When I was 9, I had a hideout. It was under the stairs in the garage downstairs – a place no one came because no one had any reason to. It was cold and concrete and entirely mine. Tragically, my parents converted that hideaway to a bedroom for my sister (some tripe about her not wanting to live in a drafty room entirely made up of windows). I’ve had many “places of my own” through life. There was the concrete bunker by the river. The abandoned tree house. The best of them was my dorm room in college. Since I married straight out of college, that was the only time in my life I’ve been the single occupant of my residence.
Now I own a house. It’s a nice house, with 4 bedrooms and practically all new appliances. (Latest update – the battery in our car died while we were pumping gas yesterday. I’m debating whether that counts or not.) You would think that this house I own is really “a space of my own” from basement to attic. I mean, I bought the couch. I organized the glassware. I water the plants. It should be the ultimate fulfillment of that impulse, right?
After putting our attic renovation plans on hold (due to being twice as expensive as I reckoned + needing a new furnace), we had to reconstruct our living space up there. The attic as it is has four spaces: a landing, a completely unheated bedroom (no closet, so just a bonus room) with the best view in the house, a partially climate controlled room with a sink (I know – weird) and an unfinished storage area with particularly lethal looking nails.
In our previous iteration, the small room was our guest room (or Chez Gospel when he was living here). The bigger partially heated room was our office. This came from a period in time, now lost to the fog of history, when computers were stationary and couldn’t be moved around easily. I know this sounds crazy now, but you needed a room where you could leave them set up all the time, and they took a significant amount of space. So when we moved in, we prioritized that space (which we’d used constantly in our prior house) and deprioritized the guest space. In her October visit, my mother in law had… ideas on how this could be improved upon.
So I decided to make the larger/warmer room with the sink our guest bedroom, and turn the (coldly) beautiful room with the view into an office. Since we do still intend to eventually do the attic project, one doesn’t want to buy much in order to do this. For the guest bedroom, we will need a new bed, my brother having taken his with him. But the office had everything I needed.
Over the course of a day or so, I put it together. And it scratched an itch that I’d had so long, I hadn’t even realized it was an itch. It was like taking off boots I’d worn for a long hike. It felt… amazing to have my own room again. And although my family is welcome there and Adam also works there, it feels very much like my own secret spot. It’s made me unreasonably happier than it should.
The view as you walk in
The new best reading spot in the houseMy favorite view in the houseThe workdesk – primarily for computing but also for scrapbooking/stampingThe music alcove – the first time I’ve had all my instruments and music in one spot
What about you? Do you have a place that is just yours? Is it something you long for?
When we were in the house hunt, one of the houses we looked at was a house in Woburn that had been built in 1720 or so. It had a weird layout and a rather disastrous crack in the chimney that ran up the center of the house, and we didn’t end up offering on it… but I thought it was awfully cool. Paul Revere would have ridden past that house when it was new built. So when we found this house (with a lovely lack of disastrous masonry), it didn’t seem all *that* old. The decor was dominantly an 80s horror (helloooo shag carpet and paneling!). The date on the paperwork said it was ~1900. I had hoped we might find some cool old treasures when we moved in, but the prior occupants did an exceptionally good job of clearing out the attic and basement. There were no boxes of old letters we might find, and no ghosts have haunted our sleep. (Well, except the ghost of fraudulently uninstalled insulation.)
But as we have very gradually updated rooms, we’ve found these hints of how old our house really is. Most of the walls, under the ugly paneling, are plaster and lathe covered by some truly hideous wallpaper. We had a very brief oral history from the prior owner, which mostly told us the house had been in the same hands for nearly fifty years and they’d raised seven children here. Also, her late husband had done all the “improvements” himself, with his two left hands comprised entirely of thumbs. (Ok, maybe that was my interpretation…)
These eagles are now hidden behind the drywall in Thane’s room
And then she was gone to Florida, and the history of the house felt like a blank slate.
But as I got a little more involved with Stoneham – as part of the bikeway kerfuffle and got to know the Historical Commission folks. One of them came by one morning with a full writeup on my house. We spent the morning in fascinating discussion of the building.
The Nobility Hill Historic District
It was built in 1898, and the funds to build it were provided by the guy (Lorenzo Hawkins) who built the beautiful white mansion right up the hill from me. That lovely house is a anchor of the Nobility Hill Historic district (which I learned about at the same time). The house, at nearly 120 years old, has been owned by ten owners, and four of those ten were in the 40s. The builder was a man named Parker G. Webber, who also lived in the house for two years after he built it. It changed hands for $100 in 1944. There was also this really cool list of the occupations and names of the people who lived in the house on various dates. In 1943 the house was occupied by Eleanor Keenan (34, housewife), James Keenan (36, bus driver) and father-in-law Joseph Keenan (69, shoe worker). Likely there were a passel of kids then too.
