PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

Tough one...

The one where Connie gets her first period while her parents are on vacation in Hawaii, and the one where Hank's old truck gets hit by a train are definitely up there though!

 

Not listed in order, but...

• The one where Connie gets her first period (Aisle 8A)
• The one where Hank's truck is dying and ends up getting hit by a train (Chasing Bobby)
• The one where Peggy get arrested in Mexico for accidentally kidnapping a Mexican girl (Lupe's Revenge)
• The one where Boomhauer gets a taste of his own medicine (Dang 'Ol Love)
• The one where the guys become firefighters (A firefighting we will go)
• The one where Boomhauer's brother comes back and tries to get married (Patch Boomhauer)
• The one where Luanne registers to vote with the communist party, and Hank almost doesn't vote because George W. has a limp handshake (The Perils of Poling)
• The one where the Y2K paranoia gets the best of Hank (Hillennium)
• The one where Cotton dies (Death Picks Cotton)
• The one where Hank finds out he's been paying sticker price on every car he's ever gotten (The Accidental Terrorist)
• The one where it finally comes out that Peggy's scumbag brother has been in prison the whole time and not on an oil rig (Life: A Loser's Manual)
• The only episode featuring Luanne's psycho bitch of a mother (Leane's Saga)
• And many more!

 

@LocoLocal

This would not be the first time I've been attracted to a cartoon character; Despite her know-it-all personality, Peggy Hill is not a woman I would kick out of bed if she were real! She looked kinda hot in the handcuffs and shackles in the "Lupe's Revenge" episode...

Honestly, all three wives on Rainey Street are hot in my opinion (especially Minh, but I won't lie; I've got a thing for Asians). What confounds me is what Nancy saw in Dale!

 

We have lived in the Central Bucks region since July 2005. We have lived in three different houses in that time. My dad was in the Navy for 25 years (1982-2007), so we moved a lot. Back in the 1980s, my dad was stationed at the same place fo years (Moffett Field in Mountain View, California) and thus lived in the same general area. However, he was sent on six-month-at-a-time deployments to places like Japan, South Korea, and Pakistan, among others. My parents married in April 1988 and bought their first house around the same time, I was born in March 1989, and we moved from California to Pennsylvania in the summer of 1990. My parents assumed the Navy would be moving use within two or three years, but my dad remained stationed NAS Willow Grove until 1996. I had absolutely no memory whatsoever of our rancher in Milpitas, seeing as I was maybe 16 months old at the very oldest when we moved. Our first house in Pennsylvania was not in Bucks County, but in adjacent Montgomery County (10-15 minutes from our current house). The address was North Wales (my mom's driver's license and all of our bills also said North Wales), but the actual Borough of North Wales was located several minutes away. Our house in Montgomeryville or Montgomery Township (I'm pretty sure I've seen police cars with both names on them over the years).

The house, which I always refer to as the Dunhill (due to that being the name of the floorplan), was particularly well-built and plenty big for a family of three, but really nothing special. It was built by the now-defunct David Cutler Group, which was building new houses as recently as three years ago, in 1990. It was just your standard 4-bedroom, 2.5-bath, 2-story colonial. It had central air, gas heat, a 2-car garage, and a decent-sized backyard. If you drive into any David Cutler subdivision built before 1995 or so, you are guaranteed to see more than a dozen Dunhills. It was a very popular floorplan, though unfortunately a lot of people did not pay the extra money for the 9-foot first floor ceilings. Our Dunhill was originally purchased by a couple who backed out of the deal at the last minute, and they did not spring for the 9-foot ceilings.

FUN FACT: Before 9-foot first floor ceilings became commonplace in the mid to late 1990s, it was always easy to tell which Cutler homes had 8-foot and which had 9-foot ceilings (not just the Dunhills but all of them). The 9-foot ceiling houses have a considerable amount of space between the tops of the garage windows and the bottom roof trim, whereas there is virtually no space between the windows and the roof trim on 8-foot ceiling examples (like ours).

Our Dunhill's biggest issue was the lot. My parents prefer houses with backyards that back up to woods. This neighborhood was almost out of their price at the time (at least for a house with the features they wanted; According to tax records, a lot with one of the smaller floorplans sold in 1990 for like $205K, but I guarantee you that house had the bare minimum). Our house originally listed for $240K, but the original buyers backed out and Cutler kept $20K of their money. As such, they sold the house to my parents for $220K when other houses in that neighborhood were probably going for as much as $250K! At the height of the housing bubble, those houses were probably worth $500K-$600K at the highest, but now Zillow has almost all of them valued at less than $500K.

