As most of my friends and family know, I live in a perpetrated haunted house. When we first moved here, it made me somewhat frightened whenever I heard a strange noise. You get used to them, however, and you go about your daily business. After all, when one moves into a scary house, strange things happen. It's funny how I roll with the punches. One time, I mentioned in a previous blog post, the loud noise in the upstairs while I was in the kitchen. We have no explanation for it. Maylyn's friends tell us of a child being hit by a car in front of this house and, if that is so, I know he is safe in heaven and not stuck here haunting this place. Another young child died of measles here and once again can only surmise he is safe with his family enjoying the afterlife. 
This house was built around 1848 and a lot of living went on here way before we took over as owners. I'll try to keep up with the changes this old lady has gone through and hopefully scare some of you to pieces as I write ghost stories in my little piece of heaven.
Love, Lynn

Now it was time to paint, but I think I mentioned that down below, so...onto stripping the floors of linoleum. Boy it must have been very popular around the 1920​ -1930. It's nice to see all the different patterns but they were all cracked and ruined. I would have loved to keep them, but it was not to be. We still have an intact piece up in the attic but couldn't get it down. They used a type of black tar as a glue or something to keep the linoleum down but as you can imagine the hell of getting it off was horrendous. I seriously had overalls that could stand up in the corner. It was a mess and the hardest thing so far. The wood underneath we knew as original by the large wood floor planks. I was relieved and happy. It made me go back in time and look at the wood closely. There was burn marks where I figured a lamp took a tumble or something close to it. If and when we sand them down they'll be beautiful.

The kitchen was the first room I really went to town on. It had ancient circa 1970 cupboards that were dirty, grimy... I took the cabinet fronts off up top and left the bottoms on. I scrubbed everything down and painted the cupboards a light sea foam green. Once that was done, I decided to rip off all the wallpaper. I was looking at ten foot ceilings, so I had to teeter on a ladder most of the time. What a mess. OMG. I could't believe the amount of sanitis they used and I had to get it all off. It took several days (long days) to strip it all down. Layer after layer. It was interesting to see the designs from different decades as I made my way to the bare wall. When i was done with that, I painted the kitchen in a cream color and we put our vintage items out. Oh, I should mention that we had running water at this point. (No more water bottles) and we also had electricity. How our ancestors survived without electricity, water, or technology is beyond me. 

The first day in the light of the sun, we looked around a bit more. How fun it was to figure out what we  were going to with all the rooms, after painting them of course. I tried to keep to beach colors. We turned one of the bedrooms into our bathroom with a claw foot tub of course.That was painted in a very light blue. The other bedroom was turned into my craft room which I painted white. We left two of the bedrooms to actually be bedrooms and one was painted a very dull yellow and our bedroom is painted creme color.  We let the girls have a choice of bedrooms. One chose the one next to us and the other daughter chose the other bedroom one step  down from us. So fun. Even if we are scared out of our wits at night, it was starting to feel a bit more like home...to me anyway.

The first night in the house was daddy's idea of a fun "outing." The girls and, I um,,,not so much. We were cuddling all night long. When daybreak finally greeted the changing of the guards. Night no longer had it's grip on us and with the light of sun shining through the windows we could fee a bit braver. Daddy got us all a breakfast from McDonalds and me a very large cup of iced coffee. Now here's where it goes from there. 
How to survive in large house built around 1848 or so with no running water. Well, we bought the gallon sized waters, shampoo, and took showers in the tub. After that we did some more investigating. May May has pics I'm pretty sure of the house before we started working on it. For God's sake the living room was painted a bright neon green. I'm like "say what!" Every room was painted a different color. Bright neon colors. I don't know who did this paint job. But bless their hearts, it was obviously very discontinued paint. 
More installments tomorrow. 

This is day four of my virtual tour for my book Buried Dolls. I haven't had it reviewed yet so I'm not sure if  it's as good as I feel. lol YIKES! I'll be awarding a $15 Amazon/BN GC via rafflecopter during the tour of my book Buried Dolls. Long and Short YA will be hosting  today. Please stop by and comment for your chance to win the gift card. I'd love to hear if your creeped out by scary dolls and if you have a scary story about a doll that made your skin crawl. This can include clowns, too.

My eleventh book, Buried Dolls, is out and to celebrate I'm giving away a $15 gift card to Amazon. Simply go to Rogue's Angel and leave a comment. It's fun if you mention how you feel about dolls, particularly scary looking ones. Also it would be great if you went to my facebook page lynn hones books and like.
​Thank you.

The girls hated the house at first. I told them to think of it as an adventure. Lia was concerned about school. She wanted to continue at the School of the Arts in downtown Cleveland (almost.) Maylyn also wanted to graduate from The School of the Arts she had been attending. We explained that Daddy would drive them back and forth to Cleveland so they could go to their schools and daddy could work. 
The girls then went into the house to look around. Nope. Hated it. Wanted to go home. They were used to the city and not some stupid house in the country. (It's not the country.) We spent the first night in beds Daddy put up in the living room. We were armed with flashlights because there was no electricity, no water, no gas, no cable--nothing. We were so scared that first night. The girls and I cuddled in one of the beds in case we heard a ghost, or something scratching in the walls. We had to find the upstairs bathroom, where we put a port-potty, carrying a candle and a flashlight. It occurred to me that we were living just like the family who built this house around 1850 did. I lit candles so the room wasn't put into total darkness. Every little noise frightened us.   To be continued...

I guess there were other people looking at it the day before, but had not done anything about it. We were scared and wanted to get to the house pronto. It takes about one hour to get to Ashtabula from Cleveland or eight hours if Marty's driving. We met the real estate lady at the house and when she opened the door I was in love. It was so fun to run around the old place. It even had a back staircase. It had six bedrooms and more rooms downstairs in the other side of the house. We flew around the house for awhile and decided to buy it. We drove quickly to the real estate office and bought the thing. On the way, home we questioned each other on what we had just done. Where were the parents in this equation? Where were the adults? The people to say, "No, don't do it" or "Have it appraised first?" Nope, none of that. We simply bought it. On the way home, we kept saying "Did we just buy a house? Like, why did we just buy a house?"...next installment tomorrow.

 If you'll excuse me, I have a case of the blues. I think it's the gloom outside. Rainy, windy, and foggy. What did we expect moving to a harbor town.
I wanted to continue where we left off. Marty took the phone number of the house off the sign and stuck it in his pocket. We did our thing at the festival, not really thinking about the house any further. Having finished selling my jewelry, we packed up and went home. A couple of days later, I asked Marty if he still had the phone number for this house. I simply wanted to know how much they would ask for a house in the harbor area. I made the call and talked to a nice woman who told me the house was owned by the bank and they simply wanted to sell it. When she told me the price was $29,000, I thought she was kidding. I thought, what the heck and offered $25,000. She got on the phone with the bank and they said, they would accept that offer but it wouldn't last long. Next installment tomorrow.