House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

  There is the argument that, as with fracking, this is the owner’s property to develop as they like—and yet I believe that it’s not only architecture that suffers when we treat a house as a mere possession. We are diminished as well. There is much that a renovation can teach us about respect and empathy, the weaving of our needs into those of another—even if the other is made of wood. Perhaps especially so. A house is a quiet partner; you have to listen carefully.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S PROBABLY CLEAR THAT of these three approaches, Ben and I gravitated toward renovation. A renovation implies an equal relationship between a house and its humans—and I found the idea of working with the house to be far more exciting than working for it, or on it. Not simply because of my obvious tendency toward anthropomorphism, but because I love making connections. It can get messy or complicated, but that’s half the point. I wanted to understand our house and what it had to teach me.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE SAME TIME THAT we were making this choice about the house, we were seeing couples around us facing similar decisions with their marriages. Many of us had eldest children in middle school, and after years in the tunnel of raising young offspring, for the first time we were having a chance to look up and around. The partner many saw across the dinner table was not always the person they remembered falling in love with. Or perhaps it was their own needs that had changed. In any case, it seemed that everywhere Ben and I looked, marriages were blasting apart. It was scary.

  If marriages are like houses, then it is understandable that sometimes the structure will simply no longer fit. Or maybe it was the wrong style to begin with. But when I looked across the dining room table, I still saw the man I had married, even if our marriage had gone in a different direction than we had intended. There were things we needed to change, but how to accomplish that without destroying what we had would be tricky.

  We had one advantage over those other couples, however—we had a big old house full of trash.

  * * *

  —

  AS WE LEARNED THE EXTENT of the work required for the house, Ben and I had to concede that we needed a local general contractor on board. We knew as well, however, that even with a contractor, every house project needs a point person for all the decisions that arise, as well as someone to keep an eye on quality and finances—and that everything goes more smoothly if that contact person is one spouse, not both.

  It wasn’t a clear or simple decision whether that person should be Ben or me. Ben had a facility with plans, and he knew tools; he’d helped his father build a cabin and worked on a demolition crew for two hot summers in Saint Louis. He had also recently left his job with a big company and was working on his own, which gave him more flexibility. On the other hand, I had overseen projects for our house in Seattle, and I was used to keeping things on budget and schedule while still being a parent.

  This time, however, the project was an entire house—two hours and a ferry ride away. No chance to zip back home for a child’s forgotten lunch or to be there when they got home from school. If I was to be the point person for the house in Port Townsend, we would need to make some radical shifts in how our current household functioned. I, for one, was ready to see that happen.

  Like many people, Ben and I had a different plan for our lives when we began our marriage. We’d met in college; Ben was studying to be a sculptor, and I wanted to be a writer. In those long, delicious conversations you have when you first fall in love, we shared visions of two artist parents with flexible jobs, passing the beautiful batons of our children back and forth through creative and satisfying days.

  My own parents had had a traditional marriage—the father goes to work and does important things, while the mother takes care of the kids. With the confidence of a twenty-one-year-old, I was certain that Ben and I could do better. I got into graduate school, and we moved to Seattle, determined to chart our own, new course.

  But life happens. While I was busy studying, Ben—who found the reality of a wife with her head in a book remarkably boring—discovered computers. By the time I finally graduated, facing a job market with 350 candidates for every college teaching position, he was working in the software industry. If we chose to prioritize his career, we could stay in Seattle, a city we loved. I could write and be a mother, away from the academia that I had already become disenchanted with. A perfect solution.

  And one that quickly began to look eerily like my parents’ marriage. I had married a man I thought was as different from my engineer father as possible—and yet at one point in our marriage, Ben not only worked for the same company my father had, he held the same job title. He was the one leaving early in the morning and getting home late; I was the one getting up at night with a sick child so my husband could sleep.

  I had wanted children, a longing that had risen in my bloodstream, at times in direct contrast with logic or brain. Before the kids were born, I’d lived in an academic world, my days spent in libraries, searching for authors that time had hidden. I reveled in the deep walls of silence that grew up around me as I sank into my task, how the world outside was replaced by one formed only of thoughts. And yet I’d yearned for something else—brightness, warmth. A life lived in the body and soul as well as in the mind.

  My children arrived, and I fell into them. They didn’t so much change my perspective as obliterate it. Writing became something I slipped in during a baby’s nap or an hour or two of preschool. But the truth was that, even in those excerpts of time, I could never really shut down the listening ear. You could say it was guilt, but just as much it was the desire to catch sight of my son’s face as he first woke up, or to hear my daughter’s excitement as she told me about her fifty plans for our afternoon. My children reached out for my life, and I gave it to them without hesitation.

