When Is My Kid Ready For A Haunted House?

"Is my child ready for a haunted house?" A friend of mine asked this question on Facebook the other day, and since I am a horror AND haunted house aficianado with kids I took a stab at it. She told me I should take my advice and turn it into a blog post because she couldn't really find anything on Google and sometimes when we get old, we forget what it's like to look at scary stuff as a kid, when it's new and fresh and (often) ACTUALLY frightening. (Which is not to say adults don't get frightened too; I know plenty of them that won't set food in a haunted house!) It can be difficult to tell if your child is too young (in years or emotional maturity) to go to a haunted attraction. So here's my advice:

Number One: KNOW YOUR KID. What they can handle will vary widely based on their individual personalities and ability to separate fantasy from reality. I've got a 9 year old son who HATES horror and being scared. I have an almost 7 year old daughter who LOVES it. Neither has been to a 'true' haunted house yet. The younger one has asked to go but I am not sure she is ready, since some of them are pretty extreme. The older one was invited to a classmate's birthday party at one this year - I didn't even know that was a thing, I think it's AWESOME, but he's not going and NO ONE CAN MAKE HIM).

Number Two: CHOOSE YOUR HAUNTED HOUSE WISELY. Each haunted attraction will vary widely based on what kinds of scares they offer.

a) Check to see if they have an age limit. Most don't but almost all recommend your kids be at least teenagers.

b) See if you can find local friends who have been there and get their opinion on how scary it was.

c) Find out if the workers touch you or not. Some houses allow this, some don't.

Haunted houses use a variety of scenarios to scare. Total darkness. Strobe lights and other light effects. Scary sounds and music. Fog. Jump and 'startle' scares. Disturbing imagery. Some even have sections where you may have to crawl, be squeezed, feel like the walls are closing in, or go down slides or through tunnels. Can your kid handle stumbling through the pitch darkness, only to have someone with a chainsaw jump out at them and chase them?

We went through our local park district's 'haunted hallway' a couple years ago and it was actually REALLY well done. My husband and I ended up having to carry both kids while they buried their faces in our necks. Even charity or local haunted houses are staffed by people like me who take pride in scaring people and they're usually really well done. I worked a Jaycees haunted house when I was in high school and was in a very realistic torture scene, stationed next to an actual rotting pig's head (from a local butcher). We had a truck that looked like it was going to drive right into you, a bunch of scary clowns, a mad scientist's lab with actual edible organs, and more. This was 20 years ago. I can only imagine they've improved since then.

Number Three: TALK TO YOUR KID. Don't just drag them to a haunted house kicking and screaming or surprise them when you get there. Discuss what sorts of things they should expect from it, and ask them if they think they are ready for it. It's FUN to be fake-scared. It's NOT fun to be really terrified. Help set your kid up for success by making sure they know it's all pretend, that the people working there are having a ton of fun and working hard so that YOU will have fun too.

So you've considered the above and your kid says 'I'm ready Mom and Dad, I want to do this!' Is there a litmus test to see if they can handle it? Here's my personal succession of tests:

1) Read scary books together. 

From my daughter's first grade open house. All the other little girls had Barbies, princesses, American Girl, mermaids. Then there's my daughter's at the end of the line.

a) If they haven't even read Goosebumps, start there. My horror-hater can't even handle Goosebumps!

b) Grab your favorite anthology of scary campfire tales from when you were a kid. Read some of those together.

c) Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. Any of them, as long as they have the ORIGINAL artwork. If your kid can look at the artwork without running screaming, you're off to a good start.

Best children's book EVER.

2) Watch some scary movies together. It can be hard to find horror movies that are ok for kids but if they can't handle even a moderately extreme scary movie, DONT TAKE THEM TO A HAUNTED HOUSE. Haunted houses typically have a good amount of gore; so if your value system doesn't want them seeing gore / disturbing material (people sliced up, bodies hanging, bodies burning on spits, torture scenes), stay out of haunted houses. I actually would like to write up a list of scary movies that are appropriate for kids, more or less, and rank them. For the sake of this post though I'll just throw out a few suggestions.

MILD: Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus, Mr. Boogedy

MEDIUM: The Hole (Joe Dante). Ghostbusters. Gremlins (warning: talks about how Santa doesn't exist! I just tell my kids 'that's made up for the movie'. Because we separate fantasy from reality but goddamnit we believe in SANTA CLAUS.)

