What is the most expensive thing you ever bought?
My granddaughter just asked me this question, and my first answer was definitely our house. It’s big and both ugly and old/ but beautiful and a great place to raise children. I have loved living here, but it comes with rats and termites and maintenance that neither my husband nor I are good at.
This old jumbled house at Tony Rosa Road was once a redwood forest, then a logging camp for Hobbes/Wall logging. Then the other camp cabins were removed but a couple were saved and connected and used as the beginning of the farmhouse here. Over time the property was used for cows and then tragedy struck the man the road was named after. I was told that Tony Rosa was in a drift boat fishing, when his son fell overboard. He attempted to grab a tree to hold the boat in place and it was carried out from under him. He drowned. I’m not sure, but I think the child was rescued.
Some of the walls of the house are 12 inches thick and solid redwood, but others are softer and more termite susceptible. The details of construction over a hundred years has been a hodgepodge of more and less skill. The room we call the toy room was added with a floor of 2x4s just laying on the earth. The house has almost no insulation, and the wooden shingles of the original cabin roofs are still there beneath the second floor.
It is my husband’s dream to tear down this house and build a more comfortable and elderly friendly home here on land we both love. Land of apples and pears, plums and blackberries, sunflowers, deer and a bear occasionally.
So yes, every month we put money into this place, and every month we have things that need repaired or replaced, but as for expensive? It has given us shelter we would have paid to rent somewhere else, and I have never been happier anywhere else, or shared any place with so many people I love. It has been home, for good, bad and in between.
