I should take a closer photo of my house, but this is all I have that's decent looking. This is from the front yard, with my grass 'sea'. Our house was built in 1917, & was a typical 4 Square style - 4 rooms up, 4 rooms down. It was remodeled some in the 70's. We bought it 2 years ago as a foreclosure for $19,000. We have 3 lots. The yard is huge, & we also have a 2 bay shop, with doors large enough to pull a semi into. We are the block. We have neighbors across the street, but it's on the yard side & the yard is huge, so they're not close. To the east of us is a grassy pasture lot & to the north & west of us is fields. When we first looked at the property it was so overgrown with weeds & trees you could barely see the house. The grassy 'sea' used to be a house years & years ago I'm told. There's still cement down in the ground, so we just let the grass grow there for now. We have to re dig our septic some time soon, & it has to go on that side of the house, so the yard will be getting torn into at that point. The house really needs the exterior done. The floors are not the greatest, but we tore out all the carpets & they are still the original hard wood. I really want to carpet the stairway & the upstairs at least. We have a wondeful fireplace in the living room, with bookshelves on each side. The folks that lived here from the 60's - 90's built them & my kitchen cupboards with hand hewn (is that the right word?) walnut, I believe from this property.
------------------> Our "Main" street. The post office is the first building on left with car in front of. It's on the list of potentially being shut down due to budget cuts. It's the only building on Main street that functions as anything. The building next to it, as well as the white building on the right are both 1910 buildings & are empty. Not sure what the brick building ever was. We only have one paved road, & that's the old highway that runs down the middle of town.
-------------->This is The Hayloft, our restaurant/bar owned by our 67 yr old mayor, Zelda. She's usually the only one working the place, but does have a couple employees for the weekends. The four of us can eat there for about $20 any day or night. Every other Sat. night she does her homemade fried chicken & fish buffett. The place is usually packed those nights. The inside is like some antique/taxidermy/flea market type place. Everywhere you look is something unusual.
So yeah..that's my town..seriously. There are more old empty buildings. We do have a Methodist church. It could probably seat 100 people max. Years & years ago the town had a school, car dealership, gas station, meat market, grocery store, hardware, implement dealer, vet, etc. Our population now is 102 & I think I counted 32 homes on our last walk. The town is 4 blocks x 4 blocks! We're 15 minutes from a small town grocery, 25 minutes to a Walmart. Which isn't too bad, but it can suck in Iowa winters. Grant sort of reminds me of Radiator Springs in Cars. The new highway didn't go through town, so the town dried up. Old highway 71 was a small, 2 lane with 'curbs' on the edges, & it goes right thru the middle of town. In the 60's when they widened the highway, they couldn't thru here since the properties were right up the the road. So, they curved out & around town. They only curved out of town by 2 blocks, but it still reminds me of Cars...but then, most small Iowa towns are drying up like ours anyway. I happen to live smack dab in the middle between the old & new highway. Right now I can't see the (new) highway traffic because we have a field of corn in between us & it, but once they harvest it, we can see the traffic. And then the deer will really be coming out of the timber just across the highway. Last year we had deer in our yard lots of mornings. They like to graze the newly harvested corn field, then bed down in our grassy 'sea'.
That's all for today, not too exciting around here.
