Expectations

We bought a house built in 1900. The nice way to phrase this is that the house had “good bones” but substantial issues. Within three years, we replaced the roof, put in a new boiler, replaced the original 1900-era windows with modern ones, stripped old wallpaper, and removed the tacky shag carpet in all the rooms.

But it could have been worse. A friend bought a home where the bathroom required many bottles of bleach, cleanser, and Odor-Begone to remove the scent reminiscent of a subway station bathroom. Another bought a house with poorly spaced joists, and the floors were “bouncy.”

Like now, the cost of rentals was going up, we had four children, and the cost of buying was again going up. A woman we were friendly with was a real estate agent. She reminded me that I had a GI Bill benefit for a mortgage. Soon, we owned a home with the bank.

Our dream home? It depends on how you define it. The yard was nothing but a poorly maintained lawn. The four children saw it as a potential wilderness for exploration but felt it needed work. The first step was digging a pond. Gaining my cooperation, we cleared the invasive vines in the back and discovered that the signs there said behind us lay a wildlife sanctuary. So, we began rewilding the area around the pond to integrate with the refuge. Then, in went the garden beds elsewhere in the yard. And eventually, up went the greenhouse (which ultimately became my workshop.

Over the years, the work inside proceeded as we bootstrapped upgrade and update programs. We gutted the upstairs bathroom down to framing a few years ago and rebuilt it; last year, we did the same to one of the partially finished back rooms.

I understand that people want to walk into a home that has been stripped and refurbished to the point that all they have to do is sit in the recliner with a glass of wine. It’s like waving the magic wand, uttering a spell, and poof, perfection. Like many paradisical situations, it may not be as expected.

House “flipping” has become popular in our area – you buy and renovate a tired property. You then sell it to a customer as their completely refurbished perfect home. Sounds great, but for several new homeowners in my neighborhood, the dream house promise has soured as they discover that many of the renovations were not to construction code standards or that the appliances were cheap and failed rapidly.

In our house, the lack of renovation saved us money. We did not need to remove well-intentioned, poorly done homeowner DIY projects. There were no layers of shingles over old leaks as patches and no bad remodel jobs. The last significant remodel had been around the late 1950s. This made our work easier and cheaper to do.

Everyone wants a dream home. But appearances can be deceptive; sometimes, the way to a comfortable and liveable home is indirect. You may have to create your dream home rather than purchase and move into one. It may be as Sri Chinmoy suggests that “Peace begins when expectation ends.”