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This is my “farewell” video blog post from Geneseo, New York. This was Dominica and my first home that we purchased in July, 2003 and this past weekend we completed the packing process and the house is ready for the movers to take everything away. It is sad selling our very first home and we wanted to have a little video to remember it by. I didn’t have much time to shoot the video so this was taken after the packing was done and we were about to walk out the door, most likely for the last time. Unfortunately because of when I had to shoot the video and the fact that the lights in the house had been packed the basement is almost entirely unlit and is almost impossible to see and the entire house is completely full of boxes so the impression is quite different than how the house was while we were still living in it.
This house was very special to us. It was the first home that either of us ever bought. It was the house that we bought to move to when we got married having bought the house just a few months before the wedding. It was the only house that my mother and my paternal grandmother would ever see of mine. It was the only house that Mr. Humphries would ever live in. It was house where we got Oreo. It was where we spent the first almost four years of our married life together. It was the house that we bought with the intention of building the ultimate theatre room in the basement which we never got a chance to finish. A house can be a very nostalgic thing. I can see why people can be so reluctant to leave a house that they have lived in for a long time. This house was the home that I have lived in more than any other since leaving my parents’ home.
The structure is an end-unit ranch style townhouse right on the end of the village of Geneseo. We start in the driveway where you can see Dominica’s 2002 Mazda Protege 5 waiting to take us back to Newark. The garage is painted in a wine colour that Dominica was very excited about. We never quite finished doing the trim in the garage. We only just put working locks on the house after many years of using defective ones that had come with the house. We should have just left them. There is a lot that we had planned to do but never got around to doing. When we bought the house we were one of only two structures in the complex. We were the fifth unit to be filled and the last of the original buildings. No one new moved in after us for quite some time as an entirely new building had to be built. As the camera swings around you can see the finished development with many new homes almost all occupied. The landscaping and other niceties were never quite finished and I seriously doubt if they ever will be.
When we first moved to Geneseo there was just beginning to be speculation that a Super Walmart might be built somewhere close to us to replace the aging Walmart that was located over in the plaza near Wegmans. At the time the project sounded absurd and highly unlikely. But it wasn’t long after moving in that construction began and for some time now there has been a Super Walmart just behind the house which is just barely visible in a shot looking over the deck. The Tim Hortons was built next to the Walmart and for a while we went there on a regular basis.
In the basement you can just barely make out the baker’s rack located in the “server alcove”. That alcove was a major selling point of the house for us and it served as the location for several servers and related networking and power equipment that ran for almost every moment that we lived in the house. The hum of those servers was a part of our lives.
The theatre is the saddest part of the house. We had had such dreams of making that into an amazing theatre and listening room. We never even got to the point that we put down carpeting. The walls are painted black but were to be carpetted as well. The screen area was painted with a carefully formuated Benjamin Moore paint very carefully to make an excellent movie viewing surface. With the projector mounted near the back wall it was able to fill every inch of that screen area. As the camera turns around you can just make out the mounts where the stereo and theatre equipment had been mounted to the ceiling behind the seating area to make it accessible without interfering with sound or image. The amplifiers had been mounted into the ceiling to get them completely out of the way.
The last room in the basement was my office for the more than the first two years that we were in the house. That room was originally filled with bookshelves and desks. It was also the hub of the old Age of Empires II Friday nights games. But after Andy moved out I moved my office to the second bedroom and the basement mostly sat undisturbed.
I hope that you enjoy this short video of my first home. I didn’t want this important memory to be lost and so I recorded it here. There is no talking in the video – it is just a chance to share in a significant moment of our lives. We are excited about moving on to new opportunities and adventures. The house has been all but empty for a long time. We use it on a regular basis and dad has been there almost every other day. But it doesn’t feel like home anymore.