by Meghan Daum
How did I know this? I didn’t, of course. But I do remember that in the midst of this booze-soaked reverie, as I tried to ignore the fact that my legs were getting chewed by some form of menacing no-see-um in the grass and that coyotes—those marauders I’d bragged about in an effort to sound tough—were no doubt watching me from the brush, I allowed myself to drift into the wish that I weren’t alone. Though I wanted to be alone at that moment, though I wouldn’t have invited anyone up to that hill that night even if I was wearing his ring on my finger, I found myself wondering if I’d ever have a ring on my finger and, if so, how that might or might not change the conditions of the road that gave me everything. Had the house effectively nailed me to one spot on the earth? Would it ward off potential life partners? Or, as per my thinking during the time of crazed house hunting, would it put my best and most authentic self into such high relief that the bad ones would skulk off in fear and the right one would emerge like a card in a magic trick? In other words, did the house look sexy on me? And would I, given my gladly celibate state, ever feel sexy in it?
Unanswerable questions all. Especially when you’re dizzy and itchy and your dog is eating coyote dung and you’re afraid you’re going to trip on a root and break your ankle and have to shout for help, which would be a really bad way to meet the neighbors. Still, as night settled in and Rex, now leashed, pulled me along the path back to the house, a surprising decision came to me. It was surprising not only because it was fully out of the realm of any decision I was making at the time but also because it’s not really the kind of thing a person decides. It’s the sort of thing you want maybe, perhaps even the sort of thing you strongly hope to implement. But that wasn’t good enough. There on that hill, in my thirty-fourth year, in my sixth hour of home ownership, I decided that if I ever got married—and that was an if and not a when—it would be on that hill.
Until I actually signed those escrow papers, the house had been less a visual entity than a contractual one. The first and only time I’d seen it, the day I made my offer, I’d spent maybe five minutes inside the place before zooming down the street with Michael in his Audi TT so we could start the paperwork in his office. Barred from going inside again until I actually took ownership, I’d driven by it a few times with friends and, since it was unoccupied, poked around in the yard and peered in the windows. But even though the yard had continued to be mowed and the hedges trimmed, the house seemed only half there, its pulse faint, its breathing shallow. It also looked smaller every time I went back, though in the catapulting market no one questioned the wisdom of dropping $450,000 on it. The smallest improvements, not to mention the mere passing of weeks, would cause no end of appreciation.
“Here,” a friend said, picking up an ugly plastic doormat and depositing it in the trash bin behind the house. “You’ve just increased the value by $5,000.”
Upon moving in, though, I found that the key word was “underwhelming.” Following a lazy, artless floor plan reminiscent of a New York City railroad apartment, one room more or less led to the next. The front door opened (abruptly, absent any kind of foyer) into the living room, which led to the kitchen, which led to what was and is the main attraction, a large (by this place’s standards) sunporch with vaulted, beamed ceilings, a woodstove, and windows on three sides. Whereas the house itself was built in 1928, this room had been added in 1983 and apparently not redecorated since. The walls and ceilings, which were made from cheap, pulpy wood, were stained dark brown in the vein of faux-wood paneling. A section of what appeared to be redbrick wall behind the fireplace was actually fake brick face, and the entire floor was covered with a brown woolly carpet.
The rest of the house was pretty standard stuff. Off the living room (again, no hallways; this was corridor-free living) was a small bedroom, and off the kitchen was a smaller one. A small bathroom adjoined them. The kitchen had cheap fake-marble adhesive tile that was sloppily laid over old linoleum that had been sloppily laid over subflooring. The bathroom had not-quite-as-cheap-but-still-awful baby blue tile. The walls, aside from the barklike rec-room-style walls in the back room, were either painted a white that had faded to a sallow, corpselike gray or covered with dark floral wallpaper that, when I looked closely, I realized would have been best suited to a Victorian dollhouse, specifically the plastic kind I remember seeing in the Sears catalog in the mid-1970s.
