck. We started at ten o’clock at night with two crowbars, two power drills, and a box of tools. Though by the time we got there, other people had scoured through a fair amount, we managed to score a load of random doors, enough kitchen cabinets to redo our kitchen, a ton of cabinet doors with great hardware on them, and enough to resell on craigslist to make up for the truck rental.

There was no electricity or running water in the house as it was scheduled to be knocked down in a few days, so we did all our work thieflike with a couple of flashlights.

There was definitely a sad edge to the whole thing. The area of town is one where a lot of the property values are skyrocketing. It’s seen as an up and coming trendy next-rich-part-of-town section of Dallas, so they are skyrocketing the property taxes and forcing out the elderly who have lived there for 40 years. Their houses get knocked down and replaced with mansions that have about four square feet of yard space and stretch to the edge of their respective lots. It’s disgusting.

The house we plundered was nice. It had huge picture windows, vaulted ceilings, skylights, it was very happy and open, and quite large. We made comments through the night about how depressing it was that it would be levelled in a matter of days. Toward the end of our mission, Eilene got quiet and was walking around looking at everything. When I came over, she just looked at me and asked, “I don’t understand. Why was this house not good enough?”