House Hunting

When Jill and I met, I owned a house in Washington DC.

A year and a half later, after a car accident that totalled my car and sent me to the hospital, we sold that house and moved to Reston, Virginia, a DC suburb much closer to where I was working. (Incidentally, moving to Virginia topped of my list of doing every single thing I have ever specifically sworn I would not do.)

Another year later, we sold the condo in Reston, and moved to Decatur, Georgia. Of course you know that we sold the house in Decatur. Now we’re house hunting in Milwaukee.

We still haven’t quite decided whether it makes more sense to buy a house soon, before we spend down our downpayment, or to wait until I have a job too.

Nonetheless, we went out for the first time yesterday, to look at houses.

One that we saw was adorable from the outside, and 90% a disaster on the inside. Small, strange, and desparately in need of a face lift.

The second one we saw was intriguing. It had been a duplex, but was semi-converted back into a single family house. We think that might be the right answer for us, so that Jill’s office especially, could be in a separate space from our home space.

The biggest problem was that it had been extensively, and inexpertly, redecorated in the 1980s. With little attention to the underlying difficult to change decorating elements, like tile.

Every wall surface not in a bedroom, on both main floors, had been decorated with some sort of sponged faux finish. Mostly using the color salmon. Even the upstairs kitchen, which had beautiful 1940s tile backsplash and stove-area in creams, browns, and gold.

The highlight, or maybe really the lowlight, but in any event the space with the most comedic value, was the basement. Some faux stone, some blue velvet flocked wallpaper, some peacock toned contact paper, and a dark orange 1970s stand-alone fireplace.

The funniest thing about this house was that it looked exactly like what would have happened if a house we tried to buy in Herndon, Virginia, had given birth to baby houses with another house we looked at in Pine Lake, Georgia.

The house in Herndon was a faux tudor townhouse. It had been the model home in the 1980s when the development was built. That poor house had been decorated to within an inch of it’s life. But professionally, so while it looked extremely dated, it didn’t look awful.

The house in Pine Lake was on an extraordinary piece of property. It was a double or triple lot, amazingly landscaped, and immediately across the street from the beach at Pine Lake. From the outside, it looked like a dream.

From the inside, it looked like it was a work in process, in which the artist hoped to have it included in the American Visionary Art Museum. Don’t get me wrong, I love that museum. But the relevant part of their mission statement reads:

“Visionary art as defined for the purposes of the American Visionary Art Museum refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.”

Picture that in a house. Lots of hand-made and hand-arranged tile. Death-trap stairs leading to a tiny loft bedroom. A room and bathroom that were framed and included basic pipework, but no drywall or plumbing basics like toilet and sink.

Now picture the child of that house and the vigorously over-decorated 1980s model home.

If it were only that, I would still consider it. Paint can do a lot. Unfortunately, our friend in the neighborhood says that there are pockets of the neighborhood that have some significant social problems, and that house is on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks.

But I’m still glad we saw it. I would never have imagined such a house being possible if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.