Lost House (From Flyers to Basement Shows)

Jeremiah and I rented the Lost House some time in 2001 because we wanted a bigger place that would hold us and our friend, Matt. The place was too big, so we had to get a roommate. Eventually, Jeremiah's cousin moved into a room in our house that was not that bigger than a closet. Another guy  moved in upstairs with Mat, and maybe I will discuss him in more detail in a future post. Needless to say the guy was a mess and caused us more stress than you could ever imagine. 

We decorated the house in Punk and Industrial Chic, taping flyers, newspaper clippings, and comic strips to the dirty walls. It soon resembled  a larger version of my bedroom in high school. Much to my mother's dismay, I covered the walls of my room with clippings and pictures from floor to ceiling, tacking up whatever took my fancy from punk ads to clippings from old books. My room was on the second floor of the house, which earlier had been converted from an attic, so the lower half of the wall had paneling and cabinet doors. I still did my best to cover all the open space. We did not do this so systematically in our new house, but we slowly put stuff up while we lived there. At one point in our tenure, the roof leaked and water poured onto my posters and all over the floor. Our landlord eventually had to fix it. When we moved out, the paper and walls were yellow with cigarette residue. 

We soon named the house, the Lost House, in emulation of other Punk Houses in the region, particularly Damage Incorporated across town and others like Crossover House. We figured that since we lived in Stevens Point, it was sufficently far away from some of the other punkhouses that we knew in Milwaukee and Madison. We had named our previous houses together because of the longstanding tradition of naming such houses, especially if you planned on throwing shows. We had scoped out the basement for that very reason -- we hoped to host touring bands and have them play in our large, spider-filled basement.