More than one brick make the best neighbors

I live on a one way street. The street is three lanes wide with cars parked on both sides... so I guess that makes five lanes. Thankfully, there are no bus stops on my street so there is no loitering or bus noise. My apartment is one floor of a row house which was built in the 1880s. On the north side of the house is an alley (where sadly many rapes have occurred) and on the south side of the house is another house! This means there are only windows on the east and west sides of the house.

The house that adjoins my house is undergoing construction and has been since June 2008. Before this time (and a whopping 60 years prior) an elderly Black woman occupied the house. The house is much, much bigger than my house. It has four floors each with 750 square feet. The woman told me all about how she lived in the house when Martin Luther King was murdered and many of the streets in this neighborhood were up in flames in protest and mourning. In May 2008, I began seeing miss-matched furniture on the sidewalk and realized the woman was slowly, slowly moving out. In June 2008, my new neighbors purchased the house and began gutting the place from floor to ceiling (four times).

Matt, my new neighbor, and his wife purchased the home for over a million dollars. Right after they closed on the house, the invited me in for a "before" tour. I saw gorgeous hardwood floors, deep enameled cast-iron tubs (with clawed feet), wonderfully worn farm kitchen sinks, and beautiful original door knobs and window hardware. Matt saw a dump with potential. He proceed to tell me he was going to take the smooth plaster off the walls to expose the brick, rip up the hard wood floors to pour polished concrete, and split this rare-in-DC one family home into three units. My heart sank. First, because I could literally feel the house crying and second, I knew I was going to be the recipient of a lot of construction noise and dust for the second year of my two year lease.

Last week when I came home from a run, Matt invited me back into the house. The first two floor are being transformed into two one-bedroom units. The third and fourth floors are slated to become a two-bedroom unit for Matt and his wife. Strangely enough, I didn't feel sad when I went into the house this time; it wasn't a house, it was a shell. It smelled like sawdust and nails (yes, nails have a smell). Matt showed me around and told me all about the solar panels, energy efficient appliances, dual-head shower, foot-pedal sinks, and finally pointed out the obvious- the exposed brick walls.

I came back to my modest little apartment, jumped in the shower, and I had this strange claustrophobic feeling- my neighbors were now only one brick away.