Sixty Years of Grease!

Have you ever wondered what sixty years of grease looks like (and I'm NOT talking about a reunion of the cheezy musical, either). Well, we uncovered this disturbing sight when we moved out an old range from a house we bought for my daughter.

Wait. Let me back up.

Maybe you remember my kvetching about when my daughter and her two dogs moved into our house not so long ago: Hell-Spawn Hound Dogs. It soon became apparent the only way to get these needy dogs of destruction out of our house was to move them into their own house. Besides, my daughter couldn't keep commuting two hours a day to work.

So. We went house shopping in the small Kansas town where she works at a bank.

Gross.

One realtor proclaimed his advertised house as "Ready to move into!" (Maybe if you're a rat.) The carpet was alternately black and green with hair and urine stains (I hope those were pet urine stains). One house visibly sloped to the side. We'll just call another house, "The International House of Mold" and leave it at that. I didn't think we'd make it out of that house of horrors alive. Things got worse from there.

My realtor buddy turned to my daughter, said, "Sarah, your town sucks."

Finally, we went back to the first house we looked at. In comparison, it seemed a hella lot better. Hey, at least it had a basement (cracked though it was), instead of all of those scary crawlspaces where, undoubtedly, bodies were buried.

So we bought the house. And have been working on it non-stop since, trying to make it habitable. Gotta get those dogs outta our house.

The problem is, the previous tenants (who'd been in the home for sixty years) had forgotten how to clean.

Really, really gross. Moving the dangerous range outta there exposed what sixty years of grease looked like. It wasn't pretty. Imagine "The Blob" if it was black. I went to town scrubbing. (Somehow I always get stuck with the less glamorous and triply gross jobs in the "World's Most Expensive Dog House.") Hours later, it finally came clean.

Proud of my handiwork, I turned to my wife, said, "You know, this is kinda fun. Maybe we should flip houses for a living."

Until the pain set in the next day and I came to my senses.

Speaking of creepy towns in Kansas, how about visiting the twelve or so sites on my spooktacular tour of Haunted Kansas? Twisted Tales from Tornado Alley, just a nightmarish day trip away.