Starting Over

A little over four years ago, my husband and I closed on a house near the University of Houston’s main campus. It was not my dream home, but my husband seemed determined to have the house, and so I agreed. 

 I thought we were paying too much, and I had concerns about the condition of the house, particularly given the price tag. 

 I wasn’t crazy about the layout, or the fact that the house backed up to a parking lot for the university.

But the house was close to the Metro Rail, so my husband could take the train to work. And the neighborhood was – and still is – vibrant and diverse, with a blend of ethnicities, ages, and religions that we found appealing.

It was not a good time for me to be buying a house, emotionally. I was entering a period of serious depression due to many factors. I was struggling with the fact that I was newly declared legally disabled. I had always been so proud of my ability to support myself, but my body had other plans, and I was in a downward spiral, health-wise. There were stretches of days when it was all I could do to drag myself out of bed to get a glass of water. Eventually, I became suicidally depressed.

I had no self confidence, and – feeling that I shouldn’t have as much of a say in how we spent our money as the spouse who was making most of it – I decided that my husband should get the house he wanted.

So we bought the house. Almost immediately, I regretted it.

We had to have the house rewired, and it took forever. Everything we hired a contractor to do, they somehow bungled. I was a constant wreck, my nerves shattered from medication, illness, constant battles with the contractors I had to deal with while my husband was at work.

Almost from the day we moved in, I hated the house. I wanted out.

About two years ago, I told my husband I didn’t like the house and probably never would. I didn’t feel that we should invest more money into a house with the location issues ours had, and wanted to move somewhere else. Every time something good would happen to us, the house would find some way to muck things up: the air conditioner would die and need replacing, the hot water heater would break, or we would find out that the previous owner had simply covered up the tile flooring that they suspected contained asbestos, rather than getting it tested so they could disclose that information. (Spoiler: we got it tested, and it contains asbestos.)

We put an enormous amount of money and time into the house. My husband stripped every bit of millwork in the house (except for the kitchen cabinets) and repainted it. We had the floors refinished from their hideous 1970s golden oak to a beautifully mellow sandy hue. I personally installed the custom door hardware with polished brass rosettes that set off their black porcelain knobs. Custom window shades were ordered for the enormous bay window in the living room, and my husband and father installed them the same day they replaced the front door, which I’d painted a bright cheery red.

But I still hated the house, mostly for its associations with the dark time I experienced right after we moved in. At one point, my therapist jokingly promised not to tell the police if I confessed to her that I’d burned the place to the ground.

On December 21, 2020, my husband came home from work and announced that he wanted to move. He wanted to sell the house, and find somewhere else to live. He wanted it to happen as soon as possible. He declared that he was sure the house was cursed. He’d learned that the University was planning to build a new building directly behind our house, along with two parking garages. The Metro Rail’s nearest crossing was getting a bar that would lower and ding-ding-ding while the trains went by. And he didn’t want to put more money into a house that we were already in over our heads on. I asked him if he wanted me to find someone to buy it, and he said, “Yes.” “When?” “As soon as possible. I want to start 2021 in a new place.”

So I found someone to buy the house from us, in cash. It was literally one of those “We Buy Ugly Houses” companies, with the billboards featuring a caveman. Their offer was less than we might have received trying to sell through a realtor, but there were no realtor fees (the buyer is a licensed realtor); the buyer paid the title fees; and there was no waiting around for potential buyers, no negotiating with them. The buyer’s offer exactly paid off our mortgage.

On January 22, 2021, we moved into an apartment. We’re spend 2021 paying less in rent, utilities, and insurance combined than we’ve been paying every month on our mortgage, and will be able to save up more money as a result. Our savings are healthy – we lived particularly frugally during the height of the pandemic – and we figure we’ll be able to buy a new house, and make a new start, six months from now.

It has been an adjustment. We moved from 1,500 square feet into about 1,100 square feet. We have to walk our dog, Ginger, multiple times every day (though the apartment complex has a large off-leash Bark Park, Ginger prefers not to share it with other pups). A lot of our things are in an off-site, climate controlled storage facility. 

BUT, I no longer spend thirty minutes circling the neighborhood in ever-tightening spirals after running errands, sobbing as I drive, because I don’t want to go back to that house. To me, it was never a home, but just “that house.”

Though we still have about six months to go before we’re ready to buy a new place, we’ve begun touring neighborhoods, discussing whether we want to buy a fixer-upper or something that will just require some tweaking (for example, new kitchen tile and interior paint). We’re debating the merits of townhouses with small yards versus more “Houston traditional” houses with large yards. I’m checking every home address against the Houston flood maps to see where they lie in relation to floodplains, and scouring listings for those magic words: “NEVER FLOODED.”

