Last year I was sure I’d found the house of my dreams. It was absolutely perfect. Kind of like a relationship where you just click and know you’re with the right person. As a preservationist, I wanted an old house, one with a history. But I also wanted one free of unresolved maintenance issues from previous owners. I was unwilling to tackle hidden black mold, asbestos in the ceiling—problems that could kill me.
Many of the historic homes where I lived in Ann Arbor had been stripped of their character and flipped for a quick profit. I wanted a quirky house, one that could make me laugh on occasion, that I could be committed to, and could be my forever house even if it took forever to turn it into one.
And this house, from the moment I drove into its winding driveway, seemed exactly what I wanted. It was filled with an intangible feeling that told me to relax. To focus on the positive. To be myself.
Like me, built in the 1950s, the house was showing its age. And yet despite living through terrific events—thunderstorms, tornados, blizzards, and having huge tree limbs fall on its roof—it was a survivor. I fell in love with its glorious copper fireplace, massive redwood beams, and enormous picture windows that looked out to a densely wooded forest.
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. And, weirdly, when I bought the house, my furniture fit. It was as if I’d been saving my belongings for this house all my life. There was no pretense. No clash of recent renovations. It seemed magical.
As often happens with both houses and romantic partners, there was one fascinating detail that attracted me: its glass blocks. Its first owner had studied light and called the house his “daylight research lab.” As a professor of physics at the University of Michigan, Robert A. Boyd brought his theories into the living space by using whole walls of prismatic glass blocks to attract light during the winter and reflect light in the summer. He wanted a house “devoid of dark corners and glare.”
And as I think of it now, that’s what I wanted for my forever house too.
Though I was enamored, the house was a little rough around the edges. With sloppy black paint on its paneled cabinets, the galley kitchen reminded me of a man with a combover. It didn’t go with the house and distracted the eye away from the kitchen’s light. The old basement carpet hid stinkbugs and millipedes. And the knee-deep weeds in the yard prevented light from nurturing its colorful woodland flowers.
I knew the house needed a new roof, which meant new skylights. And before the roof could be installed, several gigantic oaks needed to be trimmed or removed. But these changes seemed workable to me, as flaws often seem early on in a relationship. I saw them as projects I could complete over time while still living happily with the house as it was.
But like all relationships, even a love affair with a house progresses from romance to that horrible stage psychologists call the “power struggle.” The checkerboard switch plates that had looked interesting and unique at first turned out to be a part of a complicated low voltage wiring system that few electricians knew how to repair. During the winter months I had to restart the furnace on a regular basis and call the HVAC guy to bleed the lines whenever a copper pipe developed an airlock. Plumbing pipes seemed to run all over the place, confusing plumbers, and there was some kind of drain problem that allowed sewer gas to escape and fill the house.
I thought I understood this house. It had been neglected; now it called for my tender touch. But as soon as I fixed one problem, another problem developed that was even worse than the first. I replaced the pressure tank and the water turned yellow. After a small repair to a pipe in the basement, the boiler broke down. To fix the drain, the front yard was excavated, a broken pipe replaced, and a new drain problem spotted. Finally, I hired a roofer who couldn’t pay his subcontractors, so they shot nails through electrical wires and riddled the porch ceiling with nail holes as retribution.
Two weeks after Christmas with tarps and sandbags on the roof, I’d reached my limit. I heard the steady drip of water through the dining room ceiling, and instead of jumping up to call someone to stop the leak, I sat on the couch and let the ceiling drip.
What was I doing with this damn house that needed so much work?
As I sat there, questioning my judgment, my mind drifted to an 1847 cobblestone house I once restored. When I first bought the house, and began to work on it, a friend had dropped by to see the progress, and said, “This house is going to thank you.” At the time, it seemed like a funny comment, but it turned out she was right. The house did thank me, and I was sure this house would too. If only I could stick with it.
The thing about relationships and houses is that they all require emotional work. If you change your behavior in a relationship, the other person is forced to adjust. In the same way, in a house, if you add or subtract a wall, your relationship with the space changes. Those adjustments we make can sometimes cause us to question if the relationship is worth the work.
But my experience had taught me that dumping one house for another, is simply a way of trading one problem for a brand-new set of problems. And sometimes the new problems can be even worse.
Wanting to focus on the positive, I shifted my attention back to the joy and beauty, two reasons I was attracted to the house in the first place. I loved that the structure was in overall good shape, that despite its various modifications over the years, it still had integrity. I loved the feeling of closeness, that I could look out of the back windows and deep into a woods yet be near enough to hear music from my neighbors’ kitchen. I loved the spalling bricks, the turquoise patina of the copper gutters, and the dog scratches by the front door.
Most of all, I loved its surprises.
The day the house came up for sale, I had climbed through a row of huge plants on the west end that looked like overgrown rhododendrons, and my first impulse had been to question if the plants were a bad sign. In the past I’d had bad luck with rhododendrons. I thought for sure I’d kill these off as I had so many others. But much to my delight, the shrubs turned out to be huge bottlebrush buckeyes with multiple stems, dense green leaves and spectacular late summer flowers that attracted hummingbirds and butterflies. They were the kind of plants that required very little and were perfectly suited to a gardener with a brown thumb.
Another surprise was the robin feeding her young in a nest on the downspout right outside the bedroom window. I loved the frequent sightings of deer and hawks, the sound of screech owls, coyotes, and spring peepers. And in early spring, with the front and side yard still in dormancy, green shoots began to pop up under the snow. It turned out this growth was an impressive display of yellow daffodils and leuconium, the tiny white bell-shaped bulbs with little green tips. April brought a burst of yellow celandine poppies, pink hellebores, and wild geraniums. Planted by one of the early owners, and staggered so they didn’t all bloom at once, it comforted me to know that no matter what was going on with the house, some little splash of color was always unfolding.
Like all strong relationships, the work of a house is never done. But one thing I love is that it is reliable and consistent, steady and patient. It pulls its own weight, teaching me the difference between what I want and what I need. In its quiet way, long into the future, I hope the house will represent more than simply an example of a 1954 house. I hope it will stand for a respect of material and design, a love of nature and the environment, and a connection to a past way of viewing ourselves in the world.
I’ve given up the fantasy that the house is perfect or that it will ever be just as I want it, but even now, on a summer day when I glance up to notice the tarps and sandbags on the roof, my first thought is that this house is exactly what I need. As we’ve grown close, I have fewer days of feeling depressed. I believe in myself a little more, and I have become calmer and more resilient. It was as if the house and I have reached an agreement: I will help you if you will help me. It’s a simple concept that I’d barely comprehended with personal relationships, but with this house, I finally understand.
And maybe that’s commitment, after all.
***
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