No Fences Make Good Neighbors

For several months a young couple has been working on an old house across the street from ours on Mt. Washington. Since I was a boy I have always liked the sound of hammers and saws in the neighborhood. It meant that somebody was building something.

Our two new neighbors worked only on weekends, so the job went slowly. Lately they had put in a picture window, and then a crew of roofers showed up and soon the house had a new roof, complete with tin ventilators.

I realized that the house might be finished before long. We had never met the couple who were doing most of the work. I asked my wife, Denise, to go across the street and see if they would mind being visited. She came back and said they would be happy to meet us.

We met in the upstairs living room. The house has two floors, connected, so far, by an outside stairway. There was no furniture. It was bleak, but it gave promise of a happy home.

The young man’s name is William de Jong. Hers is Michelle Litchfield. “I assume you’re married,” I said, realizing it was none of my business.

“No,” they both said. They had bought the house last February, thinking they would get married and move in when they had finished remodeling it. “Do you have a target date?” I asked. “Yeah,” Michelle said. “Last June. That’s what we thought.”

“So you’ll never get married,” I said, “if the house doesn’t get finished?” They laughed.

They had run into bad structural difficulties. None of the doors had headers. Termites had done their work. The previous owners had apparently kept careless animals.

“The city of L.A. revised its codes after the earthquake, and they expect us to bring this whole house up to code. We just can’t do that unless we tear it all apart,” Will said. “They’re really being hard on us. We’re having to apply for a zoning variance and tear all the plumbing out downstairs. They were nice enough to sign us off for the upstairs so we could move in up here and we can deal with the downstairs later.”

“Who does the plumbing?” I asked. “I do,” Michelle said.

Will said he met Michelle when she was taking a plumbing class at Pasadena City College, where he got his education. “I saw her with a blowtorch in her hand and I fell in love.”

He said she spends evenings going over plumbing manuals and then they go to Home Depot and buy what they need and she does the plumbing. (She also is a graduate of UC Berkeley and has studied architecture.)

Will, by the way, is an electrical contractor, so the wiring is taken care of.

I asked him how they decided on Mt. Washington as a place to make their home.

“We were looking for a bad house in a good neighborhood. We had a very low budget. A friend of mine told us about Mt. Washington and cut out a newspaper article about it, and it told about the dirt roads.”

“Will just loves dirt roads,” Michelle said.

“We’d never heard of it, and we started taking the MG and driving up around here and just fell in love with the place,” Will said, “and we didn’t look anywhere else.”

Michelle took Denise downstairs and showed her the unfinished space. “We’ll have two offices and a large room for my art work,” Michelle said.

“We don’t have the money to totally bring it up to code,” Will said. “It would have been $60,000 extra. We don’t know what we’re going to do. Just move in, deal with it a little at a time.”

At least, I pointed out, they got the roof on before the rainy season. “We have to get the exterior done before the rainy season,” Michelle said.

“We have to tear off all the stucco,” Will said, “nail up plywood and re-stucco it.”

Meanwhile they are living in Will’s grandmother’s house in Pasadena. His grandmother passed away and Will’s mother inherited the house. “My sister and I and Michelle and two others live in it,” Will said.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I’ve lived in my grandmother’s house for eight years, and I only know one neighbor. And here we’ve been working here only on weekends and we know everyone. They come over and say, ‘Hi.’ Everyone is so friendly here. My grandmother’s house is right down from the Rose Bowl and it’s a well-to-do neighborhood, but people are behind big gates and you don’t get to talk to anybody.”

Well, we’ve said, “Hi.” No big gates here. We’re glad to have Will and Michelle as neighbors, and I hope they invite us to their housewarming, whenever it is.