Our lot sucked though. There were two houses directly behind us, and while the neighbors who lived in them were not horrible, they were hardly neighbor of the year material. One house had a family who'd moved from Arizona, an they had two daughters who would hang out in the backyard and antagonize me while I was on my swingset. The other house was owned by this older couple who had two or three annoying beagles who barked at everything. These people are most notable for not allowing my parents to connect our new fence with their fence when they had it built in 1995, plus the husband worked for the IRS, which by itself should be grounds to dislike someone! By the way, when that fence went up in 1995, it solved the problem of the other neighbor's daughters...

For about a decade, the Dunhill held the record of being the place where we lived for the longest time. My parents bought that house when I was baby, and we moved out when I was 7. I was toilet-trained in that house, among other things.

What amazes me is we'd only lived there six years when we left. If we still lived there, my parents would be paying off the mortgage in about a year (if they hadn't paid it off already; My dad has a habit of paying things off early once they get closer to being paid off)!

Oh and by the way, those two neighbors still live in those two houses behind us!

 

I've lived in the following houses since my birth (red text means it was a rental; blue text means it was owned by the government; black means my parents owned it)...

• 1970s Rancher (3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1 floor, built in 1978?; 1,800 square feet?) - Milpitas, California - 1988-1990 (I was born in 1989)
• The Dunhill (4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2 floors plus unfinished basement, built in 1990; 2,700 square feet) - North Wales, Pennsylvania - November 1990-July 1996?
• The Shithole (2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 2 floors, built during WWII; 700-800 square feet) - Mountain View, California - August 1996-March 1997
• The second Navy house (3 bedrooms, 1 full bath, 2 half baths, 2 floors, built in the 1960s; 1,200-1,300 square feet?) - Mountain View, California - March 1997-June 1998?
• The Contempo-colonial (3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2 floors, built in 1996; 1,900-2,000 square feet?) - Virginia Beach, Virginia - August 1998-June 2000
• The 3-car garage rancher (4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 1 floor, built in 1988; 2,300 square feet) - Oak Harbor, Washington - July 2000-July 2002
• The Monstrosity (5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 2 floors plus finished basement, built in 1989; est. 3,500-4,000 square feet including finished basement) - Centreville, Virginia - July 2002-July 2005
• The "WTF?" house (4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2 floors plus unfinished basement, built in 1988; 2,500 square feet) - Doylestown, Pennsylvania - July 2005-July 2007
• The Townhouse (3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2 stories plus finished basement, built in 2007; est. 2,500 square feet including finished basement) - Furlong, Pennsylvania - September 2007-March 2016
• Where I live now (4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2 floors plus unfinished basement, built in 2016; est. 3,000 square feet) - Specific location withheld - March 2016-present

 

The townhouse officially tied with the Dunhill in November 2013, and after that it officially became the recordholder for the longest time we'd lived in a house. By the time we sold it and moved out, it had been a staggering eight and a half years! This was the first house my parents bought that they built from the ground up and chose all of their options for. It was built by Toll Brothers, and the overall quality was about what you'd expect from a tract home built since the early 2000s, but it served us well. That was our first house with the following features and options:

• Separate central A/C and heat systems for upstairs and downstairs
• Granite kitchen countertops
• An oven separate from the stove

And our first neighborhood with:

• A pool
• A gym
• A homeowner's association

The water heater blew in 2015 (luckily my dad caught it and shut it off before any damage was done), but other than that the townhouse was good. We sold that house because my parents had decided they wanted to stay in Pennsylvania for good and they really wanted a single-family home with a real backyard.

 

I was attached to the townhouse for the following reasons:

• As previously stated, it still holds the record for the most number of years we've lived somewhere!
• My bedroom was fucking huge!
• I got my driver's license while we were living in that house.
• I got my first kiss in that house.

 

UPDATE: I asked my mom and she told me that the Milpitas house was actually a 3-bedroom when they bought it. It used to be a 4-bedroom, but the previous owners wanted a larger living room and tore down walls to do this.

My parents bought this house a year before I was born and I was barely over a year old when we moved out, so I have no memories of it whatsoever! It was a 1-story rancher with 4 bedrooms (maybe 3) and 2 full bathrooms. I was home with my mom when the infamous 1989 earthquake struck, and while there was no damage to the house my parents say we lost power for a few days.

