Contents: One House – Some Assembly Required
Many of my single friends complain about the constant nagging they get from their friends and family to “find someone” and “settle down”. While I don’t doubt that that such nagging can get rather irksome after a while, I challenge any of these bachelors and bachelorettes to put up with the constant pressure Dave and I endured about our choice of dwelling unit.
“Why are you still renting?”
“You’re throwing money away!”
“When are you going to look for a house?”
“You need to start building some equity!”
“You guys are still in that apartment? How many years is that now?”
This pressure only intensified after Alexandra was born and people began to imply that it was nothing short of child abuse to live in a two-bedroom apartment with an infant.
While I will admit that towards the end, the apartment did get a bit cramped, Dave and I have several good reasons for waiting to buy a house. (Well, we think they’re good and since we’re the ones who are in the hole for thirty years to the mortgage company, we’re going stick with our opinion for now.)
- Saving up a down payment for a house takes quite a bit of time, particularly when the household consists of two liberal arts majors and a baby.
- Deciding where to buy said house takes some time, particularly when the household consists of people who don’t like long commutes and who don’t know where they’ll be working in the foreseeable future.
- We hate packing.
- We have moving.
- We hate unpacking.
Despite these reservations, however, Dave and I eventually did the deed, pun intended. We bought a house. A nice one. One we could afford. One we can see ourselves in for years to come. I’ll save you the house-hunting details, especially since Dave did such an excellent job of summing them up already.
So, once we were in said house, surrounded by our transplanted stuff and now having much more space to store it in, we realized that, perhaps, just perhaps, there should have been a #6 to the list of reasons we had for stalling the whole process:
WE HAVE NO EARLTHY NOTION OF HOW TO BE HOMEOWNERS.
Maybe it could have even been promoted to #5.
Let’s start with me. Aside from baking, which I rarely have time to do anymore, my domestic skills are somewhat limited. Replacing buttons are the extent of my sewing abilities. Every plant I have ever owned has died a slow and painful death. My decorating talents costs of whatever I have managed to tuck away in my brain from the latest episode of Trading Spaces. I’m not a bad housekeeper but given that I have a one-year old who can undo a day’s worth of cleaning in fifteen minutes, I’m not sure I can count that as a skill.
Now at the risk of speaking ill of my other half, I will say that on the long list of people Dave grew up admiring, Bob Vila’s name is noticeably absent. Dave is a wonderful writer, a first-rate teacher, one of the most loyal friends to be found on this Earth and a great father to boot. He is not, however, a handyman. The good part about this is that he knows it. He confines himself to the aisles in Home Depot that have things that he recognizes. All two of ’em. Just kidding.
So there we are, two fairly bright individuals, now homeowners, with nary a domestic skill in sight. So what am I, a woman who has now signed half her paycheck away for the next thirty years, to do? I do what any grown women would do in a similar situation. I called my Mommy. And called her. And called her again.
‘We need curtains. I don’t know what kind I need. I don’t know how long they should be. I don’t even know where they’re supposed to hang from. What in the heck is a transverse rod?’
‘We have plants in our front yard that look like they’re trying to eat the front door. How do I kill them? Why to they keep coming back? How do I tell the plants from the weeds? Do they make “Big Honking Attack Plant-B-Gone”?’
‘How often should I clean hardwood floors? Why are there 36 different types of hardwood floor cleaners at the store? Is it supposed to smell like that?’
‘What color should we paint the living room? Do I need to prime before I paint? Why does Home Depot make 184 shades of white paint?’
Finally, partly because she was tired of my calling and partly to reassure me, my mother told me not to worry. We certainly weren’t the first people to buy first and panic later. In fact, she confessed that she and my father didn’t have a clue how about home ownership when they bought their home twenty years ago. Your father, she said, didn’t know one screw from another. That shocked me. My childhood memories are filled with images of my father hammering, painting, planting, and mulching things. I remember my mother being buried under piles of fabric, which magically became drapes and coverlets. These were really important homeowner-y things. Mom and Dad things. Imagine my surprise at finding out that my Mom and Dad weren’t born knowing how to do everything I remember them doing for me as a kid. No, really, I was actually surprised. I guess I just never really thought of them as incapable of anything.
That realization both disturbed and comforted me. For one, it’s yet more evidence that, despite my efforts to convince myself otherwise, my parents are, in fact, human. They don’t know everything and they also won’t always be there to fix things for me. I am a grown-up with a family and a household of my own. As glad as I am that that’s true, sometimes I want to go back to the place where my parents do know everything and they can fix everything for me. I can’t have it both ways. It’s time to move on.
So, here we are. Homeowners. Three bedrooms, one and half bath, a backyard, a one-year old, and a Sears credit card. It’s going to be one heck of ride.
