The easy answer: a house fire. Our house in New Jersey burned, not to the ground, but if it were a car it would have been totaled: the amount it would cost for us to repair was more than we could sell it for. We thought we were going to rebuild anyway so we paid to totally strip the house to the studs, dumpster after dumpster of burned wood and plaster followed the dumpsters of our burned possessions, and then more filled with smoke and water damaged wood and plaster. The plaster old enough to contain horsehair, covered with layer after layer of wallpaper that may have gone back to the building and expansion of the house in the 1860s and 1890s respectively.
We cleaned and treated the smoke damaged wood and sealed it. We used an ozone machine to make the house smell as if there was never smoke, flames, or mold. Then we got real and decided to sell. Had we been in our 40s we would have fixed all the things we meant to fix, a door to the side patio, a small balcony off the bedroom, electrical outlets in all the walls, walk in closets, expanded bathroom off the “master” bedroom. Our insurance would have paid for it and we would have enjoyed it for several decades before selling, perhaps in an upturned market. But we were 5 or 6 years from retirement and didn’t have the heart to spend half of that in a rented house while the renovations progressed only to retire and sell it anyway.
So we sold the shell and it is now a three family home. The contractor who bought it did a lovely job renovating the outside up to the historical district requirements. I have not seen the inside. The garden and most of the trees are gone but there were children’s bikes in the driveway when I walked by this fall and halloween decorations in the porch. And we have moved on.
When we were still struggling with the dilemma caused by “repair or replace” insurance and the fact that “replace” would not buy much in our part of New Jersey, we learned that our insurance company didn’t care where we replaced. And a house came for sale in the village where my husband’s mother lives. He was already there helping to take care of her, so sent me pictures. All of his family knew the house through multiple owners going back 50 years. The picture of the courtyard did it for me. I was ready to buy sight unseen and have never regretted it. You can buy a lot of house in southern France for the price of a small suburban house in the mythical central New Jersey.
So that’s how we got here. A freak electrical fire and a very good insurance policy. We still miss a lot of what we lost, the little things mostly, and books—especially beautiful old first editions. But we were also able to save more than we expected and to clean the soot damage from many of the books in my library and other parts of the house.
Please don’t say “you got lucky” to my husband as he lost the most and would not have made that trade, but you can say “it turned out okay” and I will smile agreement as I head off to potter around the garden.
PSA
Meanwhile, if you have any old surge protectors, please throw them away and buy new ones (scroll down on this page to “how old is too old” for an explanation). It took four minutes for the fire to engulf the study where it started.