My self-confidence has improved, my mental health has improved, and I am very vocal about our real estate decisions, now. And we’re communicating about our expectations and desires, which we’ve learned is absolutely crucial. I know it’s still several months away, but I can’t wait to see what 2022 has in store for us.

The Fun Never Stops

I haven’t written in a while.

A very long while.

A lot has happened in our little house, since my last writing. We now have club chairs. We have a wall of artwork in our stairwell. We have a rug in our living room, and a table lamp, and all sorts of things that were missing, as of my last post.

There are still no dining room chairs, however. It’s the only excuse I have to get out of hosting Christmas and Thanksgiving. Hah!

We’ve had grand plans for the house, and intended to start on them in February or March.

We were going to buy a king-size bed, so we could both sleep comfortably. We were going to add lighting and a legit stair rail to the stairs, so I wouldn’t repeat last year’s tumble and concussion, when the wall of our landing “broke my fall” via my head. We were going to enclose and renovate our master bedroom, which is currently open to the living room below, and renovate the master bathroom, too, because it’s hideous. We were going to enlarge our closets, because they’re tiny, useless cubby holes under a sloping roof. We were going to take in some of the attic space and add a skylight so I could have my own little study/migraine room for when I need to get up in the night time, so I wouldn’t have to go down the stairs.

I had everything priced out, down to which knobs would be on the kitchen cabinets, and which toilet seat we’d be opting for (one with a built-in bidet), and which closet system we’d install.

Then my husband pointed out to me that the ceiling above our kitchen – and below our master bathroom – seems to be sagging, at approximately the location of the bathroom wall, above.

We decided to call an engineer, just to make sure everything was okay before we proceeded with the renovation.

And all hell broke loose.

The floor joists supporting our master bedroom aren’t sufficient to support… anything, really, except a ceiling. The structure above the kitchen is messed up, somehow, but we won’t know exactly how unless we rip out the ceiling in the kitchen. We need a beam across the opening between the kitchen and the dining room, because whoever renovated back in the 1960s or 1970s tore out a bearing wall there, and didn’t put in a proper beam, so there’s nothing supporting the exterior wall of our master bathroom, above. (Hopefully, this makes sense to non-building professionals.)

TLDR: We’re screwed.

I brought in a contractor, anyway, to talk through what we would have to do to renovate, and he informed me that we’d have to do the kitchen and the master suite all at once, and the ceiling in our living room would either have to drop, or we’d have to have exposed beams in the living room.

We have 8’-5” ceilings (because construction in 1955 wasn’t as standardized as it is today), and we’re talking dropping down to 7’-10”.

Nope.

I called another contractor to get his opinion, and his opinion was vastly different. He said that a bank would be unlikely to loan us the extra money for renovations that wouldn’t add square footage and possibly wouldn’t get us the desired return on the house (a serious concern of mine). He suggested ripping off the roof and the master bedroom altogether and just building a second story. It would add about 600 square feet to the house, and would vastly increase the value of the home.

But we don’t know if our foundation can support that much weight, because adding walls AND a roof to a house that is obviously under-engineered already is a terrible idea.

As an alternative, he suggested building a new foundation off the back of the kitchen, expanding the kitchen and rebuilding the screened porch, and building a new master suite over that, plus beefing up the structure (which he said wouldn’t require beams and dropping the ceiling, though the floor level of the upstairs would raise slightly, so there would be a slightly lower ceiling upstairs). Our current master bedroom would become my migraine room, and we’d go from being a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house to a 4-bedroom, 3-bath house, which would vastly increase its market value.

I suggested to my husband trying to sell for the value of our current mortgage, and just buying a different house, rather than putting $150,000+ into a renovation on this one, plus the cost of renting an apartment for 6 months while the work is performed.

He wasn’t a fan of that idea.

After some discussions about the house, we’ve come to a conclusion: Everything will be put on hold.

We don’t want to take out a loan for the entirety of the cost of renovation and addition, so we’ll have to save up for a couple of years to make that happen, regardless. We’re just going to wait and see. In two years, when we’ve saved up the amount we hope for, we can decide if we really want to invest more money in the house, or if we want to buy a newer patio home somewhere nearby.

In the meantime, we’re buying an inexpensive platform bed and a king-size mattress. We’re going to paint the master bedroom a cheerful shade of white – it’s currently a hideous yellowish beige that’s dark and depressing – and I took advantage of a bedding sale at Target to buy pretty and affordable linens. We’ll install a stop-gap handrail and motion-sensor light in the stairs so I won’t be in mortal peril going downstairs in the middle of the night when I have a migraine and need to move to a different bed to writhe around in agony.

