There was a lady at the desk in the office and she handed me a form. I filled it out and gave it back. She looked at me and then almost hesitatingly asked which house I lived in. I described the house and she smiled and said "I used to own that house." Then I knew who she was. To say I was thrilled would be putting it mildly. We talked for quite a bit. She brought up the sewer thing. We had a different city manager then, and she told me her husband had called him and told him the city needed to fix the problem. The city manager told him "Sir, if you don't like it you can move." Wow. So they did. They moved. I am so grateful for our current city manager. He went out of his way to fix things for us. I had told him I was thinking of moving, because I couldn't deal with the sewage coming up in my house any more. That I shouldn't have to deal with sewage running down my yard. He was very apologetic and it took some time but he was true to his word. He had them reroute the line from all the way down the street. He told me "No, we want you to stay, we don't want you to move."
She told me they put in the air conditioning system, for which I am grateful, and which I already knew. I was in the attic one day and found the specs for the AC system, crudely drawn out by the AC guys, a complete sketch of the layout of our entire house with the owners name across the bottom. They also built the garage. Apparently there was a really old falling down ramshackle garage and they tore it down and built a new one.
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I'd been excoriating my previous owners two back (aka the POs-1) in my blog, thinking they were the ones who painted the woodwork. Then I talked to one of them, and found out that the perpetrator was the owner before her who lived in the house for 60 years. I guess one might want a change after that long a time . . .
And the POs-1 replaced the soil stack and put in the AC and got rid of the knob-and-tube wiring and scraped off layers and layers of old wallpaper. For all of which, I am very grateful, and I, too, apologize.
(But they're still the ones who replaced it with WP that was predominantly beige . . . :-p )
I have had many thoughts over the years of what I would say to the previous owners if I ever saw them (like THANKS for those cheap wood parquet tiles in the foyer that were popping up all over the place before I redid the floor) but in the end what I really wanted to say was "Thank you" because they really did some wonderful things too, that outweigh the bad things. (Even if they did paint a mural of billiard balls racked up complete with pool cues on my dining room wall.) :)
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