If you caught Saturday’s early issue, you heard about the tours at the gorgeous Avon Flower House. Well I went to the tour and got the actual story of how the owners, Chrissie and John D’Esopo, ended up there.

I got to chat with Chrissie during Saturday's tour, and the backstory is far too wild to hold onto until next week.

Back in the early 1980s, Chrissie was a self described hippie living out of a barn in Simsbury. When she met her builder husband, John, he gently made it clear that barn living wasn't a long term plan for him. They needed an actual house.

The catch? They had very little cash and zero interest in taking on a mortgage.

Six months pregnant, Chrissie took matters into her own hands and went house hunting. She stumbled across an abandoned, forgotten house in Avon. Naturally, she crawled right through a broken window to check it out.

The inside was a total disaster. Debris was piled several feet high, complete with dead animals that smelled so strong it almost knocked her over. But as she stood in the chaos, she was already picturing where the baby nursery would go.

That’s when a pair of hands shot out from under a pile of trash and grabbed her ankle.

She screamed. The man sleeping under the pile screamed. She politely apologized for startling him, dusted herself off, and went straight home to tell John she found their future home.

Turns out, the house wasn't just old, it was built back in 1760 on a land grant from the King of England, with a Greek Revival front added in 1810. When Chrissie and John bought it in 1985, it had no heat, no plumbing, and no electricity.

They restored every inch themselves. John built the cabinets, Chrissie hand painted every wall, and they even reglazed all the windows. Chrissie jokes that her baby daughter knew to hold off until the final nails were driven, arriving just after the heavy work was finished.

Fast forward 40 years, and it is the floral landmark we all drive past today. The kicker? Chrissie and John do every bit of it themselves without any hired help, spending up to 15 hours a day in the garden. Oh, and for anyone wondering how they afford the watering: they rely on a deep well, so there is no massive city water bill involved.

Instead of just admiring the landscape, you'll now think of this story every time you drive past the Avon Flower House.