pat pat pat pat squelch
My sock was suddenly drenched and my foot very cold.
“HoneeeYYY?” I called upstairs, hopping back to the safety of the bottom step, “Can you come down here, PLEASE? NOW?” I tried to sound cool and collected, but the squeaky pitch my voice reached gave me away.
We were two days away from moving into our new house and the basement was flooded. Not just small-puddle-in-the-corner kind of flooded, I mean water-coming-in-from-all-sides, small-river-in-the-laundry-room flooded. The carpet sent up a small geyser with every step. And it was still raining outside.
My first thought was—okay, my first thought of the moment is probably not appropriate for this blog. After that, in quick succession:
Surely a real adult will come soon and take care of this for me. Or at least take charge and tell me what to do.
Oh. Right. That’s me. Crap.
Why did anyone ever let me BUY A HOUSE? Didn’t they realize that I’m only pretending I know what I’m doing?
. . . we don’t really need a basement, right? The water can have it.
When I’ve told this story to family and friends the response I’ve gotten most often is a knowing look in the eyes, a small smile, and “Ah, yes. The joys of homeownership.”
Two months later we experienced another joy—while we were on vacation, someone kicked in the side door. The alarm, fortunately, scared them off before they took anything, but it was an unpleasant phone call to get—particularly since we had just finished watching the end of series one of the BBC’s Sherlock and had our heads full of Moriarty.
And, of course, there’s the ongoing sort of joy that we’ve heard about most: the there’s always something sort of joy. The bamboo in the yard that we felt so good about obliterating will be back in three days. The 75-year-old windows need replacing. The garage is oddly tilted. The water heater is old, and most of the paint is moderately ugly and definitely faded. The garden is—well, it’s not deserving of the name garden at this point.
But why is it always about the “joy” of homeownership? It’s true—when you buy a house you have to be prepared for the issues that come up. If something goes amiss with our house, it’s our responsibility to deal with it. But I find real joy in that, not just “joy”—to be uttered with a heavy sigh.
I love the satisfaction that comes with painting the living room the perfect shade of green. The triumph of vanquishing evil in my backyard (more commonly referred to as pulling weeds). Mowing the lawn. Watering my one successful plant of the summer. You might catch me posting pictures this winter of our immaculately shoveled driveway á la Professor VandenBosch.
Even better: the peace of a summer evening with the windows open listening to the birds chirp happily—surely well-fed, having gone through our stock of birdseed in two days. Taking a walk to the neighborhood park and petting the greyhound we met last week.
Still better than that: inviting family and friends to our home for dinner. Being able to offer the guest bed to a friend who needs it for the night.
This is our home—really home. I think that’s what most of the genuine joy stems from. We’ve rescued the basement armed with only a fan and a shop vac. We’ve spent hours painting. We’ve patched the hole in the drywall where the door was kicked in and installed a new lock. We spend lots of time discussing what to do with the wall where bits of the third layer of wallpaper is stuck forever and whether or not we should try pulling up the carpet and see if there are hardwoods underneath. And it all makes it very ours.
In the Valentine’s Day episode of This American Life, there’s a story about a longtime couple who take a break to try sleeping with other people and end up breaking up. The guy being interviewed said the experience gave him the belief that it is important to force decisions. “I do have a theory about if I do get married in the future,” he says. “What I think I would want to do is have an agreement that at the end of seven years, we have to get remarried in order for the marriage to continue. But at the end of seven years, it ends. And we can agree to get remarried or not get remarried. … Because I think you get to choose and I think it would make the relationship stronger.”
In response, Ira Glass says “I don’t know what I think of that. Because I think, actually, one of the things that’s a comfort in marriage is that there isn’t a door at seven years. And so if something is messed up in the short-term, there’s a comfort of knowing, well, we made this commitment. And so we’re just going to work this out. And even if tonight we’re not getting along or there’s something between us that doesn’t feel right, you have the comfort of knowing, we’ve got time. We’re going to figure this out. And that makes it so much easier. Because you do go through times when you hate each other’s guts. … And the no escape clause, weirdly, is a bigger comfort to being married than I ever would have thought before I got married.
That quote has really stuck with me. Because it’s true—the “no escape” clause is one of the greatest comforts of being married. We have to learn to cope with whatever happens because we’re together until death do us part, no escape. Buying a house isn’t as huge a commitment as getting married, but there’s still some of that same weird sort of comfort, I think. We can escape when we’re ready—we won’t live here forever—but it’s not an easy escape. For the time being, at least, when something goes awry we have to fix it. We have to invest money, and time, and lots and lots of hard work into this old house.
That, to me, is the joy of homeownership.
Laura (Bardolph) Hubers (’10) is wife to Matt, mother to Samuel, and copywriter at Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. She counts the day the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series as one of the happiest of her life.
Matt Hubers (’12) lives with his wife, Laura, and young son, Samuel. He likes to spend his time playing board games, coaching high school forensics, and frolicking with alpacas. His dream is to write picture books.
