The Homeowner Itch

As I read about other bloggers finding their new homes - Daharja, Shasha, Christy, and now Ruthie - it makes me anxious to find a home for us. Part of this longing is the desire to finally be settled but, I realized this morning, another part is the desire to make a place our own again. We've now been renters for almost five years.

Five years of living with someone else's landscaping choices. Five years of seeing someone else's paint colors. Five years of cleaning the wide grout lines on the kitchen counters. Five years of hating the front curtains.

I can hear some of you asking why we did not paint in our color choices or replace the front curtains. Simple. Money. We don't want to invest our time and money into someone else's property. But surely, you say, you could have at least done something about the curtains! Well, it's not as easy as that. The ceiling slopes down too low and standard curtains drag on the ground. I don't sew well enough to make new ones or alter someone else's curtains, and my sweetie has been too busy with work, garden, and other projects. So, we've just lived with it, although I did finally use safety pins last year to lift the darn things off the ground.

My point is that we want our very own place where we can invest our time and effort into making it suit our needs. In the past, this would have meant aesthetic choices as well as practical ones. In the future, when we do get a place, practical will have to take precedence over aesthetics for financial reasons. Luckily, we've had lots of practice with doing our own remodeling and won't mind doing the work ourselves. We're also good at salvaging materials so hopefully we can keep the costs down.

Reading Ruthie's dreams about what she wants to do with their new home, after a thorough cleaning, reminds me of an early 1900s small house we purchased a number of years ago. Although it was occupied by an alcoholic old lady when we looked at it, we could see the potential. It took us three and a half days to clean out the empty whisky bottles, the filthy refrigerator with moldy food in it, steam clean the carpets, and make it habitable, but we grew to love the house.

Room by room, we took up the disgusting old carpet with crumbly padding underneath it, always surprised at what we discovered beneath it. In our bedroom, for instance, we decided we needed some color on the walls. This was a radical step for me; I grew up in a house with white walls and white trim, and the furniture never budged after we moved in. Boring!

For my first foray into color, we chose a pale chiffon yellow for the walls with a dusky rose for the trim. It turned out very nice. At this point, it was obvious the worn carpet had to go. Imagine our surprise when we uncovered early 1930s aqua linoleum in a paisley pattern featuring flowers in the exact yellow and rose colors on our walls. I learned how to strip and wax the old linoleum, and the result was gorgeous and durable.

The living room yielded a similar linoleum, in yellow, but it was in such bad shape we could not salvage it. Underneath it was hiding the original wood floor: tongue-in-groove pine planks measuring the full length of the room - 25 feet. It had been painted at some point, but some time with a floor sander revealed a gorgeous old floor. Some paint remained, giving it a nice antiqued look.

We could read the story of the house in the scars on the floor, coming up with theories on its history. A handmade copper plate nestled in the floorboards in the middle of the room. It had a hold in the center of it and there were nail holes going towards the wall in both directions. It appeared that there were French doors installed at some point with the bottom bolt securing into the copper plate. Perhaps the front of the room served as the living room while the back served as the kitchen. That would explain the burn marks and stove holes in the back portion of the floor. The sash windows still had their original wavy glass. In an effort to keep with the old look of the house, I carved out potato stamps to paint tulips on the window frames.

We made many other interesting discoveries in that house as we fixed it up over several years. Someone turned an outside porch into a second bathroom without bothering to replace the dry-rotted porch decking. They just tiled right over the old wood. They also put Sheetrock right over the exterior door rather than remove it. In the other bathroom, we removed the medicine cabinet to give it a fresh coat of paint and discovered gaping holes between the wood slats letting in outside air. No wonder that bathroom was always cold in the winter! The outside shed was originally a horse barn and had six inches of old compressed horse manure hidden under the dirt floor. The dead rose on the side of the house still had its tag on it - a climbing Queen Elizabeth with a 6" diameter base. A patch of succulents in a pot outside served as the host plant for a type of butterfly never before recorded in that town.

I want to form new memories in a new home. I want to build up soil for a big garden. I want to learn to make window quilts. I want a permanent pedal-powered work station for the kitchen. I want my own place. Of course, I'll be more than happy to share it with my sweetie and the dog, although there may need to be a special room where she is banished when she has bad gas.