WILD: Poltergeist. The Frighteners. Insidious.

If your kids can make it through that whole list, they might be ready. (Haven't seen some of the films? Check out the Parental Advisory section for each film on IMDB or go to Common Sense Media. Both are excellent resources for determining if a film fits your family's value system.)

3) How well do your kids handle people's yard haunts ON Halloween? Will they walk through a scary yard where people might pop out at them, or do they make you go get the candy? If they won't set foot on the crazy neighbor's lawn, or they wet their pants when the dude down the street in the hockey mask comes after them, they're probably not ready. If they will stride up, play along, giggle right after they scream, take their candy, and skip away, you're probably good to go.

My costume for our yard haunt last year.

There's no exact way to tell FOR SURE if your kid can handle a haunted house this season, but if you follow this advice and your kid passes the litmus tests, I think you can safely give it a go and probably guarantee a good time.

One final piece of advice: if you are anywhere NEAR Mount Carroll, IL - we are three hours away and we still make this trip whenever we can - and I recommend that you do this OUTSIDE the Halloween season because they are open year-round and you will get a much better tour: TAKE THEM TO RAVENS GRIN INN. It's a haunted house that isn't at all a traditional haunted house: it's weird and wonderful, the owners are amazing people, they will tailor the tour to your kids' fear level, and it's my second favorite place on earth. 

Both my kids (even the scaredy-cat) have been there multiple times (my daughter was 3 the first time we visited) and they love it. You couldn't possibly find a better way to introduce your kids to the fun of being scared than you could here. 

The 3-year-old ringing the front doorbell... because none of the adults would.

(Here's a link to an old review I wrote of them the first time I ever went, if you want some spoilers!)

Best of luck, happy haunting, and have fun!

Trying To Stay The Course

It's been six months and I've made progress but at the same time feel like we haven't moved at all. The honest truth of the matter is that I am a heavy dreamer and over the years have moved without a lot of purpose or direction, just following whatever dream pulled me the strongest. I've ended up with some big messes to clean up as a result. The two biggest messes that really affect us starting a business are finances and home organization.

Finances are still rough. We are still planning to move to North Carolina next summer so most 'starting a business' plans are on hold until then (I do have some things I can work on in the meantime, and I have plans to do them after I finish tackling the next hurdle). We've taken Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University course (wonderful material) and have improved the way we handle our finances as a family over the past year, but there's a lot more work we need to do. I'd love to start all my businesses debt-free and continue running them debt-free. I think that's a worthwhile and important goal, but it also means it'll take longer to get to the OPENING THE BUSINESS point. The focus for 2013 is to really cut back on spending, save enough for the move and for six months' worth of living expenses (my husband will be trying to find a job in North Carolina before the summer but if he doesn't, we will most likely be moving anyway), and to be debt free by the end of the year. There's a lot of dollar signs involved in those goals, so they're pretty lofty, but that's the aim.

Home organization. I'm probably a hoarder. I call myself a recovering hoarder, at any rate. Are you always a hoarder, or are you no longer a hoarder once you've moved out of the hoarding mentality? I believe I have moved out of it over the past few years. I don't NEED things anymore. I don't have a burning desire to acquire STUFF. I rarely shop. I have gotten rid of hundreds (literally) of boxes of items from our home. It's still like having ten pounds of sugar in a five pound bag though. I'm not quite done with my first decluttering pass-through (which has only taken me, oh, YEARS to do, and that's no exaggeration) but I'm close. I can see the end, I know what's going to be left and what's going to go, and I mostly know where I want everything to live.

Over the past month I've been critically reevaluating my home and what will be left in it. It's a small home but it's still packed to the gills. There are a lot of things I'd like to keep. Things I just plain LOVE (books being the big one there; it breaks my heart to imagine getting rid of any more books than I already have, and yet I STILL have too many). Things I want to keep for the Not House. Crafting supplies, of which I have WAY too many - yet they are important for my business endeavors. General house detritus. Some days I'm ready to sell it all and start with a clean slate. Some days I'm on Pinterest, pinning beautiful homes and thinking I should just become a minimalist already. There's a balance I need to strike, and I'm not quite there yet. Do I box up all my collections, my Not House items, until I have the business? Do I box up all but my favorite books until I have the space? Or would it be better to let these things go, and acquire them again when my dreams are realized? (The books, by the by, can also go in the Not House.)

