Selling (one of a few) Childhood Home

From the same house, I lived within walking distance of every school I attended, including college. My parents bought it in 1974 for something like $14,000 and sold it in 1987 for probably about $30k. I think it sold for a few thousand more most recently, about three years ago.

From the time I was about 8, I roamed that neighborhood freely pretty much night and day. Most of the houses were smaller and older, and occupied by widows living out their golden years. (Mrs. Patterson across the street, for instance, was born in 1897. She let me me use her front yard as a pitcher's mound to throw at the retaining wall for my front yard, and didn't mind at all that in doing so I had dug a couple of big holes in her yard.)

As the widows died, the houses all were bought up by investors who never set their SUVs' tires in that neighborhood. The decline was swift, and deep. The last few times I've been back to visit, I was nervous, as a grown-ass man, to walk the routes I walked to every school I attended, including college.

 

My parents bought their house in 1948 and lived there through my high school and college graduation. When dad retired, they started splitting their time between the house in Ohio and Florida, then they decided to sell the house and move to Florida full-time around 1974. As kids, my brother and I were religious collectors of baseball cards and had cards going back into the late 40s. Somewhere along the line, those cards were discarded, never to be seen again! The last time I was in that house, I spent an afternoon going through every closet, nook and cranny seeing if perhaps they were stashed somewhere. Unfortunately, they weren't.

So my folks sold the house to a couple in town, who proceeded to run the place into the ground. First the wife died, then the husband died. The kids put it on the market about 2 years ago for $39K and the pictures they had on Zillow almost made me want to throw up. They kept reducing the price because it didn't sell. Finally it appears they got another realtor involved and last summer it finally sold for $17K. That was about $8K under what my parents sold the house for 45 years before. I do understand the new owner is putting a lot of effort into fixing the place up, so I'm hopeful it won't be an eyesore anymore.