  Still, at times I could feel it, a steady drip, as if I were leaving a watery trail of myself as I walked through the kitchen, drove the car pool, and made birthday cakes. I loved my children; I loved my husband—but I could not help privately feeling as if I had somehow broken a contract with myself. Whether or not Ben felt the same as he sat in his office—if he yearned to be back in a studio with his hands sliding over arcs and hollows of wood rather than dealing with user interfaces and beta testing—was a question we never had the time or energy to discuss. But now that the kids were thirteen and ten years old, we had a little more flexibility.

  The house in Port Townsend had shown up like a big asbestos-covered marriage counselor, forcing the issue. Without realizing it, we had put ourselves in a position that required change. Or maybe we did know it in the back of our minds, just as we must have known, at least a bit, how crazy we were to take on the house at all.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS A COIN TOSS who would get the job of house project manager, but I was eager to do it. The challenge was exciting, and even if it hadn’t been, I was determined not to be left behind at home again.

  There was another consideration as well. Our daughter was now an adolescent, a time when mother-daughter relationships are often at their most difficult. We were no exception. When Kate’s hormones started cycling together with mine, the males in our household hid under the table, dog included. She and I had always had an issue with who was in charge, from the very first time I tried to convince her that wearing a bathing suit to preschool in the winter was not a great idea.

  I worship, often too fervently, at the altar of control; it soothes my mind and brings order to my life. Controlling Kate was like holding water in a colander. She was bold, intelligent—I could see the person she would be as an adult, and it filled me with awe, but this interim period was driving us both crazy.

  “You don’t trust me to be in the house by myself,” she’d accuse me, furious, when I’d come home and trace the dots of forbidden green or blue or orange hair dye that created a trail from the bathroom sink, up the stairs, to her room.

  But Be
n had a sense of humor, and he liked teenagers. Always had.

  “Hair grows,” he would tell me. “There’s paint for the walls.”

  While I would sit there, muttering in my martyrdom about who would be repainting those walls, he would just hand the brush to Kate—which made him the far better choice to parent an adolescent.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU SHOULD DO THE RENOVATION,” Ben said. “It’s your turn. I can handle the kids—and honestly, I can do it better when you’re not here.”

  That was part of what worried me. The one time I had left my little family alone for a week, I had come back to stories of pizza night after night, and a massive cleanup in the hour before I returned. Nobody died, but it wasn’t the way I did things.

  “If we’re going to do this,” Ben continued as if reading my mind, “we can’t double-parent—on either end. Construction guys will naturally turn toward the guy for a decision; that’s just how it is. And the kids will always look to you. We gotta make it clear who’s in charge—you’re out there, and I’m here.”

  “Okay,” I said, wondering how well either one of us could keep that bargain.

  Later, I talked with the kids.

  “What do you think?” I asked, watching their reactions carefully.

  “Would you live there?” Ry asked.

  “No way,” I said. “And you’ll barely know I’m gone. It’ll mostly be while you’re at school.”

  “I think it would be great for you,” Kate said, her eyes lit by the possibilities, but whether they were for her or me, I wasn’t sure. “Go for it,” she said.

  Or perhaps, just go.

  * * *

  —

  IN HIS BOOK WHY WE BUILD, Rowan Moore presents a fascinating way of thinking about architecture, although his theory could apply just as easily to relationships: “Buildings, seemingly so fixed, are always in motion. From conception to demolition, they are negotiations between the people who make, use, and experience them…. They are propositions about the lives they might contain, always subject to revision.”

  Nothing is static. You can see this in the structures around you as they adapt to their owners’ needs. The theory is writ large in warehouses that turn into artists’ lofts, a fishing boat that finds new life as a writer’s studio, and railroad tracks that become bicycle paths.

  There are some structures that are purposefully designed to evolve over time. When the city of Iquique, Chile, wanted to rehouse squatter communities, they hired architect Alejandro Aravena. The budget was tiny, but rather than build flimsy larger structures, Aravena created what he called “half a good house”—narrow three-story linked units with open spaces between the upper floors. He put the money into the kitchens and bathrooms, the most expensive parts of a house, and gave each family just enough room to live in. As the families became able to afford it, the open spaces between the upper floors allowed them to expand for their own purposes. The buildings became an invitation, providing something else that was essential—room for the imagination.

  Seen through this kind of lens, our built environments become something entirely different—not static structures, but more like gardens, planted and tended with a patient belief in the future, structures that can give us different views in different seasons, that grow as we grow.

  The poet Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House provides an inspiring example of this way of thinking. When Jeffers and his wife, Una, discovered the coast of Carmel, California, they bought a piece of land, and over the years, Jeffers built a series of structures there using local stone. First came a small one-story house styled after an English cottage. Later, over the course of four years, Jeffers built Hawk Tower as a gift to his wife and their twins. Incorporated into both structures were small stones from all over the world—from the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt to cathedrals in England—and lava from Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano.