There's also the question of moving. How much of this stuff do I REALLY want to move with us in six or seven months?

Those questions are largely rhetorical, as what is right for YOU isn't necessarily what is right for me. They are just the things that go 'round my mind when I'm cleaning the same things over and over and feeling it wear on me. I'm slowly figuring it out. It's getting there.

This affects the business at this time largely because I don't have much space. I don't have much crafting space (I do have a crafting desk and some space to work, but it's small), I certainly don't have a lot of STORAGE space, and as far as crafting the miniature displays I mentioned in my last post six months ago? I REALLY don't have the space for those yet. It's frustrating, because it's something I really want to tackle, but I have to accept my current limitations and change course again.

Right now I'm planning, once I get just a tad more organized, on starting with a subset of the Not House that I will call Fudge & Oddities. My vision for the store itself is a fudgery (and popcorn, and possibly retro candy) with eclectic crafts / home decor for sale. I need to find a rental commercial kitchen up here before I can launch the food part of it (I already located one in North Carolina), but the Oddities part I can start pretty much right away. I can start it before I move because I can go to vendor fairs with my wares... and I can continue to sell that way when we move to North Carolina, and until we have the money for a storefront. At which point I will have to make a decision: buy land for the Not House and start there, OR open a store in town and then move later to the Not House land, wherever it may be. That's a ways down the road though. I'm still not sure where this whole thing will end up. I'm just going to start with making some wares and selling at fairs (and on etsy), and we will see where we go. I certainly never imagined two years ago that I'd be moving to North Carolina, so who knows where we'll be two years from now?? It's good to have a vision but it pays to be flexible because life throws lots of curves.

In the meantime the hardest thing for me to do is to pull myself out of dreams and stick to the path. There's plenty of room for productive dreaming ON the path, but I often get distracted by dreams not on this exact path. For instance, there's a piece of commercial real estate for sale in the town we currently live in that I keep dreaming about. I could start Fudge & Oddities AND a holiday store in one location, AND live above it! But it's in my home town, which we plan on leaving in six months, AND we are not financially ready to buy a building at this time. This isn't the first piece of real estate that has caught me like this, and it certainly won't be the last, but man they really tug at my heart when they catch me. I could do so much with it! It's hard to be a dreamer sometimes, it really is. I still mourn that bar in Mount Carroll. (It was so very lovely.) I still desperately want to start Spirits Haunted Pub (there's a restaurant for sale 15 minutes from me that would be a great location for it, and I dream about that frequently as well).

If I won the lottery these are the things I'd be launching right away, along with a few other key businesses. I would happily work these businesses until the day I die. I certainly wouldn't be trudging along, spending years of my life digging myself out from the pile of STUFF in which I live. I'd hire a few professional organizers to help me sort it all out, I'd hire a cleaning person to help me keep my house clean (I LOATHE cleaning, I really do), I'd figure out exactly where my ideal Not House location is, I'd buy some land, and I'd start launching my businesses.


Since I don't have millions of dollars at my disposal though, I can't even hire ONE professional organizer. I have to keep doing it myself, step by step (with my limited home-organization skill set, at that!). It's slow, sometimes excrutiatingly slow. Sometimes it's hard to see the progress and I have to slow down and remind myself of all the work I've done. Sometimes I dream about where I want to be and I want to fast forward SO DESPERATELY... except I don't really want to fast-forward my life. I just want the drudgery to be done.
It's important to lay a good foundation though, or the whole thing will crumble; I know this. I think we are working hard to do it the right way. I'm proud of us for taking the time to do it RIGHT.

But if any eccentric billionaires happen across this blog and want to donate some money to the cause, I certainly wouldn't turn you down! I ain't gettin' any younger... and I have enough dreams to occupy me for several lifetimes.

The State Of Our Abnormal Nation

It's been a while. Spookytown remains a dream. One I'd like to see become a reality. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as if it's going to happen with Spirits Haunted Bar... at least, not at the location in Mount Carroll that we had our eyes on. In the end, it just didn't make financial sense.

What we have from the whole experience is a decent business plan and... experience. Which we will use to continue working on the dream.

Financially in general, things are rough for us. That's no surprise I'm sure; they are rough for a whole lot of people these days. We have lots of work to do before we can launch a new business. We will keep working on that behind the scenes.