And then there was the garage. I realize that this is the kind of statement that makes people think women are not equipped to own property other than full-service condos, but I’ll just come out and say it: I didn’t really look at the garage right away because I was afraid to. But let’s understand something: many a grown man was also afraid of this structure (a weirdly endearing macho man who I know owns a gun refused to even approach it; another man told me he wouldn’t go near it without a life insurance policy). What wusses, I thought, though undoubtedly they just thought I was a moron and a sucker. The garage couldn’t be seen from the street or even from the house itself. The only way to see it was to go beyond the fence that encloses the “upper” backyard and descend a narrow, crumbling staircase that drops down from the “lower” backyard like scary basement steps. (How was it that a house approximately the size of a Chevy Suburban came to have such aristocratic trappings as an “upper” and a “lower” yard? I suspected soil erosion was at least partly to thank.) The stairs were a disaster in their own right; if a major earthquake were to strike when a person was on or near them, the likelihood of being crushed was high. The garage itself, while not without its first-century-European–esque charms, could have conceivably collapsed if a heavy truck rolled by.
The garage was also no longer technically a garage but several tons of concrete carved into a precarious, roofless shell. After the disposal of the ugly doormat, this was my first home improvement. The property had been sold in as-is condition, not least of all because the garage, which was presumably built in 1928 or shortly thereafter, had been completely caved in for decades. Somewhere along the line, the slabs of broken concrete from the roof had even bisected a Volkswagen bus parked inside. Signs reading Danger and No Trespassing were nailed to what remained of a rotted wood fence, and the “drive way,” a scabrous stretch of asphalt jutting from a narrow alley, was dusted with the decaying remains of cigarette butts and fast-food containers. At least that’s what things looked like when I peeked back there for the first and only time. After I hired a crew of illegal workers to haul the bus and rubble away, what emerged was a sort of hipster homage to both soil erosion and urban decay.
But I had big plans for it. With the proper excavation and construction, it could be rebuilt, and a guesthouse could be added on top. The garage could be new and state-of-the-art and equipped with Peg-Board and shelves and a workbench and room for two cars. And the guesthouse would really be a writing studio with skylights and a sleeping loft and a bathroom and a kitchenette and vast expanses of walls on which enormous pieces of abstract art would hang. Most days, I’d work there uninterrupted (again, everything completed in this space would be prize-worthy), but when guests visited, I’d move my operation inside the house, which would be fine, too. Because they’d be the kinds of guests with busy schedules, they’d be gone much of the day having lunch and attending meetings. But later they’d come back to my place and freshen up in the guesthouse, and by then I’d be finished working, and we’d drink gin and tonics on the patio and then eat dinner under the lemon tree.
For now, though, the walls were crumbling and covered with faded graffiti. I knew enough not to park my car there, but it wasn’t as if it had nothing going for it. Actually, it seemed reminiscent of a backdrop in the Anthropologie clothing catalog and therefore kind of sexy—at least in the way an undergraduate art student might appreciate. With a ridiculous, cocky pride that no condo dweller or turnkey property owner would ever know, I lured friends (those who would go, anyway) down the steps and into the garage as though it were a secret garden.
“It’s like ancient Rome!�
�� someone said (a kindred spirit, also an art director).
“At least,” said someone else, “you’ve done a nice job with the paint color in the living room.”
In home ownership there are two realms: the visible and the invisible, the fun and the unfun, the parts for which there are paint chips and plant nurseries and catalogs filled with doorknobs and drawer pulls and reproductions of Art Deco light fixtures and the parts for which the only gratification is that your water is running and your lights are on. The visible realm is about choices; the invisible realm is about having no choice. The visible realm is about style; the invisible realm is about substance, though it’s also about having strange men in your house for long periods of time, after which they will charge you a lot of money for only half solving the problem. During the first year in the house, the visible and the invisible competed with each other like siblings who have nothing in common but their parents. There was no doubt, however, about which one I favored. Though I hired an electrician to install a new circuit panel and wrote endless checks to a plumber who replaced many feet of corroded piping beneath the house, my heart belonged to decorating.
