Some of you know that 417 Rekey was actually a side hustle that started while I was a “baby sitter” for foreclosed homes.
This "baby sitting" consisted of weekly occupancy checks on foreclosures, putting signs in the yard, taking photos, and writing detailed descriptions of the properties.
On one weekly visit to a house in Verona, I heard something moving around inside.
This caught me off guard because this particular weekly trip was getting monotonous. I just wanted to grab the pictures as quickly as I could, make sure the doors were secured, and high-tail it back to Springfield.
But the noise would not go away, so I made a deeper investigation into this 1980’s labyrinth layout that foreclosed in the middle of numerous update attempts.
Thankfully, the power was on, so I turned on the lights and scoped out every room. It was then that I came face-to-face, eye-to-eye… with a ground hog.
He must’ve made his way in through the basement via the crawlspace. I assumed at that moment that he was as freaked out as I was.
However, encountering a human was not his only problem. The sliding mirrored closet doors in this bedroom also made it look as if ANOTHER ground hog was staring at him, too!
He freaked out.
The chase was on. Room to room we went. If only I had filmed chasing him out of that house, sped up the footage and overdubbed it to “Yakety Sax,” my video would have surely gone viral.
I saw it all during those repo visits.
Although some trips were monotonous, I will always look back on that season my life with a smile.