The house DID NOT have central air (not generally needed in that area), and my dad says it had electric baseboard heat. What electric baseboard heat translates to is this...



But it's California, and location matters much more than heating system efficiency! My parents made like $90,000 on that house after living there for only two years!

My dad also tells me the house came with a wicker-bladed ceiling fan in the kitchen, and he would regularly lift me up so I could turn it on and off. My first word, spoken in the kitchen of that house, was "light"!

I saw this house on two separate trips to California in December 2001 and March 2009, respectively. In 2001, I seem to remember that it didn't look much different than it did when my parents sold it in 1990. In March 2009, the house was almost completely unrecognizable, the exterior having been redone in beige stucco and a lot of architectural features changed.

 

My unflattering nickname for this place says it all...

One of hundreds of identical 2-bedroom houses in multi-unit dwellings constructed for soldiers and their families during WWII, these houses probably should have been torn down and replaced in the 1980s. Instead, they sat vacant for a couple decades before the Navy decided to start renovating them and get a few more years out of them. I believe our specific house was built in 1942.

These houses did not have traditional central heat, but rather just wall-mounted, floor-to-ceiling electric blower things located on the first floor (some of the houses were one story, but ours was two story). I don't recall us ever having to use the thing, even in the winter. These heaters were not new, but they had obviously been shoehorned in a couple decades after the houses had been built. Air-conditioning? Hell no!

The kitchen and the laundry room were one in the same, and there was no dishwasher. This was one of my mom's biggest complaints about this house...

 

Keep in mind that we had just moved out of a 2,700 square foot colonial, which looked like a mansion compared to the Shithole. We had more furniture and belongings than we could fit in our new house; However, they gave my dad the keys to the house next door, which was identical to our house but had a reversed floorplan, and let us keep our excess belongings there without charging any extra rent! In the military, when you opt for government housing, the size of house you get depends on your pay grade. Obviously, the house we got was well below my dad's pay grade, so they let us keep our stuff in the house next door until a much more suitable house became available.

NOTE: My parents did not actually pay rent on either of the Navy base houses; A predetermined amount of money was taken out of my dad's paycheck. My dad did not get charged anything extra for the second house.

The house next door to us had also been more or less restored, but unlike our humble abode it did not have carpeting installed on the first floor yet. We were actually given the choice between these two houses if I remember correctly, and my parents chose the one with carpeting (the other house just had generic heavy-duty tile, not unlike what's in our garage now).

 

NOTE: From August 1996 to March 1997, we lived on Stevens Creek Road. Our house number was 478. The house the Navy let us use for storage was 476. The vacant and unrestored 1-story house on the other side of ours was 480. 476 and 478 were both 2 floors. 478 was located between 476 and 480. 480 plays a significant role in our time there as well, which I will get to later. From here on out, I will be referring to each house by the address number to avoid confusion.

At some point, it was discovered (I forget how) that the refrigerator in our house (478) was leaking Freon. It may not have actually been Freon, but rather a condensation leak that could have been flooding the kitchen (I remember it being a Freon leak). Regardless, my dad and my uncle (the one with the VW buses who still lives in Monterey) decided that the best course of action was to swap our house's fridge for the one in 476. Using a hand truck and a lot of patience, my dad and my uncle swapped the fridges in less than an hour! No, I do not think the Navy or any government officials knew about the fridge swap!

 

I am 99% sure that we were the only ones living that building, which consisted of six Barbie-sized houses if I remember correctly. We had an energetic year-and-a-half old Black Lab who needed space to run. I am not entirely sure if my dad got permission for this little project either, but it only took a single trip to Home Depot to get what we needed..

Our backyard was way too small for Molly, but 480's backyard was bigger than the backyards of our house and 476 combined! My dad bought some hardware at Home Depot (A handle, to hinges, and some wood screws), removed a couple of planks from the fence between our backyard and 480's, and built a nifty little "secret door"! Now, we had a place to run Molly and play fetch with her!