And thus also to Dwell. And House Beautiful and Architectural Digest and Elle Decor and Veranda. Though more nourishing than the HGTV shows—the pages often emphasized how expensive it can be to do things well rather than how cheap it is to do them shoddily—I imbibed them by the stack and, as with Trading Spaces and its ilk, sometimes felt like throwing up afterward. It wasn’t just the relentlessness of the magazines, the ubiquity of them, their blockish presence in every doctor’s waiting room, every hair salon, every friend’s bathroom, that got me down even as I devoured them. It was, for me, the intolerable ache of unmet desire they elicited. Just as in my twenties, the hopelessness of ever living in a majestic West End Avenue prewar had made me want to crumble to the sidewalk as I walked past them, reading Architectural Digest proved too much an exercise in self-pity (followed by the requisite guilt for said pity) to devote excessive amounts of time to. Did I really need to read about how a record producer and his vegan chef wife turned their ordinary backyard into a Zen garden with an Infinity pool? Was I doing my brittle ego any favors by exposing it to the smug utterances of an artist couple whose post-and-beam contemporary has not only a living room but also a “conversational pit” and whose carriage house doubles as a studio/gallery/meditation space? If HGTV’s genius lay in its ability to entertain viewers while subconsciously making them feel superior to the hapless homeowners on the shows, the perverted success of high-end shelter magazines (like the fashion magazines that spawned them) was that they entertained you while making you hate not only your house but also yourself. And in the words of the inimitable Alison, I could hate myself on my own; I didn’t need to contract out for it.
Because here was the thing about my particular approach to home renovation: there was—and still is—really no way to characterize it other than half-assed. Lacking the money to make significant changes in fully committed, significant ways, most of my improvements were minor, low cost, and often only semi-improving. Whereas a more ambitious (or less broke) person might have taken out the ancient and wobbly windows and installed new ones, airtight and secure, I simply covered them with curtains and pretended not to notice how easily someone could break in. Whereas, by all rights, the wood floors should have been out and out replaced, I allowed them to be sanded down to a millimeter of their life and then placed rugs over the spots where they buckled from water damage. Whereas the looming disaster of the retaining wall in the backyard would have kept a more responsible person up at night, I elected to put it out of my mind, instead soothing myself to sleep with visions of dinner parties with calla lilies arcing, dancerlike, out of slender glass vases and hors d’oeuvres served on ceramic trays engraved with Asian designs.
In other words, despite all my exertion in the name of home repair, I often wasn’t repairing as much as I was obscuring. And although this made me feel like a fake and a cheater, it also made me feel as if I were doing something. And as I quickly learned, part of the denial that’s essential to home ownership is telling yourself that these somethings—even if they’re tiny, even if they amount to nothing more than reorganizing the silverware drawer—are ultimately making your house worth, if not more, at least not less than the mind-numbing amount you’ve paid. If home ownership is little more than a series of denials about how much money you owe to a bank or a mortgage company, such pseudo-improvements are building blocks of these denials. And they make for nice ceramic serving trays, if not necessarily solid windows.
