Tuesday, August 26, 2008

How We Stumbled, How We Fell- in Love, with Pumpkins


I thought I might begin these posts by telling the story about how we came to acquire The Pumpkin House- and what a great story of love and tenacity went behind keeping it in the face of adversity.

I'll back up a few years to 2005. I was hosting a baby shower at our home just about a mile away from the Pumpkin House. I had just given birth to our new little arrivals (twins) about 8 or 9 months before. The house we were living in was perfectly comfortable, but was next to a busy street and didn't exactly fit for a growing family.

Pan to next scene: I had taken some table linens to the dry cleaners in preperation for a friends baby shower and ended up taking a "wrong" turn upon my retrieval of said items. In walks "adversity" ;) I drove past one of the most overgrown, chipped, rusted and rotten houses on Harvard Street. It sat on a corner and typically would not be a house that I would have noticed, had the "estate sale" sign not been out front! ;) There was a line of 60 some odd people in front of the house- waiting on the estate sale to begin for the day- and being the bargain huntress I am- my curiosity outweighed my ability to stay put in my car and on task! I went into the house- which was fronted by rotten siding and an overgrown landscape (which had been greatly reduced by the family members who went through the estate belongings to ready it for the sale.) The house contained various odds and ends, antiques and glassware- I purchased a punch bowl (for the shower the next day) and promptly walked towards the door. (Mahogany) with an inlaid sun. At the front entryway I looked down, and marveled at the varying contrast of pine, and mahogany, cherry and various other woods which made up the "compass" floor mark. It was beautiful. I left the house and started for the street. When walking away from the house- I turned and looked at it- and what I previously saw, became clear- this house needed some love and a family to live in it! I dropped the punch bowl in my car and ran up the front steps again to ask if the home was a part of the "estate".

Scene II- Years and years of infertility- ended in our eventual pregnancy with twins! (ours is a lucky story!)- when we got pregnant with the twins- it was October- and Bill and I had been calling the babies "A & B" for months (a test cant be done to determine the sex of the babies until 21 weeks) so in October- Bill and I decided that we would no longer call the babies A&B and set out to come up with a nick-name for them- so we started calling them "The Pumpkins"-

Starting to see the eerie side of the story? :)

Scene III- I walked back up the front steps of the house and went inside- I took one more walk around the house- (sans punch bowl) and really took a look at the work that would need to be done to get the house in shape to live in. Seeing how we had just done an extensive remodel on our current home- I was feeling quite confident (haha! stupid girl!) with our abilities to redo another one! I walked back into the entry hall and asked the auctioneer if the home was for sale- and she said "yes- and from what I understand, its already got a few interested parties"- Then she said what made the hair stand up on my arms- "You know, this home is known in the neighborhood as "The Pumpkin House"... I almost started crying! It was one of those glorious, CLEAR moments in your life where you know that you must do what you must do to make something happen. And it happened- in March- (the 25th to be exact)- which was my husbands 39th birthday- we closed on The Pumpkin House. And life will never be the same! I'll also add- the house that we had lived in stayed on the market for 18 months! We lived in it for about 9 months before we moved to the Pumpkin House.

About Me

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Southern Lady with the gift of gab. Love a great glass of wine and good times with friends. Love my babies (twins) and my precious Southern man. Life is good in Texas.