It has been such a long week. Every day has been Tuesday in a year of never ending March. We are all exhausted from watching very, very closely to see who will win the very tight race. Congrats to Raven Lelani for winning the Kirkus Prize for Fiction for her debut novel Luster!! But I have some good news, and it is that we are all moving! Pack your bags! It is time to go to Georgia for absolutely no reason at all. Specifically we are moving to Covington, GA, about 40 minutes outside of Atlanta in the now rather famous (to me) Newton County. What a nice place to live, don’t you think?
I started looking for homes earlier this week in the states that stayed gray on the electoral map for a very long time because I was stressed. I checked my alert for potentially haunted homes, and found a couple of old beauties with giant porches in Savannah that would be great if we wanted beauty. But why have beauty when you could have an underground bunker that looks like a bridge!?
That’s right! This week’s house is underground. It is built into what appears to be a man made hill that faces a man-made pond lined with rocks. This house is not set on the road. In fact, thanks to Google Earth I learned that you must turn onto a very long driveway next to a reasonable home that faces the road, drive past a couple of Biden/Harris signs, through a grove of trees, and then you will find our house that is built into the actual ground. Or, maybe you won’t find it because it is covered with grass. But you will sense it. Its strangeness will call to you. Also it is underneath the crops. There are some crops on top of the house. You’ll see them to your right.
Okay, get out of your car, we are going around. Oh. Here is the front of the house. It looks like the bridges in Central Park, but also like a war bunker. There are some giant metal rods poking out from the top-ish part which I assume is because dirt is very heavy and there is a lot of dirt on top of the house? Next to the house there is what appears to be a giant summoning circle being built out of bricks, so that will be good for our spells. When was this house built? It must have been during a war. It must have been such a long long time ago. The concrete is chipping off all over. Oh. It was built in 2001? Okay, cool.
Somewhere around here there is an archery range and a dock and a little grove of trees to hang under, but it’s really important that you see what is inside this bunker house as quickly as possible. Here we go, through these strange arches and past the front door, which for some reason has a metal trim? Now we find ourselves inside, and here, my friends, is where the glory begins.
Here we have something I have never, ever, seen before: VAULTED DROP CEILINGS! That’s right, the terrible biology class ceiling tiles have returned to us, but this time, they are fancy, they are recessed in the middle. They have the exact same terrifying drippy vibe as a regular drop ceiling but in the middle they are higher? If you just look at the top third of this room, it still seems kind of cool. The fan is industrial, but as we move our eyes down things become stranger. The fireplace could belong to any regular Atlanta suburban home, the floors are carpeted which for some reason upsets me in an underground house. There is also a mural of a jagged coast line with a lighthouse on it, which I am pretty sure (but not positive) is not found anywhere in Georgia, but which nonetheless spans two whole walls of this room.
This is only one room, we don’t even have time to get into the fact that there is a two person saw suspended above the fireplace. Okay, a palm tree. Okay, there are fake bricks around the door. Okay fairly normal kitchen: pretty nice appliances actually and a plant that is taking over the room with its long spindly arms. This must be the dining room. Let’s have a seat at the...oh. That’s not a dining room table. This is a pool table?
At first, I breezed past the pool table, as you might too. But I have looked at this house for days and we must pause here because this pool table is indicative of the strangest thing about this house: all of these choices which seem truly deranged and incomprehensible are clearly intentional. This is a beautiful pool table. It is old and has the pockets for the balls instead of ramps. It has legs like tree trunks and the wood is very nice. What we really must look at is the fact that it has been recovered. Instead of the usual bright green pool top, this table is a pale blue. This is not a normal color. You can buy billiard cloth on Amazon but not in this color. You can buy “blue” pool tables but they are bright and primary. This blue is almost exactly the same color as the mural water on the wall. In fact, if we look more closely, the carpet on the floor is almost the same color as the wall sand. Someone has loved this very strange house very much. And to them I will be forever grateful because their taste is inconsistent and so strange.
Next we have a bedroom with the kind of heavy-looking faux antique furniture produced in some Tennessee factories and sold at a discount furniture outlet. Also there are purple walls. And more of this carpet. Still under the same terrifying vaulted drop ceiling. This room also has a creeping plant and a stone fireplace but instead of a two person saw, there is a mural of a window looking out at the ocean. Behind that wall, is the room we were just in. The beach room.
We will journey through the other door, the purple curtained door. Ah, this is a roomy master closet with more of this carpet. Here there is a gun safe big enough for me to climb into and suffocate to death. On the other side there are a lot of t-shirts. Seriously, that’s a lot. Into the bathroom we go.
In the first angle of the bathroom we have: a jagged rock backsplash, a purple tufted toilet cover, a half circle shower wall made entirely of glass bricks, and some fake plants. But on the other side of the bathroom we have a whole ass hot tub. Wait, you might be saying, isn’t it ill-advised and probably dangerous to have a hot tub inside your home where there are also fiberboard drop ceilings susceptible to water damage? Yes it is. But we are underground and this is our house and no one can stop us, so we will get into the hot tub in front of our custom mural of a waterfall (?) with our Michelob Ultra and you cannot stop us! We are surrounded by dozens of vases of many shapes and sizes, but also there is a very small beach chair on the counter with an umbrella. What is it for? We should go somewhere else.
Ah. Now we are in the two guest rooms. Both of which are innocuous except that like every other room nothing inside makes any goddamn sense. One has a mural of a window to the beach on the wall it shares with the living/beach room. One has two antique sewing desks and another bathroom with glass bricks. All of these rooms (including the bathroom) have porthole windows in the doors.
The only space besides the kitchen/living room with a window is the laundry room. An excellent use of natural light. The window is nice. The trim is metal for some reason.
Open the next door and the metal trim on every door begins to make sense. Here is a whole workshop. There is a band saw and a bunch of tools, two garage doors. This creepy workshop may explain the saw over the fireplace, but it doesn’t explain the beach or the lack of respect for the metal roof. In this room, we can see what the ceiling above the drop tile must look like. It is made of very, very shiny metal that is almost certainly rusting through above the hot tub as we speak. There is no more. Someone built the 1996 Sears Catalog home of their dreams. Back outside, the big trees are shading the yard and a four wheeler awaits nearby for us to zoom around our almost 6 acres. Maybe we will even drive on top of our house if we are feeling brave.
This house has been listed on Zillow for a mere 15 days. If you buy this terrible house, please remember to register to vote in Georgia before December 1 to vote in the runoff Senate election in January.