Enlisting any number of chronically tardy, semi- or non-English-speaking painters and floor refinishers and carpenters and handymen, I set about on my various projects. The remainder of the carpet was pulled up and the floor gingerly resanded by a flooring contractor with a finger missing. The living room was painted mint green, the bedroom bright blue, the bathroom butterscotch (I didn’t bother with the window or door trim, the scuffed and chipping white paint of which was reminiscent of an Upper West Side prewar and thus signified acceptability). In the back room, I did as much as I could while staying within the bounds of what I could still describe as “nothing too major.” Sleek, nickel-plated industrial-style ceiling fans replaced the cheap light fixtures, the concrete floor underneath the brown carpet was polished for a shiny, loftlike effect, and white paint covered every inch of the ceiling and walls, including the fake brick behind the woodstove, which looked considerably less fake that way. Sliding doors leading to the patio were replaced with French doors (this was pretty major, a fact I think I subconsciously tried to deny by buying faux-vintage doorknobs at Anthropologie—yes, the same store whose catalog reminded me of my garage—and ineptly screwing them into the doors in such a way that they did not rotate but merely protruded from either side as if the door had a bone through its nose). Furniture and appliances were bought via Craigslist: a 1930s-era pedestal bathroom sink, four wrought-iron patio chairs, numerous lamps to compensate for my aversion to overhead lights. Other furniture and appliances—the old bathroom sink, the old light fixtures—were sold on Craigslist or deposited by the curb for bulky-item trash collection. After a few months, the mint green living room was repainted terra-cotta, the bright blue bedroom repainted mint green.
The economy and culture of California being what they are, I became an employer not just of intermittent workers but also of regular help. A Mexican gardener named Fernando came every week for $75 a month. A Guatemalan cleaning lady named Marta came twice a month for $80 a pop. Every so often, a nice man (of no discernible ethnic background) from the water softener company came by and replaced the rock salt for a fee of $45. Having decided there was little point in denying my status as a gentrifier, I joined the neighborhood security association, a network of mostly middle- and upper-middle-class homeowners that employed a small stable of private patrol officers to cruise the neighborhood and scare any potential marauders, most of which amounted to kids loitering near the park. For this service I paid $55 a quarter in dues.
In an effort to keep my personal and professional life in concert with the speedy pulse of my home improvement and maintenance efforts, I tried to be social, to be productive, even occasionally to be joyous. I walked Rex in the park and sat on the hill while he nosed around in the grass. I sang Van Morrison songs while screwing towel hooks into the bathroom walls or assembling shelves in the closet. I entertained friends. Alison came over for Thai takeout; eight or ten friends came for dinner; a crowd of more than seventy-five showed up for an early October housewarming that spilled from the backyard into all rooms of the house and jammed the surrounding streets with cars. I went to the gym, to yoga, to parties, and to occasional (and still entirely pointless) meetings with movie or TV executives. I met friends for dinner or for drinks and, on one occasion, while chatting with the guy on the bar stool next to me, achieved my goal of looking squarely into an attractive stranger’s eyes and saying, “I own a house.” As it happ
ened, so did he. And it contained his wife and children. This didn’t bother me. Dating him was not the point. Dating in general was not the point. Despite a vague recollection that I’d planned to resume dating or at least combing my hair once I held title and deed on a reasonably well-decorated, furnished, plumbed, and wired house, I still found myself mired in my second latency period. The few men who showed interest in me seemed puerile or psychologically unstable or both. My hair was still too short and too orange. I had no interest in rectifying these matters.
Indeed, amid the euphoria of my home-ownership dream realized, a peculiar darkness had set in around me. Though I’d been counting on the house to make me content—not happy, of course, but content—the act of taking ownership had somehow done the opposite. It was as if my mood had been goaded away from situational discontentedness into a dysthymia that seemed now to be heading into full-fledged depression. In some ways, though, the word “depression” seems not right. What I felt, rather, was asleep. At least half-asleep. Somewhere along the line, in between getting references for all these workmen, calling them, waiting for them to show up, and hearing excuses as to why they didn’t (the grand-prize winner in the excuse category: “I had internal bleeding”), something had happened to my brain that felt not unlike light anesthesia. It wasn’t that I was unhappy or angry or wanting anything to be different. It was more that I was beginning to feel an unsettling torpor lining the contours of my existence, a sense of neutrality that was only exacerbating my neutered physical essence and slowly pushing me toward a state of being in which my favorite activity, aside from monitoring antique light fixture auctions on eBay, was turning in for the night with Rex. Whether or not it was cold, I preferred he sleep not at the foot of the bed but next to me, preferably with his head on a pillow.
