That one house in the neighborhood

[_msnobody]

Every neighborhood has at least one. Tell us about the house that really stands out in your neighborhood or if you are the one in the neighborhood with that house.

[_Jersey Girl]

I'd love to tell you about the house that stands out in our neighborhood, but you can't see any of them! My own house is unviewable from the street!

I'll tell you about a couple we looked at while house shopping. First know, that almost every single house in my neck of the woods is custom built. That sounds good, doesn't it? As we found out, custom can also mean "weird". :-)

When we walked into the white house, it felt really weird inside. Like steamy weird. It wasn't until we were about half way through our tour that we saw it had a swimming pool INSIDE of the house. It was really nice with work out equipment scattered around it.

A nice rustic home is one that I remember well. It was just plain and rustic, something like what we were looking for and an older home. So off to the right, there was what looked to be like a solarium or green house room. It had huge windows, a ceiling fan, plants all around, real live trees, DIRT FLOORS and BIRDS flying around inside of it!

There are lots of geo dome houses around here, but mostly rustic, Tudor and stucco. I hear that there's an orange house in this town that is shaped like a mushroom!

Anyway, we decided to build our own and the only thing weird about our house is that it's intentionally built backwards. It sort of looks like an A-frame with huge trapezoid windows over rectangle windows in front (which is why it's built backwards) and you wouldn't know it was backwards if the contractor didn't notice that the crew put the door bell on the BACK DOOR instead of the front door and we didn't either until our first guest arrived! (Where's the doorbell???) So we have a house built backwards with no door bell in front.

Can I tell you something else that stands out about this neighborhood? The mailboxes! Most of us have country mail boxes but some folks have them custom made to be fire trucks, school houses, wagons and stuff like that. My favorite is a country mail box mounted on a huge pole that sits up in the trees that is labeled "Air Mail". :-) It's really a birdhouse.

Other mailbox trivia. One of the things that teens do on weekends around here is to go mailbox bashing. I kid you not! They take baseball bats and smash the heck out of the country mailboxes. In response, some residents have gone to great lengths to protect their mailboxes, encasing them in concrete and brick! They look like little fortresses along the road.

Oh, another weird thing in our area. The school bus thingy's that people build for their kids to wait for the bus in winter. They look like little outhouses at the end of the driveways. Most are painted to match the house they go to. I wondered what the heck those were until I drove the kids to school the first day in winter and saw children huddled inside of them!

[_msnobody]

My parents had the same problem with mailboxes being bashed on their street. My dad had a custom made 1/4" thick steel mailbox made. You could hardly lift it to put it on the pole.

We have neighbors up the street of latino background who have tall stalks of corn growing right up against the windows on the front of their house.