“What happens if you love it so much you want to live
there?” It’s a question my husband and I have been asked by family and friends
about the waterfront home we bought earlier this month to renovate and sell.
My initial answer was, “we can’t afford it,” which is true.
After two years without a job, my husband has launched his home renovation business,
and it would be bad business not to sell the product.
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| Beginnings of sunset from the project house bulkhead |
Recounting my latest, “we can’t afford it,” response to my
husband, he reminded me of another more important reason we will sell the
project home: It’s illegal for this corporation, which we’ve started with
Kevin’s 401K, to buy property for us to live in.
But I think there’s more to both the question we’ve been
asked and the answers we’ve given, something that goes deeper than the property’s
projected beauty and it’s stunning location, a question along the lines of:
“You’ll be pouring your heart and soul into this house, how will you be able to
part with it?”
It’s in our nature to be drawn to beauty, humans crave
beautiful environments: architecture, design, landscapes, and art. We surround
ourselves with objects we find beautiful, and we often go to great lengths to
procure or create beauty in our lives and in our homes.
When we focus that creative energy outward, we are by
design, asked to give away the things and ideas we have birthed and labored and
loved into being. Parting with our creations is a dilemma most of us confront
in our vocations but maybe not always
in our jobs (when I worked in fast
food and at a restaurant, I had no trouble parting with the food I prepared).
In my experience as a homeowner, when it came time to sell
both of our former homes, we wanted everyone who toured to love our houses the
way we did, but they didn’t, and they couldn’t. They didn’t have any history
there. They hadn’t birthed and raised children and built decks and added rooms
like we did with our first house. They didn’t see raw acreage come to life with
water, electricity, septic, a house, and a swimming pool that was filled with
teenagers and church folk and extended family, like we did with our second.
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| Our second home which we had built on acreage. |
With our second house particularly, sold at the trough of
the recession, we felt insulted by the initial (and even the final) offer our
buyers made. Neither offers were close to the appraisal or the actual costs
(mostly sunken costs of utilities and septic and grading) we accrued to build
the house. It was painful to see our home devalued so, to lose money upon
selling it.
The experience has made us wiser. We were careful in
purchasing the home we live in now, making sure we could spend a hundred
thousand dollars on necessary improvements and come out ahead should we need to
sell in a few years. And now, as we’re renovating a property with the express
purpose of selling, we are constantly asking ourselves, “just because we can,
should we?”
As people who are flipping
(buying, fixing up, and selling) a property we find ourselves wanting to create
the most beautiful home that appeals to the broadest spectrum of people:
nothing quirky and original, no fabulous amenity that has no resale value. A
third bedroom yes, a garage yes, a new roof yes, but will the more visually
appealing metal be worth it if we have to spend thousands on septic
improvements? Bulkhead and landscaping improvements, yes, but how elaborate?
And so we are tempering our creative genius against the
dollar, which, I think is what a wise businessperson must do. We are learning
to expand our thinking not only to the physical: shingles or metal, but to time
as well: custom sized-windows cost more than standard, but that means no labor
costs for reframing window openings and replacing siding. How do the final
numbers compare?
My husband and my daughter (who is an architecture student
and our intern for a month) discuss bathroom fixtures and window and door
placements and treatments over dinner, prepare drawings, and enter data in
spreadsheets while they work at the job site each day, finding an equilibrium
between beauty and practicality. I chime in my opinions, and I marvel at how we
have come to this place.
My husband branching out from the corporate world, and me from
full-time motherhood and parish ministry, both of us having been engaged most
often in tasks where the results are intangible, are now working in the most
concrete terms (and with actual concrete). My husband has been remodeling homes
since he was seventeen, always for and with his family, always as an avocation,
a hobby.
But now, we step into the stream of laborers, craftspeople,
and artisans, a handful of whom we have met while getting bids for work on our
project house. Each of them has an eagerly shared story, a compelling path to
this work they love. We join them now, as the literal work of our hands becomes
the effort that will put the actual bread in our mouths, the wine in our
goblets.
As creatures born to create, we will devote our intentions
and our visions into transforming dilapidated dwellings into homes that are beautiful
and functional and we will part with them, selling them to the highest bidder.
Months from now, this house will belong to its next
inhabitants, and become a stranger to us. In the meantime, before it is gutted
and chaotic here, we are pretending it is our summer home, kayaking some
evenings, roasting marshmallows around a bulkhead campfire, and even camping
under the stars (clouds actually) one warm night.
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| My husband kayaking from the project house |
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| Roasting marshmallows with our daughter, an architecture student |
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| Camping on the bulkhead |
Renovation and sale has become our vocation, but it’s also a
blend of art and commerce, of soul and body, of the bewildering mixed bag that constitutes
our lives as humans, unfolding before us in one 2100 square foot home on one
acre of land on the banks of Puget Sound.