We are also talking about moving to North Carolina in a year. It may turn out that Spookytown will end up being in the mountains somewhere. We'll just have to see as things come together.

In the meantime, I'm going to start working on one of the other pieces of Spookytown... the Not House. For those outside of my inner circle (those poor souls have been hearing me come up with wild and crazy 'Not House' ideas for years now!), there is a future post coming explaining this new project. For now, suffice to say that it's something for which I've been gathering ideas for ages but have never really worked on. It occurred to me recently that a) I'm not getting any younger and b) a lot of these ideas are things I can start working on even if I don't have a display space for them at the time. Many of the ideas for the Not House involve displaying different collections, for instance; no point waiting until I have the whole business mapped out and space purchased before I START collecting, right?

Project one: miniatures! Specifically, my miniature Tales From The Crypt mansion. More on that later as well.

Crazy dreams mean lots of crazy twists on the way, right? Looking forward to seeing where this one takes us.

Goings-On

our crazy crew at Lincoln Park Zoo

It has been a little while since my last post so here's an update.

Last week was a mostly "off" week for us; we had family staying with us as part of their vacation, which meant we were on a kind of stay-cation. Cleaning before they arrived, and then socializing and having fun while they were here. Not much got done on the bar-work front. We were going to try to take a trip out to Mount Carroll so the family could check out the bar AND see Raven's Grin, but with so much other driving, it just didn't happen.

We continue to plug along on the business plan. I am thinking that I will probably share rough draft sections here as we get them hammered out, looking for feedback and questions and the like. I have several sections pretty well fleshed out already so those blog posts will probably start coming in the near future. I look forward to everyone's feedback.

Our biggest news: we created and launched a website to raise funds for the bar! We're calling it The $250,000 Project. We had been talking about using an indie crowdfunding website like Kickstarter, but upon further consideration we decided to make our own site and try to raise all the money ourselves. With Kickstarter or the like, we'd probably ask for donations of around $10,000 and then use that to beg for further money (from banks, investors, friends, relatives, etc). With those sites, if we didn't reach our arbitrary goal by our arbitrary deadline, we wouldn't get ANY money. If we DID reach our goal and get the money, we'd still have to beg for more money. Rather than keep asking and asking and asking, we figured we'd just let the world know what we need and keep working until we get it.

We're trying to raise $250,000 (hence the clever name), and we're willing to do it in pretty much any legal way possible. Donations, merchandise sales, eBay sales, micro loans, advertising, and more. Aside from completing the business plan, raising funds is our second most important step, so we're working on those two things simultaneously.
It would be really helpful if all of you did the following:
1) Check out The $250,000 Project website. See if there's any way you can help. Let us know if you have any feedback on the site itself.
2) 'Like' The $250,000 Project on Facebook. Daily updates and eBay listings will be posted there.
3) Spread the word about us to your family and friends in any way possible! This is probably the most helpful thing anyone can do for us. The more people that know about us and lend a hand, the quicker we will achieve our dream.

The biggest problem I have with the site right now? I have paypal donation buttons on there that just won't work. I am by no means a code monkey (I used iWeb to make the site, it's very WYSIWYG and that's about the only way I could pull off something like that), so I have asked my very good friend Kate to take a look and see if she can help me fix whatever mess I made there. Hopefully we'll have this resolved soon. And if you have any web building needs, check out her site! MissHTML. She's awesome.

I've started listing some of our things on eBay. I'm working hard on decluttering the house, getting rid of the extraneous items we have lying around (and we have a LOT). I doubt we have 250,000 saleable items in the house, but hey, if we DO and each one sells for $1, we'll make our goal through eBay alone. Any little bit we get this way will help. I'll be maintaining lists of everything we have for sale here as more gets posted, but if you're interested in seeing what we've got for now, here's a listing of our eBay sales.

Moving forward, I am going to try to post every day about what I've worked on as it relates to the bar. The background work can be very slow and tedious and I don't always have much to say here about it... sometimes not acknowledging what I HAVE done feels like we aren't really moving forward at all when in fact, we are. It just all takes time. (For instance, the business plan is taking hours to hammer out... building the website for The $250,000 Project has taken quite a few hours as well!)

I think that's it for our current updates. Let me know if you have any questions or advice. Thanks everyone!