 

If you stood on the front porch of our house (478 Stevens Creek Road), you could look straight down Orange Avenue. We were originally supposed to move into a 1-story house on Orange Avenue. Also, keep in mind that we did not fly. The Navy paid for Mayflower to move our stuff across the country. They also paid to have my mom's 1990 Toyota Camry shipped across the country. Me, the parents, and Molly piled into my dad's new 1996 Nissan Pathfinder and drove across the country in about a week. It may have been closer to ten days, because we stayed an extra day in Indianapolis so my parents could take me to this spectacular children's museum. I was 7 years old, and I probably stayed in more hotels in less than two weeks than I'd stay in my entire life! I remember my dad giving "Orange Avenue" as his address when we checked into a hotel in Nevada, but we ended up not moving into that house because it was unrestored...

Some guy from the Navy gave us a tour of all these houses, and 478 was the only one that was move-in ready. The one on Orange Avenue did not have the electricity or water turned on, the whole house (including the toilet) was full of cobwebs, and I observed at least one broken window. If we'd opted for the house on Orange Avenue, we would have been in a hotel for weeks while they made the place livable!

 

The government bureaucrats ended up tearing these houses down sometime prior to December 2001, but in 1996-1998 the plan was obviously different. They were slowly but surely restoring these houses that could be considered cute or even charming in today's real estate market.

To be fair, my best friend John lives in an apartment not much smaller (or much different) than these houses. The biggest differences are that John's apartment has central air and a dishwasher, and one bedroom instead of two. Just like the Stevens Creek house, John has a washer and dryer in his kitchen. However, John's apartment building was built circa 1983 (based on the manufacture date I got from the original A/C unit), so about 40 years of technological advances separates my old house from his apartment. John's apartment building is
now almost 40 years old and will probably be there for another forty years!

By 1996, a few of these houses had been appropriated for non-residential use...

 

@El Duderino

It is important to note that while all of these apartments and houses were owned by the government (I don't know if they were owned directly by the Navy, or just the government in general), the neighborhood we lived in from about August 1996 to March 1997 was located just off the base. Anybody could enter at anytime, but as I found out one time, cars without DoD (Department of Defense) stickers stuck out like a sore thumb...

One of the houses appropriated for "non-residential use" was caddy-corner to our house, on the corner of Orange Avenue and Stevens Creek Road if you looked at it from our front yard. This house was used as headquarters for the security patrol. Seeing as this was five years before 9/11, I'm guessing they were civilians (though still employed by the government). I don't remember if these two guys were cops or just security guards (I don't even remember if they had guns). They were uniformed, and they drove around in a 1994 Dodge Spirit (may have been a Plymouth Acclaim) with government plates and a light bar on the roof. It looked just like a real cop car, but smaller. I know the year of the car because, being Charlie the car-obsessed Aspie, I asked the security guys...

One time, I remember my dad being particularly suspicious of this Dodge Neon with no DoD sticker parked in front of our house. The Dodge Neon was practically a new model at the time (this was late 1996 or early 1997 and the Neon came out in 1994 as a '95 model), so even though it was a Neon, it was in decent shape and did not look like the shitbox it was. Regardless, something about this Neon weirded out my dad enough to notify the security guys across the street.

 

@BillsSR5

You were talking about snakes in your basement earlier...

Here's a snake story from my childhood!

The neighborhood security patrol guys were pretty cool, and served a number of different unofficial functions, including snake wranglers...

One time in either 1996 or 1997 (we were in that house for such a short period of time that it all blurs together), I was in the house and my mom said something about the security guys trying to catch a snake. This immediately peaked my interest and I ran outside to see our two brave security officers in a standoff with a snake on the sidewalk in front of their headquarters. This was more than 22 years ago, so I don't remember what kind of snake it was. Based on how cautious they were being with the snake, I'm going to guess it was poisonous though...

They managed to get the snake into a sack, and one of the maintenance guys showed up in a pickup truck to relocate the snake.

 

@BillsSR5

And here's another snake story!

From 1998 to 2000, my dad was stationed in Norfolk and we lived in Virginia Beach. I would like to point out that there were two Navy bases in that area, the one in Norfolk where my dad was stationed, and NAS Oceana which was very close to our house. My dad regularly took me to the swimming pool at Oceana in the summer.

On this particular occasion, presumably sometime in the summer of 1999, my dad and I were headed out to his old Mazda pickup to hit the pool. We did not get very far because someone discovered a snake coiled up under a bush in front of our house (I forget whether it was me or my dad who saw the snake; may have even been my mom). Regardless, this was not just a snake...

It was a goddamn Water Moccasin!

