July 22, 2005

Guide to Identifying Shitty Highway Houses

In our drive up to Muskoka this week, we named the roadside phenomenon that is the “Shitty Highway House”. These are houses with skyhigh levels of shittiness, and can identified by having two or more of the following characteristics:

1) A door hovering in midair, with no means to exit to the ground. Somehow stairs seem to be optional in shitty highway houses.
2) A former school bus parked in the drive way
3) A pick-up truck on blocks
4) Four vehicles or more
5) More than two extensions, especially if they are constructed from completely different materials and don’t match
6) A door or window that has been bricked or boarded up, or a door or window that has been replaced and doesn’t quite fit in the alloted space
7) No visible door and no window larger 8 by 7 inches
8) An elaborately-planned new home, abandoned midjob and thus lacking bricks, a front porch, garage doors, a lawn etc but still happily lived-in
9) No landscaping
10) Raised bungalow