Being Pulled In Different Directions

It seems that one of the biggest challenges in our adult lives is often the need to manage multiple tasks, often at the same time. You hear a lot about work-life balance, achieving a good one, following dreams, nurturing family, relationships, and friendships, and so on. It can be difficult to find solid footing in the sea of to-do lists we find ourselves surrounded with.

Things are no different over here. I often feel like we're not making a lot of progress on the bar because there's so much to do. Even though I put some work into it every day, sometimes hours of work (depending on my current family and life commitments), it still feels like we're going nowhere.

Logically, I know we are. I've got a really good rough-draft business plan... but it's VERY rough. More like a skeleton with a little bit of meat. Still lots of questions to be answered on there.

We have quite a few boxes packed for moving, and quite a few things put aside to sell.

I have some (hopefully strong) ideas for fundraising, and almost have the main platform we are going to try to use for it ready to launch.

I've been working on spreading the news about our business venture throughout the horror community as well as to all our family, friends, and acquaintances. Since our budget is so limited, a lot of our publicity at first will come through word of mouth... and we need all the help we can get there.

I've been doing all that stuff as well as taking care of my house, my family, our finances, our pets, our general life crap, our activities, our friendships, our grocery shopping, and anything else life feels fit to throw our way.

It's a lot of work. It's not easy work, but it's not hard work either. It just... is. Most of it I actually enjoy, which is funny to me. Granted, I'm not getting paid for any of the work yet, but I'm working on all of these things in the hope that we will have our own money-making business in the near future, so I consider it my job. I've never really had a JOB that I enjoyed before. I like the feeling.

Mostly, I get frustrated because parts of the process take so long. I'm impatient by nature and I want everything to just HAPPEN. Life doesn't work that way. And there is definitely value in the process. Working on the business plan, for instance, has really been helping us solidify our ideas and paint a solid picture of what we want and what will WORK. Packing things up now and sorting out things we don't need will both help us raise money AND make the actual moving process much easier. There is value in taking the time to do things right.

At the same time, the frustrated Veruca inside me is stamping her foot and screaming "But I want to be at the bar NOOOWWWWW!".

So many tasks to complete. They really are coming along, even if it doesn't always LOOK like it from the outside.

We will likely be back in Mount Carroll in two weeks. Who knows what will come of that visit, eh? We have some ideas and some hopes... but we'll see.

Looking At Properties, Part Seven

There's a lot of taxidermy in the bar. A LOT.

OK, I know I've dragged this out forever. Forgive me! This is the last "looking at properties" post (unless we find some reason to look at anything else in the future, that is). As a bonus: this is the one we love! You finally get to see it!

Have I talked about how this all came about? Probably, but here's a recap: we were visiting Raven's Grin Inn, one of our favorite places in the world, for our friend Sarah's birthday in February. Since there were quite a few of us going, we met at the bar next door before heading in. During this getting together, we learned that the bar was for sale. "WE SHOULD BUY IT AND START A SPOOKY BAR/RESTAURANT NEXT DOOR TO RAVEN'S GRIN!" ... and the rest is history.

So after we looked at the six properties with Amy from Isenhart Realty, we parted ways and went back to Charlie's (AKA the bar we love). Verdict? We still love it. Last time we didn't get a chance to look upstairs and we were worried it would be uninhabitable. This visit we got to see the upstairs and were pleasantly surprised to find that it is totally workable.

The bar is for sale by owner and they have NO idea what the size of it is. We're guesstimating it at 12,000 square feet. It's got a huge drive-in basement (there's a garage door at the back), unfinished, lots of storage space. (I didn't take any pictures of the basement.)

Side of the building / fire escape from upstairs. You can see a bit of Raven's Grin in the background.

Side of the building, looking towards the main street.

back of the building. The garage opens into the basement; there is a tiny wrought iron 'porch' off the restaurant. The two boarded-up windows are off the upstairs junk room.

The main floor, the bar / restaurant area, is divided into two sections by a large pocket door. The 'bar' side is by far the largest, but the 'restaurant' side isn't too small either.

Looking into the bar side from the front door, towards the left.

Looking into the bar side from the front door, towards the right.

A few booths at the front of the bar side. It's hard to tell in this lighting, but there are three giant bison heads hanging over the booths. As well as some antlers and a few dead squirrels. One of which is just a HEAD. No I'm not kidding.

