The Hillbilly House

This is the hillbilly house. It is so named because there are a bunch of drunk hilljacks living there. A typical night for them is to have a party, invite all their hilljack friends, sit out by the pool, drink some beer, light some firecrackers, and figure out ways to make everyone else's property value go down.

The below photographs were taken while driving by in the middle of the day. I think they turned out pretty well, considering I was in motion. I would have stopped, but I was afraid they'd come out with a shotgun or something.

You may click on any of the photos below to see the giant-sized picture.

Visible in this picture is their fine above-ground pool, which they put in a few years ago Like the rest of their house, it is now falling apart. Unlike the rest of their house, they will repair this. Otherwise, they would have nowhere to hang out and drink beer on a hot day. Sure, they could take some of the boards off their windows and let the cool breeze blow through, but then they'd have to put the boards back on the windows once it got cooler, and that's entirely too much work.

Making their first appearances in this photograph are two of the vehicles that are permanent fixtures on the lawn. There is the obvious pickup-truck in the foreground, and the trained eye can discern a barely visible 1970's gas guzzler in the back, next to the pool. Depending on the brightness of your monitor, you may also be able to see a boat on the far left, next to the car. This boat has never moved, from what I have seen. You also get a better shot of the boarded up windows and door in this picture.

In this photograph, you can see the large paved driveway they added a few years ago. While you might think that this is perfect for parking their shitty cars on, you would be wrong. As you can see in this picture, there is only one car parked on the driveway. The other cars are either parked on the lawn, or on the street, in front of other people's houses. It is obvious that the only reason that they paved the driveway was so there would be less grass, on the off-chance that they actually decided to mow it.

The first of a series of photographs I took while I was in town for the holidays. There isn't much that this picture will show you that previous ones haven't, other than that it's the first one to document how little has been done to attempt to fix up the house in the past year and a half. I heard that the city made them put in some new windows. They should have made them put in some new owners. Maybe the fire department could use it as a practice house. Wherever you see bright white frames, these are new windows.

This picture was partially obscured by my car (I was driving down the street.) We can see here that they placed a newspaper American flag in their window - most likely shortly after the tragedies of September 11, 2001. This picture was taken in December of 2002. The flag was most likely put up to prevent people from thinking that they were terrorists, as their house bears a strong resemblance to the typical "unabomber shack in the deep woods" that most people think of when they think of home-grown madmen.

This photograph shows the first time I noticed that the window on their screen door was boarded up. Keep in mind, a screen door is typically used in conjunction with a *regular* door. If a screen door is missing the window (or screen), it's not normally a big problem, as there is typically another door to block the wind. One can speculate from the plywood-covered screen door that this is in fact their primary door.

A beautiful front-side shot of the house. You can see that several inches of snow had fallen but that nobody had bothered to shovel their sidewalk or driveway. This was photographed 3 days after it had snowed, on December 27, 2002.
(it had snowed about 7 inches between the time people had gone to bed on Christmas Eve and when they woke up on Christmas morning. It could have come straight out of an old crappy Christmas movie about how if you believe hard enough, it will snow. But I'm getting off-topic here...)
They were probably too busy shoveling the snow out of where it had blown through busted out windows and into their bedrooms and kitchen to bother with the snow *outside* their house.

There's nothing special about this picture, and it's kind of out of focus. You can see some nice paint neglect in this picture, in stark contrast with the shiny new windows that look incredibly out of place. I'm not sure if having *some* new windows in a ratty old house makes it nicer or trashier. I think the old expression "pig in a prom dress" might apply here. Unfortunately, a quick search on google shows that that phrase has been seen on the Internet a total of 3 other times. So I guess it's not really an old expression. By comparison, "Cuff 'em and stuff 'em", the great line from the Dukes of Hazzard, has 150 hits at the time of this writing.

Here's a picture my sister stumbled across while she was looking through an old photo album. The actual photo was of some factory that was on fire, and you can see the smoke billowing up in the sky. However, in this picture you can also see the Hillbilly House in its pre-redneck form. It's tastefully painted a light green (this was the 70s or early 80s, mind you) with nice white trim around the windows, and there weren't any boarded up doors. The lawn appears to be well-kept, and there aren't any piles of trash or anything visible.