BUYING HOUSES

The first house we ever purchased was a little house in West Meade on Haverford Drive. (I always like that name for a street.) Jim had just been offered a job with IBM and we were happy to be back in Nashville after living at fourteen different locations in five years.

At that time we had only two little ones, Ashley and Jim, so the house we bought was small - - - three bedrooms and one bath. The lot was great, filled with flowers and shrubs that bloomed every year. And there was a fenced-in yard in the back. The cost was $14,500; our payments were a little over $100 per month.

We lived in that house for several years until we realized we had outgrown it. Brenda had arrived and getting kids ready for school with one bathroom was not easy. So we began to hunt for something a little bigger.

A time or two we found something acceptable, but others were there ahead of us with offers. So I told Carolyn Warden, who had gone into real estate, that if a house along a certain stretch of Chickering Lane ever came up for sale, we would be interested. There were six or seven houses on the same side of that street that were near to the entrance of the Sequoia Club, our swim and tennis club, where we hung out almost daily in the summer. It had two large pools, 2 wading pools for little ones, a playground, a basketball court, and 8 tennis courts. The side that bordered the adjacent yards was all grown up with bushes and trees, so that it was a very private place to swim and play tennis.

One day Carolyn called me and said that one of the houses was going on the market on Sunday and we could see it on Saturday if we wished. So I first played tennis, then got in the car and drove the five houses up from Sequoia and went in to see the house. It was a two story house on two acres that sat down in a valley and had a huge back yard. In fact, there was a small A-frame barn out back with an electric fence around half of the back property where they kept 2 horses. A little creek ran through this part. The inside had a living room, large dining room, eat-in kitchen, ½ bath, den, and a study with a fireplace. Upstairs were four nice bedrooms and two baths. I took one look and said to myself that we would never be able to afford it. It was priced about $10,000 over the range we were looking for.

But we knew it was perfect for us, and we made an offer of $56,500 that was accepted! We were on our way to the house of our dreams. And amazingly, we made a discovery about the back yard - - - after we cleared the back fence, we discovered that our property backed up to the eight tennis courts! How convenient was that for a family so involved in the game? Our house was closer to the courts than the Sequoia parking lot was. (Of course, others discovered that too and we had many people over the years use our driveway in which to park.)

We lived there for 23 years and would be there today if it were not for the maintenance of all that land. It just got to be too much for us. But, it was a great place to raise our children and we enjoyed every minute.

Both the Haverford and Chickering houses have changed drastically, but that’s a story for another day.