Lotus in the driveway on Easy Street

   After renting for many years I decided to by my first house in 1979.  I looked at a new town house that was right on the beach just south of Indialantic where I rented.  At $89,000 I decided it was too much and ended up buying a house on the mainland on the west side of Melbourne.  It had a quarter acre lot and was only $35,000.  The sale almost fell through for on the day of closing, the FHA backed loan I had applied for required a water quality test which came back with there being too much salt in the water that came from a well.   After a bit of scrambling I went with a conventional loan and closed a couple of weeks later. 

   I had been in the house only a couple of months when hurricane David came right up the coast of Florida.  I didn’t have any damage to the house but several large Australian pines in the back yard came down.  The biggest problem was I didn’t have electricity for a week.  Water wasn’t a problem for the well for the house had an artesian flow but doing with a refrigerator was a problem.  It was several days before I could even get ice.

    It was an older house that the previous owners had done considerable renovation on, enclosing the carport to make a family room, adding a new double garage on the other side and putting a new front on the house.  Although the family room was nice, the living room ended up not having any windows, so it was really dark.  What was the windows in the living room had a window air conditioning unit in it with the “outside” part of the unit being in the added double garage, like how dumb was that.   It had three bedrooms, the master bedroom with a bath and two small bedrooms, one of which I used for a study.  The laundry room was inconvenient for you had to go out the side door and around the back to enter it. 

  In 1981 Julie and her daughter Anne moved in and Julie and got married that November.  To make room for them I moved all my computer stuff from the bedrooms into the garage and Anne took one room and Julie used the other for a study.  The two-car garage wasn’t finished on the inside so with Julie’s and some friends help we put up the sheetrock.  We also had central air put in, so the window unit with its back end in the garage was removed and I paneled the living room covering up the window into the garage.

    It was nice living on Easy Street, it was on the west edge of Melbourne, so it was sort of country.  A neighbor a couple houses down had horses who Anne took riding lessons from.  It was a short drive to Harris where I worked. I bought a 1968 Lotus Elan which I did a full restoration on in the garage.

    The house was a bit small for the three of us so in 1985 we sold it and moved to a much newer and nicer home on Tallpine Road in Melbourne.  I sold my Lotus Elan to get the cash for the down payment.

Read about me moving to Easy Street