And I’ll try not to have a panic attack about the house, every week. (I’m not exaggerating. The uncertainty of everything has been incredibly stressful, for me. Hello, Klonopin!)

And we’ll live with the house we have.

For now.

In the Home Stretch

We have now lived in our "new house" for 9 months, and we are so close to getting everything put together.

"Everything" is relative, of course. We have no dining chairs, and no club chairs in the living room. My husband's office is sans desk, right now, and also desk chair, lamps, bookshelves and filing cabinets. Some of these deficiencies will be rectified when my husband gets his bonus in April - "when you get your bonus" has taken on an almost mystical quality, at this point - but others will wait a while longer.

My husband and I decided to go ahead and have the floors refinished before "bonus day", because having the fake fireplace removed left a gaping hole in the floor. And the idea of moving furniture in, and then having to move it back out to have the floors redone later, did not appeal to either of us.

We got in touch with a local flooring contractor, and decided he was our guy (partly because nobody else would call us back, following Hurricane Harvey and the construction boom it caused, and partly because we chatted about what an amazing biographer Ron Chernow is while he measured the house). Initially, we were supposed to have our floors refinished two weeks before Christmas.

But...

Given all the work from Harvey, the flooring contractor had to bump our date back, and he was going to start 4 days before Christmas.

Four days.

Four days when we would have to have the dogs boarded somewhere, and we would have to stay in a hotel, all while dealing with the holidays. And there were no vacancies at our preferred boarding places. And no hotels that would accept two humans and two dogs during that time. Four days before Christmas was obviously a "no-go", especially since we were celebrating in Houston with family from out of town.

Our flooring contractor was elated when I asked if we could postpone things until after New Year's Day.

The only problem was that we found out our start date was being pushed back after we'd dragged my brother-in-law over to the house to move all the furniture outside.

We did the best we could with the mattress from our guest room on the living room floor, serving as a sofa, for almost a month. I'm sure our neighbors think we're strange, or were convinced we'd rented the place out to college students, given the sudden downgrade in seating.

Did I mention our 44" wide dining table had been placed in our kitchen, where the space between the countertops is 54" wide? And that the dining table is almost as long as the kitchen? No?

I should have mentioned that.

We are now some of DoorDash's favorite customers, and now that things are relatively back to normal (and our dining table is out of the kitchen) I daily expect our delivery guy to drop by to make sure we haven't died.

Prior to the refinish, our floors were a lovely shade of 1980s golden-oak (a.k.a. orange), with some areas that had experienced spills which removed all the finish from the surface, exposing the bare wood beneath.

I was not too fond of them.

We had our floors refinished to a beautiful strawberry-blonde color, since the floors are red oak, interspersed with white oak.

The "media center" is temporary, a holdover from my first apartment 15 years ago. The front drawers are goldenrod fiberglass flecked with gold threads, which unfortunately don't show up well in this picture!

I love love love the color (half Dura-Seal "neutral" and half Dura-Seal "Cottage White", if you're wondering). My husband loves the color (and loves that I'm happy with the color).

There's just one problem.

There is a streak in the floor, about 8 feet long and 1/8" wide, as if someone's shoelace dragged through the finish before it had completely cured. It's visible from the dining room, though almost invisible when you're standing in the living room. It isn't in a location where we intend to put a rug, because it's right down the middle of the path of travel between the staircase and the dining room.

We initially thought we could live with it, mostly because we're just tired of "camping out" in our house.

But we ultimately decided to have it fixed. Which means the dogs will have to be boarded (again), right after returning from Dallas, where they stayed with my endlessly patient mother. They'll get to have an afternoon at the house today (Thursday, January 18) before they go to our boarding-place of choice, tomorrow (Friday, January 19).

I feel like the worst "dog mom" ever.

But our dogs will come home (Monday) to beautiful floors, and an unobstructed view out the front windows, at least until 8 weeks after "Bonus Day."

They are also coming home to a house without water, because our exterior water main burst, at some point in the past 72 hours, and our pest control guy alerted me to it around noon. I have purchased bottled water for "plumbing" purposes, and my mother will have to stay at my sister's house for tonight, at least (though I'm sure she won't mind seeing her non-dog grandchildren).

Also, after the days of freezing weather we've had, I returned home from buying the bottled water to find that we'd won the emergency trash pickup lottery, but hadn't put our trash out. I sprinted down the driveway with an overflowing trash can, and decided afterwards that a medicinal glass of muscato was in order.

I mean, there's no water to the house, right? Got to stay hydrated somehow.