Age and Authenticity

Home is, at its best, a sheltering place, a buffer. It’s where you sustain yourself, where you’re most essentially you. The seeds of happiness are sown there.

Ideally, home should be comfortable. The last house my husband and I owned was very modest, a small nineteenth-century brick rowhouse in an equally small city, and though the house was not ornate or fancy, many people told us it was beautiful. But one of the most treasured compliments we received on our home was from a neighbor who commented on how warm and cozy it felt when she walked through the front door. The other, incidentally, was from a six-year-old who told me it was the coolest house she’d ever been in.

Some of the professionally decorated homes featured in books and magazines strike me as being counter to the idea of home as I think of it. Because home can’t be outward looking. That’s not at all to say that I think where a person lives shouldn’t be stylish and well turned out. I aspire to that myself. But it seems like it would be difficult to sustain giving primacy of place to image and always seeing your home through an outsider’s eye, by organizing and designing it to please someone other than yourself and whoever you live with.

For the entire duration of my husband’s and my domestic relationship, home has taken the form of old houses. Even before we bought our first house, and before we were married, the two different apartments we chose to live in together were in old buildings. One of them was so lovely—featuring marble fireplace mantles, an enormous living room made even more expansive with floor-to-ceiling windows, and a hilltop location overlooking a wide river—that I sometimes wish we still lived there.

Very recently, someone asked me, Why old houses? Strangely, I don’t know that I’ve ever consciously asked myself that question. For sure, my husband and I have had many conversations between ourselves or with other “old house people” about why we prefer to live in old houses. And we have often felt put in the position of needing to justify our choice of domicile, in particular to (my) family members who let it be known that they were less than comfortable with the city setting of our longest-held residence, especially the lack of parking, or with the admittedly cramped layout of a narrow row house. We have found ourselves needing to defend our decisions even to ourselves as we’ve faced perpetually living in the throes of one construction project after another, including a renovation that left us without a kitchen for well over a year and ended up in us leaving home for a period of time. Or the absurdity of losing an entire room to tools in what was more or less only a six-room house, because we had no attic, utility basement, garage, or shed in which to store them, and yet they were necessary to the jobs we needed to do. My husband can attest to how often I doubted our path. Old-house ownership can seem like a hard row to hoe, especially when the living space is not exactly rambling, and I regularly wondered whether it was worth the bother.

But in addition to having lived in those apartments together in old buildings, we have now owned three old houses that have for all practical purposes constituted part-time jobs. So clearly this is something we want to do. Our friend’s question—Why old houses?—prompted me to consider the genesis of our, or at least my, desire to live in an old building or house rather than a new, new-ish, or at least more recent one. And without thinking for more than a second or two, I answered him. It’s the way old houses make me feel when I walk into them, I said. And so there it was: my entire adult life, substantively shaped by decisions based on unexamined feelings that were unquantifiable and visceral. That sounds like me.

And the unquantifiable, visceral certain something that old houses can exude—their je ne sais quoi—might be called coziness, comfort, and warmth. Although as I sit in our latest old house on a clear and cold winter day, the warmth is mostly metaphorical, and the coziness augmented by multiple space heaters and a homemade quilt that keeps the chill from overtaking me. But warmth, comfort, and coziness—as well as character, another quality that people ascribe to old houses, especially people who don’t live in one—all seem components of the same, overarching characteristic. And I realize that it is this characteristic which I have sought and found in the old houses we have in turn sought and found. In short, what they offer is authenticity.

During one of the many periods of self-searching I have undergone in relation to my career, I came across a book that sorted job searchers into various profiles. According to this book, I fell squarely into the category of authenticity seekers. I distinctly remember the epiphany I experienced, and how grateful I was to the writer of that book for giving a name to what I hadn’t understood about myself.

And so I see that it is this quality of old houses that drew me in at first and keeps me coming back. And authenticity, or integrity and realness, is also what I value in people. Conversely, the trait I dislike most in others and seem peculiarly ill-equipped to deal with is disingenuousness, since I tend to take people at face value.

I prefer imperfection to falseness. I’ll coexist more comfortably with a curmudgeon than with a very polished person or with someone who pastes on a smile and tells me everything is great, always. I guess I feel that it’s all right to let your humanity hang out. And I’ll choose well-worn wool sweaters with holes in them, stiff cotton blue jeans, and hand-knitted socks over sleeker clothing any day of the week.