  There is something marvelously integrated about these buildings. They seem to come from the ground itself—distinctly human-made and yet part of their surroundings. And their production was equally integrated into Jeffers’s life. He would write in the morning and build in the afternoon, letting the work of fitting stone into stone help him plan his poems. He continued this routine throughout his life. In the end, Tor House was a home that grew and changed, created with Jeffers’s imagination for his family. I cannot imagine a better love poem.

  This is what I wanted in my marriage with Ben, I realized: a stone structure built over decades with hands of love; a warehouse that turns into a space for creativity; railroad tracks that become a path to adventure. When it came to my marriage, I didn’t want the restriction of a restoration, the requirement to preserve a structure that no longer fit. But neither did I want the wrecking bar. I wanted a renovation.

  Which, of course, leads you right back to that tricky fourth R.

  Part II:

  DIGGING OUT

  TRASH

  Every house is a living museum of habitation.

  —David Owen

  OVER THE YEARS, PEOPLE HAVE asked us, usually with confused looks on their faces, why we offered to clean out the house in Port Townsend. For the most part, we just pointed to the simplest reason: it was the only way to move the negotiations along. Many folks assumed we hoped to find treasure, and there was a bit of that—I had spied an antique rolltop desk at the back of the basement as we did our inspection of the house. But what really motivated us was something completely different.

  One of the things that binds Ben and me together is our love of stories. We collect stories the way other people do Hummel dolls or beer steins. We line them up on the shelves of our minds, hold them up in varying lights, and see how they change. They are the bones of our family, the warm and moving blood of our friendships, and the telling of them is an art of its own. I’d wanted to be a novelist my entire life, but those everyday stories were the closest I’d ever gotten. They were an outlet for narrative when being an author still seemed so impossible that it felt like someone else’s dream.

  And so if I am to be honest, I will tell you that when we agreed to clean out the house, it was not for expediency, or the hopes of finding an item that would stun the experts on Antiques Roadshow. It was for the stories.

  As they say, be careful what you wish for.

  * * *

  —

  WE SET OUT FROM Seattle on a Saturday morning in early February, dressed in our most expendable work clothes. The house had been legally ours for only fourteen hours, but Ben and I were already heading for Port Townsend, taking our children with us, anxious to get in that reluctant front door and start removing trash. It was past time to start taking care of things, to clear out all that was in the way of what could be.

  As Ben drove, he and I tried to explain to the kids about the value of working on the house together—home renovation as family bonding. Underlying our words was the subtext, understood by everyone in the car, that everybody else thought we were crazy, but they, our children, would have to help us.

  “I think we deserve better than minimum wage,” Kate said.

  “Who said you were being paid?” Ben replied, shooting her a grin.

  “Okay,” said Kate, shifting tactics fluidly, “but I get the motorcycles on the front porch.” She was years away from a license, but Kate had been yearning to drive since she was born, eager to hit the gas and head off to a life of her own making.

  We spent the rest of the trip speculating about what we might find. During the inspection we’d seen a pristine KitchenAid mixer and a covey of antique cameras mingled among the bedlam of objects—and then there was that rolltop desk. Who knew? Perhaps we would find enough to give us a head start toward the renovation. Or at least pay the dump fees.

  “I really hope I find a jump rope,” said Ry to no one and everyone in particular. “The kind with the wooden handles.”

  As far as we knew, Ry had never even jumped rope, but I was in no position to call anyone else’s
desires strange at that point. I looked back, and he gave me a small smile.

  * * *

  —

  “THE MOTORCYCLES ARE GONE,” announced Ben as he reached the front porch.

  “Damn,” said Kate. “All of them?”

  We unlocked the front door and made a quick pass through the house. It appeared the heirs had finally found motivation. The big-screen television and the KitchenAid had been carted away. In the bedrooms, dresser drawers had been emptied, the unwanted contents dumped on top of the items already on the floor, like a fresh layer on a compost heap.

  Down in the basement, Ben and I looked across the swamp of old boxes and furnace filters and rolls of dirty insulation to a neat, square hole in the back corner, where the antique rolltop desk used to be.

  “How the hell did they get that out?” Ben asked. “Teleportation?”

  What was left behind was disconcertingly and definitely trash—mountains and days and weeks of it. As we stood there looking, an oily smell slithered in from the furnace room. I peeked in the door and saw dozens of coffee cans filled with a shiny black motor oil, scattered around the floor like a field of liquid land mines. We had seen them during the inspection, but I had been focusing elsewhere. Now, I realized that I didn’t even know what to do with used oil, and my utter lack of knowledge suddenly seemed vitally important.