I’m Jake Hounds, and this is One Thousand Words or Less
EPISODE 12- MY OLD HOUSE
The day we bought our house I ran around utterly engrossed in other pursuits, oblivious to the moment, a moment that would impact me for years to come. I was frazzled, worried, excited, and out of my depth.
It took us a long time to find a house that we liked, as we didn’t know what we wanted in a house, while being very clear about what we didn’t want.
We didn’t want a little ticky tacky box that was the same as every other little box. We wanted a house that reflected our tastes, one that hadn’t had the character renovated out of it.
At the time of purchase, we were creatives fleeing urban gentrification for a place of our own. A place of calm, creativity, with some aesthetic merit; a home.
Everything at that time seems like it was done in a hurry, with an air of panic, like our opportunity would fade and we must act immediately or lose our chance. All that haste lead to a series of provisionally minded decisions.
The house we picked is a charming one-hundred year old foursquare farmhouse with the original wood siding on a double lot. Style wise we move between shabby chic and modernism, and the house suits both my wife’s antique pine hutch, as much as a the teak dinette set we bought at auction.
When you buy an older house that has not been ruined by renovations, you have to start updating as soon as things fall apart. The home inspector we hired turned out to be known around town for his poor judgment. To him every flaw was a question of good bones. It’s got good bones, he would say over and over again. It didn’t take long for the skeletons to appear.
When we lived in the city we would visualize our home in the country and imagine fixing up a diamond in the rough. But there is the fantasy about having a fixer upper versus actually fixing it up, and my skills were mixed, at best.
At first though we took to it with good energy and made some real changes including a new roof, a deck, a perimeter fence, we cut down nuisance trees, insulated, and repaired the shed. We did some simple wiring, we built some interior partitions, some closets, and painted throughout.
Somewhere after our youngest was born, while we scaled a new venture, our attention to all matters house took a back seat to the pressing concerns of the now. Kids, business, life, death, and the range of daily vicissitudes were enough to capture anyone’s full attention.
Whenever I surveyed everything that needed to be done, I’d get bummed out. I was ready to leave it all behind for more space, more land, more…finished frontiers. Meanwhile, the gutters need cleaning, the house needs painting, new windows, all of what a flipper would do. But that would neutralize everything charming we love about our house.
After several years of questioning our direction, we resolved to remain, and to continue to cultivate this space. Once that decision was made, the list of “to do” got longer, but the sense of continuity with our experience here grew deeper.
Despite everything that needs to be repaired there is never a day when I dislike my house. Since accepting this as our place, I kind of relish being here. There are moments when the light in the house is perfect. We don’t see sunsets, but the master bedroom has a solarium attached and the morning light is glorious.
We have a large backyard with an artist’s shed that we a built together during the pandemic lock down to give us another space to escape from one another. There are raspberry bushes that we planted on my wife’s first mother’s day, which have spread and flourished from the southern exposure.
Nothing is quite as good as picking berries in your own yard, although we do have a vegetable patch that produces a bulk of tomatoes which give the berries a run for the money. We also have a raised bed of garlic, which yields over a hundred heads a year, our entire annual need. Plus, we have never seen a vampire the whole time we have lived here.
We layed a small stone patio with limestone slabs gathered from digging up the garden beds. We have two feeders than provide sustenance to a wide range of birds all year long, including families of cardinals and blue jays. To counter the squirrels, I don’t leave peanuts out for the jays, but when I hear them caw from a nearby tree, I dash outside and scatter a handful for them to swoop and pick.
Beyond the wonderful spaces, and the ones that need work, truly the most precious moments of my life have all happened in this house. My children arrived home for the first time here, and every space has a story to tell of their whole lives. Sometimes I catch myself remembering a moment that happened in an exact spot. I can close my eyes and be right in that time.
In that respect, my old house is a time machine, and it holds a psychic record of each of our days that we have lived here. It holds the joy, the tears, the elation and celebration, the mourning, and mostly, as the sun crests the horizon each day and bathes us in golden light, it holds the hope for our family into the future.
All of the things that are wrong with our house are physical things, readily remedied with effort and money, whereas all the things that are right about our house are irreplaceable memories, a sense of continuity and belonging. It reminds me of that quote by the Warren Buffet who says: “The Happiest people do not necessarily have the best things. They simply appreciate the things they have.”
And, with all my heart, I appreciate my old house.
This has been 1000 words or less, I’m Jake Hounds.
Thanks for listening.
One Thousand Words or Less is one hundred percent created by flawed natural human intelligence.
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