Buying our House
We are in Santa Fe at the Folk Art Museum in August of 2014, when our realtor texts us a photo of the next contestant: another house that has come up for sale. It is a cute bungalow but it has only two bedrooms and it's priced to incite a feeding frenzy, which we dread. With low enthusiasm, we reply that we will be back in town for the open house that weekend and we'll take a look.
This is starting to remind me of internet dating in 1999.
The house is right where we want it—maybe not the most glamorous street in the neighborhood, but well located. It has sweet curb appeal, and while it's not the bungalow of my dreams, it's pretty convincing from the street and not badly altered. The rooms, painted completely white and mostly devoid of furniture, seem reasonably sized. All of the oak floors are recently refinished. My spouse, our agent, and I are lined up on the bench in the nook, looking westward down thirty feet of living room (through a dense crowd of other potential bidders). The living room seems narrow, but it is clean and bright with quarter-sawn oak floors, a box beam ceiling, and a plain brick fireplace—not functioning, of course—at the far end. All of the oak floors are recently refinished, though I am grumpy about the too-dark walnut finish (I later find out that it was not the trendiness of dark floors that drove this, but the years of pet stains from, uh, leaks through carpet—eew). I find myself thinking: I could live here.
But the exterior? What a mess. Any feelings of peace that I experience looking out over the living room turn to revulsion with a glance at the condition of paint on shingles and the deterioration of the barge board ends and rafter tails. It's livable, but what an expensive maintenance mess the exterior will be! Some shingles are in okay condition, but their paint is flaking off all over the place. Some shingles are in dreadful condition, but their paint is managing to cling to them. Old shingles themselves, in this condition especially, are too delicate to sand the paint off of mechanically, and besides, the lead paint containment rules (and common sense) say that you can't just sand that stuff off anyway. It's not 1975! Actually, in 1975 the shingles probably looked a lot better than they do now, so wouldn’t be too bad.
(Now that I look it up, I see that in 1977 the house sold for $67,000!)
A windowless lean-to sits on the left side of the creaking deck and houses an old washer and dryer. The disgusting space is filling up with dryer lint stuck to every lower surface, including the slumping, delaminating plywood doors outside to the deck itself—thankfully not shown here.
Not enough paint outside, and way too much inside. Box beams, moldings, baseboards, door and window casing, window sash and frames, window hardware, hinges, mantel, v-groove paneling in the service porch: every wood surface that is presumably the builder-grade fir of 1910 is completely covered in paint. In the same color of paint. All of it.
I kind of liked that table, but I’m glad the fan is now just a memory! Apparently there used to be a proper Craftsman built-in over on that far side in the center, but it must have been pretty small. This is kind of a snooze as bungalow dining rooms go. It’s not clear whether more features were removed at some point. No plate rail or wainscoting?
Something clearly has to happen with the foundation, too. Walking across the living room gives me the odd sensation of walking downhill toward the front door, and then when I go to turn around I feel my body prepare to walk back uphill.
Eventually we realize that we have to bid and stay in the game or we'll never end up in this neighborhood. We amend our charming letter to appeal to these sellers, say that we can handle an old house without saying “we can handle cleaning up the mess you've made of this place over the past thirty years;” we come up with an absurdly high number, and we hope for the best. We get a counter-offer. We hear things (perhaps too much). We make another absurdly high offer designed to cut the crap once and for all. We resign ourselves to a two-bedroom house with no hallway and the paint peeling off it. But two weeks or so after the open house, we are in escrow and IN the neighborhood!
It looks deceptively clean in this photo. Very deceptive: those oak-y cabinets are completely grimy where for years (lacking any hardware) they pawed at the corners of the cabinets to open them and never once, it appears, attempted to clean them.
Is that a gushing love story, or what?? No, it wasn’t that way. I never expected, frankly, that at my ripe age and with the resources we have I’d be settling for something so small and disappointing and in such a raw state. Somehow I thought that as an architectural historian and a plain-old-house-lover I was entitled to something nicer? What, is THAT how it works!? My parents bought a pretty special house (a stylish and sprawling 1950s “custom ranch” with cork floors, mahogany paneling, and giant sliding doors and windows) when they were 15 years younger than I was when buying this house, when I was six. But my dad always reminds me that they got ahead of themselves: it was too much to handle and they didn’t live there for long, so be careful what you wish for.
We did end up right where we wanted to live, and over time it has worked out well for us. We love the location, which is convenient yet so quiet; we love our neighbors; and every time we pull up to the house we appreciate how darling and inviting it looks (okay, at the moment, perhaps a little less so with the port-a-potty and the construction fence). The projects we did soon after—some prior to moving in—really helped with that. We completed all the recommended work on the foundation (such as it is!), but we also remodeled the bathroom, completed some aesthetic upgrades to the kitchen, and, three years later, installed a lush and water-wise native plant garden in the front yard. These changes all made it ours and made us realize that, all things considered, we did the right thing within the limited choices we had, given today’s housing market. When we think of all that came along with living here, we feel incredibly lucky to have it. And it is damned lucky to have us.