Arlington Heights Tract House

From the outside it looked pretty much like its neighbors. From the inside it looked pretty much like a lot of estate sales. But looks can be deceiving.

First bedroom: ladies shoes and hats, fans, lamps, costume jewelery and accessories. Boring.

Second bedroom: Christmas and holiday decorations, dried flower sprays. Gah.

Third bedroom: "A windshield rubbed with sliced onion will stay clear on rainy days." Worth a try.

Also worth a try in these trying times. What else?

This kitchen is old, but actually kind of charming. I'm beginning to seriously wonder if this place will be blog-worthy.

The yellow counter tops certainly are cheery. And my mother had that exact same arrangement of fake fruit. But still.

Ooh, a basement. Maybe there's something interesting down here.

Meh. I was just about to leave when I turned and discovered...

... the video vault. It was a tiny room, off to one side, where someone had organized and stored hundreds of homemade VHS tapes.

There were so many. And they'd all been labeled with a name and a length and whether or not they'd been watched.

I know what you're thinking. But there's no scandal here. Just evidence of a harmless obsession.

Each one had been lovingly recorded and numbered and cataloged and obsessed over. There were several seasons of M*A*S*H and All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Someone must have been fortifying themselves against a potential drought of '70s reruns.

There were a lot of vintage movies, too. Many I'd never heard of. Take #405, above, which features a film called The Gay Sisters. They sure don't make 'em like that any more.

These filing cabinets were interesting, too. Why I didn't open them up I can't say. Maybe that's where all the home-grown porn was hidden.