More questionable wallpaper choices
Glancing up and down the list for 1948, I noticed a 96 year old resident in my dear neighbor’s house down the street… a 96 year old named Parker G. Webber. He lived with what must have been a second wife, Alice F. Webber (77, housewife). So fifty years after he built my home, he was living in close sight of it. He must have spent the greater part of his life on this block – perhaps he built most of the houses in it, and not just mine. It’s this wonderful connection to imagine the care that must have crafted my home from a man who was proud enough to live in it and willing to look at his work every single day thereafter.
By the way, the list of occupations is fascinating. There are tree surgeons, a “dier”, a “grinder”, a “burner”, someone mysteriously in the “egg bus.” (A house on Franklin Street has a prestidigitator. Now that would be some exciting history!)
After the visit (well, some time after) I got around to signing up for a Historical Marker for the house ($55 is the bargain of the century, and they’ll help you fill it out). In New England, this isn’t a particularly old building, but 120 years old is not pathetic, either. The commission says anything over 50 years qualifies, and this most certainly beat that. I settled on the name “Parker G. Webber” to grace the sign, in honor of the man who had built the house with such craftsmanship a century and a score ago. The signs are all hand made (and come with the research!), so it took a little while before I got it. But I just found it on my porch this week, and I can’t wait to get it placed in a prominent location on my house!
I hear a lot about the wider world. I listen to NPR so religiously my son thinks that his phone number is 800-909-9287 (the pledge number for WBUR). I read the Economist over my Honey Nut Cheerios every morning. No day is complete without various other news sources as well.
In the last year or so, it is possible I might have heard one or two stories about home prices and the economy. Perhaps you’ve heard one or two too?
I have this bad habit of rethinking decisions that have been made. In October of 2007 we found a great house for $350k in a town I’m happy to live in. By December of 2007 we were moved in. At the time, I was proud of myself for not buying at the top and waiting until house prices had declined. The house had originally been offered for $409,000. A bargain, no? I keep wondering if buying then was the right thing to do.
But here’s another way of looking at the equation. House prices have stood up decently where we are. According to Zillow, our house is now worth $329,000. That’s not bad in this market. We’re still above water. But I’ve been thinking about that $21,000 difference. Between 2000 when we got married and 2007 when we moved, we rented. Our first apartment in Roslindale was $1200 a month. The lovely three bedroom place on Cliff street was $1500 a month. If we lived in Cliff Street for the 14 months we’ve lived in our current place, we would’ve spent $21,000 with no equity returned to us. We lived there for three years. 36 months times $1500 a month is $54,000 that we spent on housing, with no equity returned to us for our expense.
There is, of course, lots more complexity to it. Our mortgage payment is larger than our rent was. Rent didn’t include interest. Rent wasn’t federally tax deductible. (It is state income tax deductible here in MA.) I didn’t have to pay the water and sewer back then, nor did I pay real estate taxes.
But I don’t think we should regret our decision. Paying your mortgage while your house declines in value is a lot like paying rent. You may not get equity, but you do get a place to live. And hey, assuming you have a fixed rate mortgage, at least you won’t get any rent increases. How good the landlord is is entirely up to you. Rent to own?
As I mentioned previously, we bought our first house a little under a year ago. There are many great things about this house. The bones are very solid. (The house is listed as being built in 1900, which is shorthand for no one knows when it was built, but probably between 1890 and 1910). The layout of the house is excellent. I love the view from the back and the town. And it’s really a pretty large house — certainly big enough for our needs.
Every room in the house is perfectly usable for what it is. Other than a sewer pipe ready to disintigrate at the slightest touch, the house really was in move in condition.
But every room in the house could also stand an update. The first two stories of the house are entirely wood-panelled with drop ceilings. Every. Single. Room. (Or was when we moved in.) Better yet, each room has a DIFFERENT drop ceiling and DIFFERENT panelling. Basically, the house was more or less redone around the time I was born. And it’s been well-maintained since, but the decor is what you might call dated.
