It. Is. Gone. (and there was much rejoicing!) Spoiler: I wasn't there when the main part of the house came down, so you won't get to see that. Oh, how I wish I would have been! I really wanted to see it come down! Please take a (big!) moment and keep reading...

The gas stove actually dates from 1988, had a digital timer available as an option (probably very expensive!) and was made by Tappan for GE. I'm curious what liquid is (was?) used in the oven thermostat capillary tube and bulb. The GE service manual says only that it was "caustic". Whatever it is, it flashed into smoke (exactly like that from a fire) and dissipated almost instantly when the tube got broken. (Amazingly, the fluorescent lamp tube above the stove's console was unbroken when the tractor grabbed it.)

When I say that the stove wouldn't bring a pot of water to the boil, I mean a large pot of water. Small ones it would, medium ones took a long time. That's been my experience with every gas stove I've ever used (one from Whirlpool and another from Maytag, both slightly newer than this one).

Every water pipe in the Roach Palace had burst, something I discovered when I had the water service restored not long after purchase. One had to pull up a part of the kitchen floor and reach down about two feet to get at the shutoff valve. I was somewhat amazed there WAS a shutoff valve!

Still of the impression it could be saved at the time, myself and a good friend started gutting the kitchen. During that process, I discovered newspaper used as insulation in the walls. Unfortunately, none of it was sufficiently intact to make out a date or any headlines.

Things really went downhill when my father suggested we take the metal roof off of the kitchen to see what was under it. Part of me knew better, yet it happened anyway with no plan to repair/replace it, and that was the beginning of the end.

Until I bought it, there were no smoke detectors anywhere in the house. I later learned the humidity would set them off! Of all the circuit breakers in the box, only about half did anything. Someone tried to wedge a Siemens twopole breaker onto the bus bar in the Square D box...and went on to try and power a 240 volt A/C with it, to predictably successful results, I'd imagine.

About three or four years ago, there was a rash of vandalism. Many people were affected. They got into the Roach Palace, the yard shed, some of our cars, and the new garage. (How they did that had me puzzled until I remembered the old "credit card" trick. I've since resolved this problem. Amazingly, the Roach Palace's door wouldn't yield when I tried that, which explains why they went in through a window.) They even unplugged the DVR, and then, as a way to really thumb their noise at us, plugged it back in after they left. The only real damage was to the dial glass of my Zenith 6S52 radio, which came with the palace. It could have been much worse.

I'm not sure what happened with the deinterlacing around the 16 minute mark. Nor was I going to reexport it, after the computer spent nearly two hours on that task! You'll live.

We have tractors (most specifically, an International Harvester 756) that could certainly have taken most if not all of the old house down. I didn't want to chance having the old house fall onto the new garage or somewhere else that it shouldn't have. I was nervous about that happening even though the people I hired have done this before.

I wanted to save the TV antenna mast, so the Keykeeper, myself and our father all took it down. I cut the legs off with a saber saw and then we lowered it down to the ground with a rope. I'm not sure what I'll do with it. Someone approached me about wanting it for use as a concrete "drag", and I may just send it their way.

Since the last part of this video was shot, more dirt was brought in and the lot graded further. So far, nothing has grown or sprouted.

Everything in this video took place over about three and a half weeks in August 2021.

Next project? Quite possibly having the trees removed from the yard. I don't know what, if anything, I'll put in place of the palace.

Trivia: the name "Roach Palace" comes from an issue of Consumer Reports Zillions, which was a magazine they published for children. One of the restaurant reviews in it ended with words to the effect of "tune in next time, when we review the Roach Palace".