the bones are good
i'm not an expert on home renovations, or making the right choice, or anything really...
My best friend bought a house across the street from my grandma. Literally, I can walk out onto the porch1 and look to the right and have a perfect view of her new house.
I love my grandma’s house— built in 1900, it’s only ever had one owner who wasn’t us. My great grandparents raised my mom’s dad there, and then my grandparents returned to New York from Arizona to live with my great grandmother when she was too old to take care of herself. They sided the house and fixed the roof and replaced the claw foot tub2 with a regular one. They left the octagon tiles in the bathroom and the marble thresholds on the floor and the leaded glass door on the landing. They left the ceiling work and the acid green wallpaper in the dining room.
It’s a beautiful house. It has great bones, beautiful character that new-build houses can’t hold a candle to. It’s a house I love dearly.
The foundation is sinking. The kitchen needs to be gutted and redone. The plumbing is fucked. There are squirrels in the attic. The house is completely paid off, and my grandma is getting older and there’s no scenario in which anyone in my family wants to sell this old house.
So we can take it. My husband and I can move into this house so my grandma isn’t alone as she gets older. We can pour the money that we would put toward rent or a mortgage toward home improvements instead. It’s a good plan.
Hey! Free house! All it needs is blood, sweat and tears. All you have to do is uproot your life a little…or backtrack, depending on your definition.
I have a vision for the house. Of course I do. I love this house! I love the built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace that doesn’t work anymore. I love the window seat in the dining room and the sunroom off the back of my grandfather’s room. I love those tiles on the bathroom floor.
I’ve walked through the house and envisioned it. I’ve built it in The Sims, as any sane person does. I would strip the dining room wallpaper, but I would keep the green color and find a similar patterned fabric to make a cushion for the window seat. I would turn that sunroom into a reading nook, and I would drink my coffee out there every morning before I start writing. I would turn the pantry into a second bathroom3 and source the same octagon tiles from the bathroom upstairs to inlay downstairs, so they match. Speaking of the upstairs bathroom, I would completely redo it. I would swap the sink and the toilet because the toilet is tucked in a weird alcove. I would bring back the clawfoot tub, and open up the window that was covered when the house was sided. I would keep the tile, obviously.
The kitchen would be orange— like a muted, cozy, burnt orange. An orange that conveys romantic lighting and early morning sunrises and shortbread with your cup of tea. I would weatherproof the back porch so it could be used as a laundry room, and I would decorate with the weird array of vintage pieces my grandpa collected and made over the course of his life. There are so many things I would do.
Selfishly, now would be the perfect time. Rents are high and we’re ready to leave our current apartment. Neither of us love our jobs. And I mean, my best friend would be across the street! We would have so much fun, wine nights and coffee dates in the morning on the porch and dinners. Like a real-life sitcom. How often in life do you get to live so close to your best friend?!
And, of course, I’m scared out of my mind. What if the project is too large? What if I bite off more than I can chew, or my grandma drives me insane or me and my husband drive her insane? What if I can’t find a good job? What if I have no health insurance? What if I never sell a book, or I can’t get approved for a loan, or I end up having to work a soul sucking office job that makes me miserable? What if I can’t figure out how to work a snow blower? What if I’m not cut out for homeownership? What if, in committing to this, I’m missing the path that would lead me to a really rich, cool, interesting life?
I imagine a hundred futures and can’t commit to any of them. What if the one I pick is the wrong path? And I drag myself and my husband down it and we hate it? What if we have to start all over and it’s my fault? What if I fail?
What if I fail?
I’ll never love my hometown the way some people will, steeped in nostalgia that permeates their every move. Here’s where we won the first game and here’s where I had my first kiss and here’s every memory I ever had, condensed to a ten block radius, and here are all the same people I loved twenty years ago and here is where they still fit into my life. I lived in a city, but not in the nice way, I guess. There were neighborhoods you didn’t set foot in. I was a latchkey kid with a bus pass and little to no supervision. Sure, there are places that remind me of being sixteen: the coffee shop downtown where we got drinks that were way too sweet and spent hours commandeering their basement pool table and the front window seat; various parks and soccer fields where I kissed crushes who later broke my heart or went sledding or skipped school. The coffee shop on the eastside where I made amends with my best friend is gone. I had my first kiss in a mall parking lot and, come to think of it, had a lot of my later kisses in similar settings. There wasn’t anything picturesque about it, or nostalgic and all-American. Most of the people I made those memories with are no longer in my life.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is that it wouldn’t be for love of this place, this city. I could hate it. I could get back and find that it’s not shiny or nostalgic. It’s just a city. Or it’s worse than where we currently live, in my husband’s hometown. There are a million ways in which things could go wrong, and I’m so anxious.
The bones are good, and it’s up to me to build something beautiful around them.
But it has such good bones. The house I love so dearly, this city with its grime and imperfections and also beauty and community, my life and the version of it I can imagine when I close my eyes. The bones are good, and it’s up to me to build something beautiful around them. And I can. I know I can— I have it in me. It just takes some work. Blood, sweat, tears. Love. It just takes some love.
We spent countless hours on this front porch when were teenagers. This is the front porch she sat on when I tried to kick her out before my new years eve party because I was mad at her, and my grandma wouldn’t let me. The same front porch where we sat in a cardboard box when we were like, fifteen (too old for that silly goose behavior) and some man walking by said, “Damn, are y’all bored or what?” The front porch has extensive lore, okay?
A personal tragedy to me, but my great grandma was in her 90s so the claw foot tub was impractical at best, and dangerous at worst.
I know this is possible, because the house next door is the exact same layout and the owners did just that.