The lights in the back are on the old, original bar... the newer, sit-at bar is in front. It curves down quite far.

Tin ceiling. LOVE IT.

This is the restaurant side. The kitchen is back to the left. The door I am pointing at goes into the smaller 'junk' room.

Large walk-in beer / wine cooler on the restaurant side. This opens to the bar on the right.

Looking into the bar from the restaurant side.

Looking into the bar from the restaurant side.

Then there's a small room at the back, currently filled with junk, that we could do a variety of things with.

Room of junk!

Plus, of course, the kitchen, which is of decent size as well.

fryers!

griddle!

pizza oven!

their current menu

The upstairs is equally huge. It already contains a fairly good-sized one bedroom apartment. (We would probably turn that into a two-bedroom apartment and rent it out.)

Kitchen in the apartment.

Bedroom in the apartment.

Living space in the apartment.

Bathroom in the apartment. Red carpet! Oy!

The rest of the upstairs consists of two rooms - one is a large, open space that they occasionally use for banquets / weddings. 

The other is a smaller room that they have NEVER used; it's another junk room. It's had some water damage (they recently replaced the roof) and would need to be gutted.

PILES of junk.

water damage.

They don't even really know what's in that back door.

We would probably combine these two spaces into one large three-bedroom apartment and use that as our living space.

It's just perfect in a lot of ways. It needs some sprucing up, sure, and of course we have lots of ideas for putting our own spooky touches on it, but overall we love it. The old worn wooden floors, the huge bar, the gorgeous old bar behind the 'newer' bar, the amount of space, the location (right next to Raven's Grin and still on the main downtown Mount Carroll street), it's all great.

The owner is asking $200,000 for it. She's pretty willing to include most of the stuff inside, it seems, minus some memorabilia they would like to keep, of course. The price is still a little high for the area but she seems willing to negotiate too.

So. This is it. We are trying to get the business plan finished and also get out there with an inspector / structural engineer to make sure everything is up to code. Then we are going to talk to her about making an offer and see where we can go from there. Our first step is to see if she would be willing to do some sort of owner financing deal with us (she owns it outright). If she won't, things are going to get a lot more complicated for us... we don't have much capital at all, and their business numbers have been pretty abysmal for the last few years (for a number of reasons, we believe; we're looking at it as a brand new business since we will run it totally differently). We are really concerned about our ability to get any kind of traditional loan.

We won't give up on our dream though!

First things first though. Business plan and inspection. We'll go from there.

Looking At Properties, Part Three

front facade / upstairs windows

The third property we saw was also in downtown Mount Carroll. Location wise it was also in a good spot; it was half a block down from the bank building we'd seen previously (and about half a block up from the bar that started this whole crazy dream of ours). It is listed at $75,000 and says it has 2093 square feet.

"Prime storefront location in the heart of downtown historic Mt. Carroll. Beautiful 1850 building with large display windows and excellent street visibility. Exterior wood trim was painted in 2005. Maple wood floor; barn board covered side walls for display area. New rubber roof 2002, new flashing 2007. New furnace in 2005. C/A in 2000. Small kitchen with refrigerator, sink, stove, and counter top. Appliances not warranted by seller."

view down the street. The bar we love is across the street.

This building previously housed a small cafe / espresso shop, fairly recently. It had apartment space upstairs but the realtor had no idea when those had last been used. (Not very recently, would be my guess!)











The downstairs area was very cute - in decent shape, with nice floors and a cute semi-exposed brick wall; the back area was a little out of shape though and there was no real kitchen. There also wasn't much room for a decent kitchen. Additionally, this was one of the smallest spaces we saw (if not THE smallest), and we just want something bigger. It would be hard to get the bar AND restaurant in this space.

nice floors

love the exposed brick

not very big inside though :(

the kitchen area is TINY

the back room could use some work

The apartments upstairs? Well... they were pretty much gutted and ready to be redone, I'll give them that much. I have no idea how long they've been in disrepair, and we'd probably just turn that whole thing into our living space and not have a rental unit if we took this building (again, due to size). Since that isn't really what we'd like to do, this building is pretty much off our list.

heading upstairs

hmm. nice walls.

preeeettttty.

uhm.

well at least it's KINDA gutted...

oh dear, PLEASE don't fall through the floor...

talk about a project...

where would we live while the work is being done?

this would make a great bedroom, right, Drake? (he says HECK NO MOM)