College is a crazy time. Everybody is broke, and broke all the time. Sure, there are a few around that seem to have it made, but that is the exception to the rule.
Most of us had to figure out ways to have fun, and being young we usually managed that.
I was a little bit luckier, or perhaps a little bit more clever than most, and I had no intention of starving. I found a house to rent, it was two stories and close to downtown, on the East side. That meant a short bus ride or bike ride across the bridge to the school.
The house was best described as old, and big. The upstairs was all bedrooms with a common oversize bathroom on the end of a long hallway that ran smack dab down the middle. There were four bedrooms up there, one on the main floor, and a full daylight basement that had a dirt floor when I took over the place.
I asked for and got the right to sublet from the little old lady named Dorothy that owned the house. It helped that she liked me, of course I sweet talked her as much as I dared and that seemed to work.
"Oh, you are such a nice young man!" She said to me with a sweet smile. I held her hand for a shade longer than I really needed to, tipping my head attentively.
OK. A bit much to be flirting mildly with a 60 year old lady but a guy has to do what a guy has to do.
I got the place for $600 a month, a steal at the time. After I mentioned that my family were all contractors and had access to "anything and everything" and how much I "loved" fixing up old houses, I could almost write my own terms.
No point in mentioning that my Dad drove a bus and both of my Uncles were schoolteachers, of course. I didn't get to that, besides Dorothy was enjoying holding my hand too much to notice I was talking pretty fast.
I moved in, the first thing I did was go to a local building supply yard and buy some of those ready poured cement squares. I used a shovel to level the floor carefully in the basement, soaked it with a garden hose and brushed it out with a barn broom. As soon as that was dry I covered it with the blocks. It made a perfect solid floor, I found an end roll of thick leftover carpet at a local company, bought that for $50 and the room looked great. Some cheap two by fours and some inexpensive paneling and I had two more rooms downstairs. I filled the walls with plastic wrapped styrofoam, that made for cheap sound proofing and insulation.
I modified the wash basin and laundry room down there, hooked up a drain line and shower. There was a monstrous heater of a design I had never seen before. The walls of it were filled with sand, about six inches thick, it was wood fired, and controlled by a series of vents all hooked together with a long chain. A round floor vent went straight up to the first floor, it was surrounded by a square steel box.
A simple arrangement, cool air went down the outside, then heated, it rose straight up to the main floor. In the ceiling were floor vents that let heat on upstairs, if it did get a bit too cool up there or warm on the main floor all I had to do was open the upstairs door.
I spent a long time checking that out. Built before the turn of the century, it was so simple and easy it amazed me that anyone would use electricity to push heated air around.
There was a wood stack in a room just alongside the furnace. It was a huge area, and would hold an easy Winter's worth of firewood. I knew I would need to buy firewood but I had done the math, this place would be cheap to run.
I found some cheap track lighting at the surplus store and wired that into each room using the new low draw light bulbs. I got those at the local dollar store on sale, 4 in each pack for a buck, what a deal.
Then I went to work upstairs. Every room up there had plain untouched ship lap on the walls, it was ugly as sin.
I thought about paint, but instead went and got some stain and shined the walls up. When I got done it looked like someone had spent ten's of thousands of dollars on real wood walls.
I borrowed my Dad's angle head grinder and scratched all the paint off the cheap ugly doors, those were all put in much later after the house was built. They were plain flat wooden doors, painted over dozens of times. I stained them all dark. That made a high and low effect, they looked good. Some light yellow paint on the trim, more end rolls of soft carpet and the upstairs was almost ready.
One thing I did notice was every door had glass doorknobs, I spent hours trimming the old layers of paint off each one of them. They also had magnificent heavy bronze hinges, those had to be 75-80 years old, maybe more. I took all of them off and went down to a local machine shop and had them boil them out in their hot tank. Yep, they looked brand new.
The place really did look like I had spent literally thousands on remodeling, and I would have if we were talking about today's dollars using a contractor, but the old place was built in 1886 and I did everything myself.
I showed Dorothy, the little old lady what I had done and she was tickled pink. She even hugged me and gave me a couple of month's rent for free.
That worked out to almost $20 more than I had spent so far. By now I had my arm around her shoulders as we walked around the house.
I held her hand some more as I guided her around showing off my handiwork. By the time she left I had talked her into a 3 year lease with an option to renew.
Dorothy was smiling and actually giggling, she kept reaching up and flipping her hair back from her face, also.
Off to Goodwill, I found some small tables, chairs, and some bed frames. Then I got some phone wire and put in phone jacks in every room. I set that up so that it was local dialing only, I knew all about telephone bills from watching court TV.
Five counter top hot plates and five small refrigerators finished furnishing the rooms. I had to put those on my credit card, I was now getting low on capital.
The last thing I did was install computer access as a stand alone, the DSL gave me a wireless flood so I had internet in every room in the house, even the bathrooms.
The entire job took me just 60 days, I was ready.
I ran some ads on the local free internet board for room mates. I knew I could beat the market by a few dollars and even include utilities and internet, plus garbage.
It didn't take very long. I rented the basement unit to a young man named Gary who was one year ahead of me in class. He was a nerdy type and I figured he would be nice and quiet, plus the basement had outside access. By the end of the first week I had more than two dozen applications.
I spent some of my dwindling supply of cash on background checks. I selected 4 of them, all women. The first one was Sylvia, a heavyset little brunette that was a first year student. The second one was Janet, she was a runner and long and lean. A few days later Carol and Beth joined our household.
The last two tickled me, they both not only easily passed the background checks but they both were hotties.
It wouldn't hurt one bit to have a few decorations around the house.