With houses, too, my preference is for imperfect over ersatz. There were chips in the porcelain coating of the cast-iron sink and tub in our old house, but I wouldn’t have swapped either of them for a cleaner model. Where we live now, I like the solid plaster walls, even if they’re cracked, which most of them are. And I know how durable the original wood clapboard is, though we do have to contend with mold and peeling paint.

Neither my husband nor I grew up in an old house, but I have sensory memories of my paternal grandparents’ 1920s home, which my family lived in one summer. My grandparents are long dead, but I wish I could tell them how much I loved their clean white kitchen, the stone floor of the breezeway, the pergola covered with grapevines, and the warm wood of the hallways, staircases, and den. It was special in its sense of place. Old houses also tend to have secrets, and I remember wandering down to the basement and finding toys, including a Barbie doll that had belonged to my father’s sister, who, tragically, died just before her fourteenth birthday. I took this doll and kept it for myself. I don’t remember if I asked permission.

My maternal grandmother lived in a place that was equally special to me, and also in a way that I feel sensorially. As an adult I went to a get-together in an apartment building in my neighborhood that was perhaps of the same vintage as my grandmother’s—1920s or 1930s, I believe—and I was overpowered by memory when we opened the door to the building and the particular, not-unpleasant scent of the vestibule hit me.

I’m sure that these homes of my grandparents’ hold sway over me because of childhood nostalgia and my profound attachment to these relatives who are no longer with us, but I am equally sure that it’s more than that. My maternal grandmother moved to Florida eventually, and though I have very fond memories of visiting her there, I feel no yearning for her mobile homes and mobile home parks. I feel no great pull toward my own family’s houses either, not really.

Maybe there’s just something to be said about the integrity of a building where a two-by-four was still in fact two by four.

Thinking back, I was always drawn to old buildings. I still remember three different libraries I went to as a kid, two of which might have been built as houses, or at least had the feel of having been so. I can hear in my mind the sound of the wood floors creaking and visualize the built-in seating and shelves of one of the libraries. I recall the atmosphere of the libraries and the sense of calm I felt as I turned through books. This recollection is so distinct that I even recall in one case the title of a book I sat and read (Searching for Shona) and, in another case, the topic (Pocahontas). It would seem noteworthy if I, a lifelong reader, didn’t have positive associations with libraries, but I have been in many in my lifetime—I even go out of my way to visit them while I am on vacation away from home— but it’s of these libraries specifically, these buildings, that I have held memories like a keepsake for forty years.

Before my family moved into a new house in a subdevelopment when I was ten or so, I think my father tried to convince my mother that we should live in an old house. She was having none of that. But I retain a clear visual of the old-fashioned kitchen in one of the houses that my father must have bullheadedly insisted we go see. I would have liked living there.

Also when I was around that age, we visited relatives who sought my dad’s help in renovating the kitchen in their enormous historic house in an old seaside town. I loved that aunt and uncle (and actually, that uncle once told me I was his favorite). The house was terrific too—it had a “secret” back stairway and it came with plenty of cousins to hang around with. I was in heaven.

So here, too, happy memories are at play. And also the sense of place: a house ensconced in a village, situated on a hill, just up from the ocean. I suppose as well that with houses and their milieu, just as with people, authenticity comes with age.

But of course there are negative aspects to old houses and where one tends to find them, and more specifically to old-house ownership. And once we started down that road ourselves, life was never the same.

Savings: depleted. Marital discord: heightened. Spare time: gone. What we have in common with people who don’t own an old house: almost nothing, because we inhabit different universes.

 A few years ago, in order to buy the house my husband and son and I currently live in, we sold the circa 1885 house we’d bought fifteen years earlier in a nearby step-back-in-time kind of historic district. It was a gem, but when we became its owners, it looked like a coal heap.

Any description of our relationship with that house reads like a rehashing of a story you’ve already heard. Pick a cliché: love at first sight, which developed into a love-hate relationship, which we stayed with as a labor of love, which was the hardest thing we’ve ever done.

