Before it became casa Krone, our house was…

Mirabelle’s home for the elderly (or Mirabelle’s Place for short).

!!!Disclaimer: everything from here on is based solely on rumor and hypothesis!!!

Mirabelle’s home for the elderly was a sort of nursing home for elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease… and yes, there was a sign above the garage that said “Mirabelle’s Place.”  Apparently the neighbors complained (our neighborhood is 100% residential and not at all zoned for nursing homes…) and Mirabelle (the lady to ran it/ previous owner of our house) had to take it down.  The lasting affect of that sign, however, is that our neighbors still refer to our house as “Mirabelle’s Place” (we overheard or neighbor telling his landscaping contractor last weekend: “yeah… they’re the people who bought Mirabelle’s place.”).  Knowing this explains SOOO much about our house:

• The handicap accessibility (ramps off the side deck, hand rails in the bathrooms, zero-clearance showers, the buzzer)
• The “security” (security cameras,  fire alarm, the “fire extinguisher inside” sign, the 10 smoke detectors)
• The exceptionally high number of bedrooms (6 total: the 3 intended bedrooms, the office/bedroom, the “beer room” plus about 25% of the garage was made into a room (complete with a sliding door to the atrium, white paint and a textured ceiling)
• Every single “room” listed above has a sliding door to either the outside or the atrium- so our house has 9 exterior doors (including the dog door) plus 3 doors into the atrium.
• The mail man was shocked to find out there are only 2 people living here… we still get mail for about 10 different people.
• The laundry room didn’t have a dryer exhaust vent (we added one into the garage which apparently is a big no-no that we’ll have to fix some day but works for now- as long one of the garage doors is open)
• There IS a dryer exhaust vent in the living room… apparently that was the “laundry room”
• The copious statues and fountains… elderly people like that sort of thing and their eyesight is generally not good enough to tell that, up-close, they were hideously ugly (or even from far away…  you can see more than one fountain if you Google Earth our house!)
• The many many many plants that require hand-watering (there is no in-ground sprinkler system… or there was but someone decided to concrete around it).  We recently learned that one of Mirabelle’s patients used gardening as her therapy and spent ALL DAY EVERY DAY tending to the plants.  We learned this when we confirmed our neighbor’s suspicion that we were discarding two green waste bins full of tree/shrub/plant every week (she said “my son asked if that was a tree he saw in your garbage can”).  Our plan is to “simplify” the landscaping… and my theory is that some time in 2012 we’ll have it down to just the stuff we want (e.g. grass).  Yeah, we have no intentions of renting a dumpster if we can discard stuff for free every week in our green waste bins (yeah, we have 2… it was a happy misunderstanding when we started garbage collection service).  On that note- if anyone is interested in any type of plant life (and we pretty much have the whole spectrum)- it’s yours for the digging.
• Mirabelle’s husband was the resident handy man… so a lot of our house was “DIY” (not in the “wow, your DIY wedding details were so personal” way, but more in the “uh, are you sure you’re qualified to DIY electrical work?” way).  Sadly, I think he had some medical problems (I heard he fell off the roof)… so perhaps that had something to do with the quality of his work.  I also think it had something to do with the eventual closing of Mirabelle’s place / foreclosure of our house (which, by the way, we bought from the same back that owned it… which worked out magnificently for us… not so well for Mirabelle).

So, now you have the full history of Mirabelle’s Place (as told through rumor and hypothesis)!