For only $159,000, you can buy the last place I lived in Bloomington:
http://www.homefinder.org/public/buy-details.asp?sTransactionNumber=20101620&sCRecord=147
This is the 1005 W. 6th house, where I lived from 1994-1995. I lived here with Simms and Matt Liggett, and it’s a weird little place. It’s five bedrooms, but they’re odd-sized little rooms, so you can only really get three people in there. We each had a tiny upstairs room, with a computer room up front and the Simms music studio in another room. It had 1.5 baths, but in a weird configuration; there was a room with a toilet, sink, and non-functional tub; the other one had a shower, sink, and no toilet. I bought a sign that said NO DUMPING and put it on the toilet-less room. This also became a metaphor for distributed computing in a long and somewhat irrelevant story that I’ll skip.
The place also had a giant kitchen, big enough for a drum set and full band without compromising on keg location or chili distribution. I have a lot of strange memories of that place, like when I tried to grow tomatoes in one corner with a bunch of grow lights, or the birthday when me and Larry went to K-Mart, bought two copies of this board game where you built castles out of bricks and then launched marbles from catapults siege-style to try to level your opponent, and then played on the kitchen floor, proceeding to lose little marbles all over the place.
I really did like my room there, too. It was a cape cod, and my room was upstairs, so I had a low ceiling with weird angles on it, and bookshelves built into two walls. I spent many late nights on my mattress on the floor, reading Henry Miller and scribbling in notebooks, listening to rain on the rooftop or running the little electric heater in the cold. I loved living in this little closet-sized womb of a room, books on three walls, journals all over the creaky wooden floors, a busted-up PS/2 386SX computer I borrowed from work and only used to play solitaire in Windows 3.1. (It was a literal doorstop; it was not networked and I had some crazy idea that I’d type away on it in Notepad and write down thoughts and turn them into books, and of course that didn’t happen.)
Anyway – I’m not in the market for a second house these days. And if you really want some Konrath history for about $158,985 cheaper, you could go buy a copy of Summer Rain. (And that book was based on a different house – the one at 414 Mitchell – but I did start writing SR at the 6th Street house, so there is a connection.) But I’ve been thinking of B-town a lot lately, and it seems five forevers ago since I was there. So it gave be a chuckle and a brief trip through time when I saw this.