Not only are Water Moccasins highly venomous, but they were well known for being highly aggressive even by poisonous snake standards and standing their ground rather than slithering way at the earliest convenience. Sure, we could have just gone out the back door and gone to the pool, but my dad understandably didn't want that snake hiding out near his front door.

So, my dad tried scaring the snake away but it didn't work. Eventually, our neighbor Dave who lived across the street came to the rescue. Dave was a former Navy SEAL. He also drove a late 1980s lifted 1st Gen 4Runner. Need I say more?!?!

Dave grabbed a shovel and decapitated that snake before the poor bastard even knew what happening. Dave then disposed of the body in the woods behind our house, and took extra care to bury the head where our dog or a neighborhood kid couldn't find it.

NOT-SO-FUN FACT: Decapitated snake heads can still bite, and the poisonous ones can still pack a lethal punch, er...um, bite!

 

The other non-residential house was used by the local boy scout troop. It too was a 1-story house, attached to another 1-story house. The floorplan was identical to 480 Stevens Creek Road, but this was a duplex instead of a multi-unit building. I forget whether anyone lived in the other unit. The house was restored and sparsely furnished, but not functional as a house. One noteworthy issue I remember is that the stove didn't work. It was while we were living at 478 Stevens Creek that I decided to join Boy Scouts. In 1997, my parents became the troop leaders after their predecessors had to move (the husband was also Navy and lived on base). When we moved in 1998, my parents transferred leadership to another volunteer parent. I remained in the scouts until 1999, when both my dad and I lost interest (plus, in Virginia Beach there was this one kid who liked to pick on me, who also happened to be the leader's son).

One thing I remember about the my parents' precursor is that the father drove what was then the all-new "mini Ram" 1997 Dodge Dakota (keep in mind that this was sometime in 1997, so it really was a brand new truck). It was a bright red extra cab 4x4, just like trademark red trucks Dodge always used in its ads. This one had a cap on the back. On one occasion, they took us on a field trip in that truck. The scout leader drove, his wife rode shotgun, my mom crammed into the backseat, and all of the boys including myself got to ride in the back! My mom would later tell me that she was less than pleased about me riding in the back of a pickup, but that she went along with it because all of the other boys were back there and she didn't want to embarrass me or something.

 

One aggravating thing about 478 Stevens Creek was the lack of a driveway. There were non-reserved spaces curbside, and this where we parked my dad's 1996 Pathfinder and my mom's 1990 Toyota Camry. My dad bought a 1997 Yamaha Virago in late 1996, and also kept the motorcycle parked in one of the curbside spaces in front of our house protected by nothing more than a waterproof cover. We were living right next to a goddamn Navy base with the neighborhood security headquarters directly across the street! Crime was not something we worried about. Some neighborhood kids who didn't like me stole my bike and scooter from the alcove in the front yard, let the air out of the tires, and abandoned them at a nearby playground, all because they didn't like me! However, actual crime was never an issue.

However, there was this one time in late 1996 when I saw a bunch of Mexican/Hispanic guys congregating around my dad's months-old '96 Pathfinder, smoking cigarettes and leaning against like it was theirs. I'd guess they were in their teens or early twenties. They definitely looked old enough to be in the military, so I'm assuming they were enlisted guys from one of the nearby apartment buildings (also Navy-owned). I was only 7 at the time, and all I saw was a bunch of jerks leaning against my dad's new $30,000 SUV. I wanted to tell them off, but my parents wouldn't let me (I'm surprised my dad didn't confront them). I then suggested hitting the panic button the Pathfinder's key fob and watching them scatter. My parents didn't go for that either. Eventually, this group walked away and disappeared...

 

So yeah, the Stevens Creek house fucking sucked, but the government still didn't want to tear them down. At some point, they decided to experiment with the houses, using the duplex next door to the Boy Scout house as a Guinea Pig. They knocked down the dividing wall in this house, transforming the two tiny 2-bedroom/1-bathroom houses into a 4-bed/2-bath house of roughly 1,400-1,600 square feet! The kitchen of one house was gutted and transformed into extra space. A family with two daughters of 12-13 years of age moved into this house in late 1996, and were still living there when we moved in 1998 if I remember correctly. I actually hung out and played with these girls from time to time, and one thing I definitely do remember is that they got a non-very-friendly Pit Bull-type dog at some point in 1997 (the first and so far only remotely mean Pit Bull I've ever seen in person). This stupid dog affected our ability to use the backyard during Boy Scout meetings!