We painted a bit when we moved in (our office and Grey’s room — beige is no color for a little boy’s room!) We actually offered on the house when I was pregnant — the same weekend we made the offer I discovered this fact. I ended up miscarrying that child, but the house was purchased with the expectation that there would be four of us living there. The second floor has three bedrooms. Our room is ok (shag carpet and white panelling!), Grey’s room we painted over the panelling. But the nursery was by far the worst and smallest of the rooms. Here’s a picture from the first time we visited the house:
A blast from the '70sAnother view -- love that closet door! It's the details that really make a room
Now, it is not true that it would be impossible to put a child in that room. However, that is not a room that speaks to me of the nurture and warmth needed for a new baby. That is a room that speaks to me of, uh, a middle aged couple putting in a den in about 1975. (It was one of four tv viewing areas in the house as they had it set up.)
So I wanted to redo it.
The easy option would’ve been a coat of paint. There’s a lot to be said of a coat of paint. Grey’s room looks really good with the coat of paint over the panelling. But the drop ceiling wasn’t in good shape. The panelling was buckling in spots. And that carpet! Carpet is really not meant to be there for 30 years, even if the room has been lightly used. Did I really want my precious little spawn learning to crawl on that carpet? No, I did not. Also, the closet door was a sin against God and man. And I wanted an overhead fan.
So you start with removing the panelling. If you remove the panelling, you MUST remove the drop ceiling, as the drop ceiling is attached to the panelling. But you need to remove the drop ceiling ANYWAY because it turns out the light fixture was held up ONLY by the drop ceiling and that’s not going to work for a ceiling fan. So we need to put up a new ceiling. But there are wires that ran under the drop ceiling, so we can’t just go back the the layer above the drop ceiling — we need to add a new layer. (Actually, we ended up removing two layers — the drop ceiling and the water damaged ceiling tiles above that. And by we I mean my husband because pregnant women do not belong on ladders doing demo in rooms that may contain lead.) And so we removed two layers of ceiling and panelling to discover the badly damaged horsehair plaster walls that were original to the house.
The room at this stage was rather amusing in it’s hideousness. But here’s the thing. There were some big holes in that plaster wall. There’s wallpaper on all of it, which is probably good since paint from the same era would likely be lead paint. This is not a wall you can work with. We need to put new drywall in the entire room. That’s not actually the bad part. The bad part is that makes the room 1 inch smaller in every dimension (.5 inch drywall on all the walls). Unless you have redrywalled a room, you may never look at the trim in a room — inside and around the windows and doors and on the baseboard.
Thank heavens my husband got laid off about this time. (He got another job right away — but ended up with 2 weeks off.) He did what software engineers do when confronted with a hardware problem: he ordered about 8 books off Amazon, googled each problem and basically did a crash course in drywalling, painting and trim. He did an amazing, astounding job.
First, the ceiling. He added firring strips (strips of wood) to the ceiling, cursing roundly because the studs were elusive and had a tendency to disappear halfway through the ceiling. This was to create room to run the wires under the new ceiling. Then he and a friend and a rented contraption attached the new drywall on the ceiling to the firring strips. He cut a hole where the light fixture was to go. (Yeah, to add to the fun, lighting was an issue for the entire first half of the project — right from demo!)
Then we had a debacle getting the right drywall for the walls. This resulted in a whole heap of re-measuring and recutting. The studs in the walls were no more cooperative in their locations, once we had the drywall in place, either. Then taping and mudding. Remember — this includes the ceiling. Then priming. (I finally get to start helping around this point.) Finally, we get to paint the whole thing — ceiling and walls and closet. You start to feel like you’re almost done.
You are laughably wrong. The hardest part is yet ahead. But wait! You can’t do it yet. Because you need to put the new carpet in before you put the new trim in, or it won’t work measurement-wise. The room lived in this state for many a week before the carpet went in. (Lowe’s did the installation — we have no complaints with that whole process. It wasn’t nearly as expensive as I expected, either.)
New carpet, painted walls, light fixture in place… done, right?
No, there is yet the trim.
Did you know each window has 8 pieces of trim? (4 on the inside and 4 on the outside?) And moreover, each piece of trim has to be exactly the right length? Ambitious people even mitre it so they have nice angles. AHHAHAHAHAH!
We spent like 2 hours in the hardware store attempting to transform our careful window measurements into lengths of wood we should buy, considering all the variables like “Will it fit in our car”. Hours more went into measuring three times before sawing once, hammering into place, praying like fury, and caulking the inevitable shortcomings. Working together, it took two of us five hours to do one window. And that was without mishap. And it was the easy window.
The trim took a long time, and it was hard to do, but we perservered! And finally, after trimming, touching up, installing closet doors, trying not to get any paint on the new carpet and using so much caulk that the room would likely float if placed in water, I declared it done and ready to recieve a baby. Or at least baby furniture.
And here it is … a room for the next 30 years.
Needless to say, we are very proud of ourselves. Not bad for a pair of knowledge workers!
My Truant Pen 