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Neighborhood NewsNovember 06, 2006 The flying house has finally settled down. Since late spring the flying house has been a source of considerable fascination and speculation in my neighborhood. It went up on stilts -- four or five of them (already I've forgotten), each a square pillar built of railroad-tie-size horizontals -- and in fits and starts, punctuated by long pauses, a foundation has been laid underneath it. Now the wood pillars are gone and the house rests on concrete, a story higher than it used to be. Rhodry and I checked it out yesterday morning. Wires hang down through the ceiling. Work lights have been installed for whatever comes next. This is what we wonder about. It seems a huge fuss to produce "just a basement," but we're pretty sure he doesn't have a permit to stick an apartment down there, or even an additional bedroom. Nobody in the neighborhood likes this guy. I started not liking him not long after I moved to Dunham Ave., mainly because the light on his carport (which now lies in sections among the falling leaves) was several orders of magnitude brighter than anything else in the area. Fortunately it was only on when someone was in residence, and that wasn't very often. What I've really got against him is that he's trying to sell a possibly unbuildable adjacent lot for $349,000. The lot is shaped like a lasagna noodle, with a few feet of frontage on Davis Street. Until this weekend it was a tangle of underbrush with plastic bags, coffee cups, and beer cans caught here and there. Even on Martha's Vineyard you can do better than that for $349,000. Story has it that the house's time aloft was much prolonged by owner's lack of money; if completion was contingent on the sale of this lot, prospects didn't look good. Now the house is grounded though the lot isn't sold. He must have come up with the money some other how. There've been quite a few changes in the neighborhood since I moved in four years and four months ago. Further up Davis there was an almost equally laughable lot for sale. Now there's a two-story prefab house on it. I don't know the people, but they're friendly, they have young kids, and they're here year-round, so I'm inclined to like them. On the big corner lot next door an auxiliary gambrel-roofed building has been renovated from a garage with second-floor apartment to a full-blown two-story house. On the prefab's other side, a small ranch-type house is in the process of acquiring a higher roof with two dormers. When I moved to Dunham Ave., the formerly flying house was barely visible from Davis: view was blocked by a heavily wooded hill. It was one of Rhodry's favorite scavenge-and-poop places. Two or three years ago not only was the hill cleared, it was removed. A prefab was built there too, but we don't like those people. We don't even know who they are, but this past summer they rented to summer workers and the place was a noise hazard most weekend nights. During the week there were as many as six cars parked out front. Word around the neighborhood is that the owners want to sell, but as yet no broker's sign has appeared out front. The scavenge-and-poop places are getting fewer and smaller. There is a For Sale sign outside the boxy burnt-orange house where tiny Rice Street flows into Hinkley Circle. They're summer people; they live in Florida the rest of the time. The family at the Skiff end of Dunham wants to sell too, even though their grandmother next door helps look after the kids and the dog, a big black Lab named Rosie. Too hard to make ends meet, they say. Got that right.
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