My husband’s job at the time had a residency requirement, and he found a boarded-up house that piqued his interest. Sure, a boarded-up house, we thought, that’s in our price range. And we walked into this house that smelled like a moldering mess, and the plaster ceilings were coming down, and a squirrel had chewed through wallboard, and we could see the sky through the walls, and a constant spray of water passed from a burst pipe in the dirt-floor basement, and no one had lived in the house for a few years and certainly no one had decorated since the 1970s, except the daughter, who we were told had developed a problem with crack cocaine, which was perhaps confirmed by her combinations of paint colors. Yet all I remember is the simple grandeur of the pocket doors, the ornate plaster medallions, the gracious staircase, and turning to my husband and saying, “It’s beautiful.”

It was going to be so cheap, and it was going to be done in six months.

The purchase price was certainly low. With $10,000 of our own savings, and $5,000 borrowed from each of our respective families, we had the cash for closing costs and for the purchase price of $17,500, which we’d negotiated the bank’s asking price down to. The daughter’s addiction issue had also manifested itself in foreclosure proceedings for nonpayment of back taxes. The stories old houses can tell are not always very far in the past.

Procuring the building was complicated enough, but actually owning it was even more so. Maybe people who had been involved in buying a fixer-upper before could have budgeted or otherwise planned a bit more realistically, but we were neophytes and we hadn’t a clue. I was wide-eyed at finding out that even though the bathroom was here, we could move it there—that is, somewhere that actually made sense in the layout. Who knew? At first, the contractor was great. He expertly suggested which walls should come down and where a new supporting wall would best be placed, and guided our thinking about the division of public and private space in the two flats. And I would defy anyone to pick out the original moldings versus the moldings he made for us. But the problem is that he was really vague about the money, and we were too intimidated to properly draw out the details. Sometimes he’d propose, or already have carried out, changes that may or may not have been reasonable—we had no idea, so we’d just nod. Or he’d propose a change or addition that seemed to me to make sense, but when I’d ask him to give it to me in dollars, he’d snap at me with an “I’m not going to rip you off” and I’d have to soothe ruffled feathers and come away with none of the information I’d sought.

In the end we’re pretty sure he didn’t rip us off, though he didn’t pay two of the major subcontractors. That was a surprise, especially coming on the heels of finding out that our bank—a local bank, mind you—had decided the project was taking too long and, without ever notifying us of the fact, had paid themselves back with our last loan installment, even though we had formally notified them of our delay, they had assured us that it was not a problem, and we were faithfully making our payments. It was a bad few months. Tears were shed, negotiations ensued, electricians and plumbers were paid, second mortgages were applied for and then dispatched not long afterward. All better.

It took roughly five years of our lives for that project to finally be “done,” though I use the word loosely. There was still some scraping to do, an old shed to rebuild (it never did get rebuilt), and, more pleasingly, a garden to cultivate (this did happen to some degree). Regardless, tenants were able to move in and have lovely apartments. We closely tracked how much the project actually cost in dollars—I’m a Virgo, and by nature a closet accountant—but life’s other balance sheets also apply here. For instance, during the years we worked on the house, we hemorrhaged cash. Put that in the debit column. But when we eventually sold the house, we got our money back and more, as if the house had been a piggybank we’d stored money in. That goes into the credit column. For more evenings and weekends than I care to count, we scraped paint rather than reading novels, removed old flooring instead of going to museums, and dealt with a missing-in-action contractor and incompetent bankers when we would rather have been having fun. It was so hard, and we were probably too hands-on, and it consumed all of our resources, financial and otherwise. That’s a debit. But when my husband was up on a ladder and installing a reproduction light fixture over the front stoop, six people—six—stopped to tell him how great the house looked. Credit. And so on. When the work was completed, it was just nice to be able to move on to other things. Like renovating the house we actually lived in.

And the house we lived in had me pulling out my hair too.

In our old neighborhood, where that house still is but we no longer are, we had an acquaintance who was a carpenter and who had a bad habit of buying down-on-their luck houses as if he were adopting pets from a shelter. We knew him through a mutual friend but would also simply run into him on the street, which is truly one of the best aspects of living in a densely populated but human-scale city neighborhood where older buildings can be found.

