The Joys of House Ownership

When I was in 6th grade, we had a project for some class or another to design your "dream house."  Mine was a sprawling compound the size of a Boeing factory with pretty much every amenity you could ever imagine, an underground tram line that ran all over the grounds, and was built to survive a limited nuclear exchange (it was 1987 -- I had a lot of angst about the end of the world back then).  Eventually, my teacher made me turn it in even though it wasn't "finished," because I had taken about a month and a half to do it and I had about forty pages of drawings on graph paper and other notes for it.

My parents have always owned a house, as far back as I can remember.  They have always been big on the whole remodeling thing and my dad is pretty good with most everything you can do around the house.  They have always made their house a real home within a year or two of moving in.  I can remember moving into the house on Stratford, and I can remember how it definitely did not feel like home.  It smelled wrong, it felt weird...but I can remember not long after when it seemed like I had never lived anywhere else.

I bought a house five years ago and I've done almost nothing with it, aside from some repairs, and putting a new floor in the kitchen.  My house has never really felt like a home -- just a place I'm living until I move on.  It's too small, it's a mess, and it's just not....home.  I've been working on remodeling my brother's old room, now that he moved out, with my dad's help (and a lot of it, and I really couldn't have done any of it without him -- thanks, Dad).  Even so....I don't think it will ever change the fact that this just doesn't seem like home.  My apartment that I had before this never felt like home, though I admit when my mom surprised me by hanging up a bunch of my grandfather's old stuff when I was at LISA one year, it felt....better.  Still not like home though.

I don't know what it is.  What makes a house a home?  When is that change from the house that smells weird and feels wrong to it seeming like you've never lived anywhere else?  Hell, my parents' new house, that I've never lived in ever, still feels like more of a home to me than my house ever has.  Part of it, I know, is because of all the time and effort my folks have invested in it, and I've done almost nothing here.  But I haven't done anything here because...I just don't know where to start, or what will make that change, or what the point is when I really don't want to live here anymore.  I'm tired of cramped spaces and a place where there's nothing really to do at home but be at home.  I'm tired of thinking about how much it costs to change anything about the place I live and thinking about all the other money I'm spending on everything else.  It's a vicious cycle.  Maybe if I had built my house, but I know from my parents' experience that that is only half the story -- it's not the house itself but what's in it that makes that change.  The smell of dad's cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, mom's silly potpourri things and candles everywhere, the warmth of the fire in the winter, dinner cooking on the grill out back, knowing that when you come home you're not going to be sitting there talking to yourself all night before you go to bed, the actual decorating style so that everything in the room is pulled together instead of looking like it came from nine different places and you just threw it all together so that you'd have something functional; that's home, and I'm worried I'll never get to have something like that.

I want to be able to sit in the place where I live and look out the window and just be happy to be where I am.  At my parents' house, when I can look out the window into the back yard on a cold winter day, snow covering the ground and a fire burning nearby, sipping some hot chocolate...that's home.  When I do that here...all I can think about is how much I don't want to be here really.  I want to be out, somewhere else, anywhere else.  I just don't have anywhere else to go, at least not that I can just hop out to.  I don't want to live with my folks, I know that -- but I do want that same experience.  I want to come home and feel relaxed, not trapped.  I just don't know if I'll ever be able to do that.

Possibly more on this tomorrow, but I think this is quite enough for today.