Spite House
Two neighbors both struggle to do the best they can, and one man’s bit of ingenuity becomes overshadowed by his neighbor’s demons.
Carpenter Charles Froling came to Alameda from Sweden, with a pit stop in Utah. When things didn’t pan out there, he decided to start again in this small California town with lots of building opportunities. Even with the steady work, he would only have a small amount saved to buy a property and build a house for his wife and two sons. And so he made do, on a strip of land only ten feet wide. To the Froling family, the unusually thin building was their home, and they didn’t think it was so odd. It was just a house.
But to Annette Westerdahl, their neighbor who hadn’t expected a house to spring up right outside her window, and what it would mean to her life, it was just one more thing in a long list of things that had gone wrong.