When we’d see the acquaintance, we’d catch up on our respective house projects. These chats often took the form of commiseration. On one occasion when I was out walking with my son, who was very young at the time, this fellow gave us a tour of one of his properties, which after ten years of him owning it was still uninhabitable. He’d dealt with enough of the difficult repairs and deconstruction, though, to allow the next owner—he’d listed it for sale—to proceed relatively unhindered with the reconstruction needed. At this juncture, he’d had enough.

Another neighbor he'd shown it to had concluded that working on a house to this degree was an act of philanthropy. When he told me this, I laughed in recognition. And he agreed wholeheartedly when I said it was as if we served the houses instead of them serving us. But, as my husband has often reminded me, the houses have in fact served us very well.

By the time of that conversation, we’d made a lot of progress on our own primary residence. When my husband had taken a few months off between jobs a few years earlier, we finally finished stripping a century and a half of paint from moldings. He installed a stately, impressive antique display cabinet, replacing tired-looking open bookshelves that were impossible to keep clean and made the room look cluttered, since we had to store things besides books on them, given a rowhouse’s lack of storage space. We painted the rooms on the first floor a warm and welcoming yellow, a change from the flat dirty beige that had been on almost every wall in the house and sucked the life out of the space. I had finally made the roman blinds from the expensive fabric I’d bought years earlier. The house had become easier to maintain and looked like something out of a magazine, but more personal, and I was proud of it. Even better, I enjoyed being there. Before, we’d sat in our very small dining area, at the table it took us three years to find, and our eyes would wander around the shadowy room as we found fault and mentally planned improvements. No longer. My eyes traveled the room with pleasure.

Over time, my husband and I had become homebodies. That word sometimes carries a negative implication, like it’s synonymous with “couch potato.” That we weren’t, and we’re still not. What we continue to be is house proud. While it was just the two of us, we did find a kind of contentment with a quiet life amid the frequent disquiet and inconveniences of improving our house and making it ours. And even if I struggled with all that we took on—just to be clear, by “struggled” I mean melting down into a sobbing mess—it was a nice life, and it was the home we welcomed our son into when he arrived.

Until ten years later, when we sold it.

Which was a year after we sold the rental property we’d rehabbed, then bought our third old house.

That was two too many real estate transactions for a sixteen-month stretch, and I don’t recommend it.

After fifteen years of having the responsibility for two old houses, we reveled in the two-and-a-half-month respite after we’d sold the rental property and again owned only the house we resided in. Then the universe needed to return us to a state of disequilibrium, and we were back to having two old houses on our hands; it was simply that one of the partners we were dancing with had changed.

Before we could move into our new old house, it needed heavy cleaning, crucial masonry repairs to the leaking chimneys, and some of the floors refinished. Once we dealt with that, my husband would be doing some final work on what was now our old old house before we could put it on the market.

Sounds logical on paper. In actuality, the protracted move was stressful for all three of us. On the plus side, though, we mostly avoided the headache of having to maintain our small row house at museum quality and pretend that we didn’t live there. Because by the time the house was ready for showings, we really didn’t live there.

And finally, here we are. For more than a year now as I write this, down to one house. A lightening of our load. A reduction in responsibilities. One would think.

Unless one owned this old house.

The moment I walked through the doorway, I knew it was the right house. Again that feeling: visceral, unquantifiable. One of the prettiest in our village full of nineteenth-century houses, it’s somewhat bigger and fancier than we require, which is why when my husband picked it out of the listings I dismissed it initially. But inside, it is quite a lot simpler, less pretentious, and friendlier than it is on the outside. Had it been otherwise, it would not have been the house for us.

One of its most distinctive features is a conservatory-style sunroom added only a couple of decades ago. Seemingly everyone who lives within a five-mile radius knows which house is ours if we identify it by that room. This expensive addition was, I know, undertaken for the pleasure of the older couple who lived here, not for the neighborhood at large. But it does have the effect of making our home, my family’s sanctuary and shelter, strangely public. And although I acknowledge and appreciate the beauty of this room, I chafe at its conspicuousness and suspect that people are forming a skewed impression of us.

As authentically me as I am, however, I set them straight by wearing well-worn wool sweaters with holes in them.

And this being an authentically old house, the roof leaked.

And like all old houses, and like me, and like everything in my life, it’s a work in progress. I’m hoping it will soon be done, but I use that word loosely.