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After my last blog post, two different people asked to hear more about my old house in El Reno. I could’ve sworn that I’ve written about it before, but a search of the blog didn’t turn up anything so … here you go.

In August of 1993, after having attended classes at a local community college for two years, I packed up all my belongings and moved 60 miles west to Weatherford, Oklahoma. There, I moved in with Susan and enrolled at South Western Oklahoma State University (SWOSU). Susan’s mom had purchased a mobile home in Weatherford which Susan, myself, and a third roommate all shared. In the spring of 1994, Susan and I had both had enough of school so we dropped out and towed the mobile home 60 miles back east to Oklahoma City. As I mentioned earlier this week, once we moved back to OKC we had a rough time finding jobs, and the two of us were pretty hungry and miserable for several months. We lived in the mobile home the rest of 1994 and most of 1995 — in fact, we were still living there in August of 1995 when the two of us got married.

Susan’s mom received a sizable inheritance in 1994, and could often be found spending it at local auctions. One day in the fall of 1995, Susan returned home after attending an auction with her mom and informed me that she had “just bought a house!”

And actually, that wasn’t accurate — they had bought two houses: 202 S. Barker and 206 S. Barker, both in El Reno, Oklahoma (about 15 minutes west of where we were living). The financial part of the deal was pretty straight forward. Susan’s mom paid $75k for both houses. If we wanted one, it would cost us $37,500, which we would pay off (interest free) over the next ten years. After living in a mobile home for two years, we decided we were ready to become home owners. How bad could it be?

(Did you ever see the movie “The Money Pit”?)

Front of 202 S. Barker.

If I remember correctly, the house was around 3,000 square feet. It was built in 1880, 27 years before Oklahoma was a state. Inside, the house had been divided up into five separate apartments. Four of the five apartments had their own kitchen, bathroom, living room, and bedroom(s); the fifth apartment was a big studio room. Two of the apartments were part of the original house; the other three had been added on at some point. At one point I think we counted 14 rooms (excluding bathrooms).

Here’s a funny story I had actually forgot about. When Susan and I moved in, there were two girls — twin sisters, I think — still living in the house. When we asked them to leave, they told us no. I think we took ownership of the house in the middle of October, and the twins told us that they had paid rent through the end of October. Now of course they hadn’t paid us any rent (their old landlord was dead — thus the auction). So for two weeks, we had a couple of strangers also living in the house. Due to the layout of the house with its separate apartments, it wasn’t as awkward as it sounds. When the twins finally left, they left behind a ton of furniture and belongings that Susan and I ended up moving out to our shed. We had to hound those girls’ parents to come get their crap before we took it to the dump. That was an odd experience.

Rear of 202 S. Barker.

At first, the idea of having such a large house was pretty exciting. We joked about having a “dirty clothes room” and a “shoe room” and different rooms to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in, but we quickly learned things were a lot simpler if you didn’t spread your stuff all through a giant house. Not long after we moved in we migrated to the “side” apartment (the most modern of the five) and lived there. There were two bedrooms (one of which I used for a computer room), a living room, a dining room (that I turned into an arcade), and a bathroom with a claw foot bathtub and no shower. Actually, all the bathrooms were like that. Five bathrooms, five claw foot bathtubs, and no showers.

Makeshift arcade — Mat Mania and Championship Street Fighter.

Let’s talk about the interior. For starters, there wasn’t a three-prong outlet to be found in that place. For the arcade games and my computer, I had to plug things into a power strip with the ground prong pulled off. The living room had gas pipes still on the wall — the house was originally built to accommodate gas lanterns in the home for lighting, instead of electricity. The one time I peeked in the attic I saw electrical wires where the insulation had fallen off. On one wall that needed repair, we found newspapers from the 1930s stuffed inside.

And then there was “the door” incident. For whatever reason, the rear apartment had been completely sealed off from the rest of the house. The only way to enter the rear apartment was to go outside and come back in a different door. I decided that was stupid, so I decided to “make a doorway”. I’m not sure what tools most people use to “make a doorway”, but I used a steak knife. I sawed and sawed until I had what essentially looked like a giant mouse hole from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Inside the hole I found that the whole house had been insulated with straw. Seriously, one dropped match could have incinerated the place.

Tune in tomorrow for Part Two of “The El Reno House”!

Similar Posts:

• Spokane Memories
• The El Reno House, Part II
• The Rule of Fives

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