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We were trapped in a basement apartment with almost no ventilation.
You reminded me of Jeff Foxworthy and his "you might be a redneck if" jokes.?ÿ One of those involves having your appliances on the front porch.
That's funny. It was really the back porch...but the old rent house I was in back then had a 'front' door that faced the rear of the property. The screened-in back porch where the washer (no dryer, I had a clothes line outdoors) faced the road and the gravel driveway and was the main ingress-egress portal for the house. When you walked in you were in the kitchen, which was fine with me. BTW the dogs stayed on that porch and kept solicitors to a minimum.
The 'front' door that entered the living room was used so little I wound up putting a table up against it.
Sounds typical of many farm homes from my youth. Everyone used the back or side door. If someone knocked at the front door, you knew it was a stranger or salesman.
Our front door faced the road, but the side door faced the driveway. The back door was our primary ingress/egress point as it was on the way to the outhouse, the wood pile, the two garages, the two chicken houses and the barn. Various vehicles and tractors were in that direction as well.
The house I spoke of was about 900 sq. ft. and probably built about 1900 or so with a single car detached garage. It sat on 1 1/4 acre with section line frontage. Although it was in a small municipality's city limits it was at least a 1/2 mile from anything that lit up at night. The owner kept two horses on the place. I paid $75 a month rent if I fed and watered the horses for him (he bought the feed and hay).
The owner wanted to sell the place rather than put on a new roof. He offered it to me for $18,000. I decided not to take him up on the offer and spent my nest-egg on a brand-spankin' new trailer house for my young family.
I always wished I had bought that place. About five years later I surveyed a small apartment complex they built on the site. I looked it up and the developer had paid almost $50,000 for the house and lot.
That story pretty much sums up the luck I've had with real estate my whole life...
