I love my house, but sometimes it terrifies me.
No, this is not a story about how I bought an older home and then realized it’s haunted (honestly, ghost problems might be easier to fix). Instead, this is about the reality of older home ownership and restoration — and how, as many legendary Millennial icons told us on MTV’s “Diary” series, “You think you know, but you have no idea.”
When we bought our 1904-built house last year, we knew what we were getting into. We did a lot of work to our previous home, we know HGTV is full of shit, and we had an amazing real estate agent, Tai Faux, who called in every specialist she could during the buying process so we could get estimates on all the work that needed to be done and wouldn’t be signing blindly on the dotted line.
In fact, it was Tai who told us that she knew we were OK with an older home that needed some work, but this is “a major fixer.”
“We’re in,” we said. Take our money. Give us the keys. Register the domain name.
The first six months in our new home were spent making huge changes that no one could really see from the outside:
We had major electrical work done to remove old knob and tube wiring, add a new electrical box in the basement, and install several outlets.
We had to replace a part of the sewage line because it was still connected to the city system via the original terracotta pipes from over a hundred years ago.
We had to have a huge leak repaired in the dining room ceiling and essentially rip out everything in the bathroom above it. We’re still working on replacing it all.
If you can’t see your dining room through your bathroom floor, are you really living?
We took the non-functional, extremely disgusting downstairs bathroom down to the studs and installed new tile, a sink, a toilet, and a shower. Granted, this is one change you can see, but it was less about style and more so we could have one functional place to bathe and brush teeth and pee for the foreseeable future. We still have plans to “make it pretty” later on.
We’ve done some other cosmetic projects involving paint, tile, plants, and decor, but our house was rough when we bought it, it is still rough a year and some change later, and it’s going to continue to be rough for a while.
And that’s the part that scares me sometimes.
I can give you a laundry list of improvements my husband and I have worked our butts off making, but we still have the ugliest house on the block — no matter how much we love Our Little Uggo — and we’re going to keep on having the ugliest house on the block for some time.
Will it ever actually look better? Will we actually be “done”? With anything? Ever? I spiral a bit if I think about those questions too long.
Case in point: the latest project.
Last summer, I got curious about the aluminum siding on the outside of our house. Clearly, there was stuff under it, but what?
I’ve never had an impulse I didn’t follow with little to no forethought, so a-ripping I went. I found weird shingle siding underneath (something we’ve since learned was a popular house covering in the 1940s). And then, beneath that, original fir siding. I also found out our porch did not actually have square pillars — those were hiding beautiful (and in desperate need of repair) columns.
Now, we’re redoing the porch. And it’s going to be beautiful when all is said and done. But you know what it looks like right now? Here are some progress shots from the past two weeks as I painstakingly strip the old paint to get down to the gorgeous original siding, which I will eventually restore and prime and repaint.
How it started
The end of day one of paint stripping (4-5 hours of work)
Day two of paint stripping (another 4-ish hours)
That is my progress in two days — several hours — of work, and it’s not even a quarter of what I need to do. It’s slow painstaking work. I have to wear coveralls and a respirator because of lead. I built a little shelter out of PVC pipes and tarps to put around me while I work so I don’t contaminate the neighborhood. It’s hot and sweaty, and I haven’t been able to work on it at all this week because temperatures have been in the high ‘90s and I’m not a huge fan of heat stroke.
I would really love to get the porch done by Halloween. But I also have a job, two kids starting school in September, four cats, a million other projects, hobbies, and human limitations, so who knows?
The scariest thing about my house — and the most exhilarating and challenging and frequently beautiful thing — is that there’s really no choice but to keep going, no matter how long it takes, even if the road starts getting longer and twistier (and more expensive) with every step you take.
I’ve always wanted to restore an old house like this. I feel so privileged to be able to do this. I love this house like one of my kids. I daydream about the day in the future when I will sit on my beautiful porch with a cup of coffee, admiring my handiwork and watching the birds playing in our birdbath. But I have no real idea how far off that day is, even with maximal effort and good intentions and as much planning as I can do.
It is a major fixer with a life and a history all its own and a to-do list that never stops, and I am just along for the ride.