The Red House is nestled in a historic neighborhood a block or two away from some vey famous architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright style abounds and Craftsman charm is everywhere. We have a unique set of windows in The Red House with some really beautiful antique brass hardware. There is a tiny problem though: the windows in our home are purely decorative.
We didn't mind at first. After all, she was so grand. All that quarter-sawn oak started to shimmer and shine as the wallpaper came off room by room and the decades of neglect were rerversed.
But those windows... they sit there, in the middle of every wall, appearing to offer protection from the elements and flooding the large rooms with daylight. But… you notice as you sit at the table or lounge in an armchair that the elements are actually passing right through them. Stifling heat, biting cold, and let’s not forget the insects. And the dirt.
Of course, everyone has to sweep. Dirt is part of life. Every house gets dirty. But- The Red House! Like a toddler when you turn your back at the beach, she just eats it in. Lots of it. How does she do it? Every Saturday- er, many Saturdays- between the broom and the Swiffer vac, how many tons of dirt have we hauled out of her in 5 years? It was on a fateful cleaning Saturday in 2010 that The Master and I were attending to the upstairs hallway when our eyes met over a dustpan full of grit. 3 children were fussing downstairs. We had been working for hours and The Red House looked as if we had barely given her a swipe. And we knew. That 7 ounces of muck was it. Other people would spend an hour or 2 putting their home to rights, then would proceed to something like a walk in the park or a matinee with light hearts. But not us. Every time we stopped the cleaning or the patching it was just a pause. The to-do list never ended. Always in the back of our minds were the things we ought to be doing to The Red House. And that’s just when things were going well. Forget about the regular burst pipe, clogged drain, or shake shingles falling like rain.
It was sometime later in 2010 when we got brave enough to say it out loud. The dream we had had as newlyweds of fixing up an old house… it had changed. Not died, but changed. Because the end of this remodel was not in sight, not by a long shot; we were not getting younger nor the family smaller. Family time, time to build block towers and read The Just-So Stories to our children, was not growing more abundant. So we decided we ought to just trade houses, trade mortgages on something lower maintenance. But that didn’t feel quite right. It was many months before the decision to take our equity and bail was really settled. But once it had been, once the realtor came through with her laundry list, The Red House was furious.
First, one pipe burst. The side of the house came off; floors were demolished. And before the dust could settle, a drain clogged. Really clogged. And while that was still a mystery, yet another pipe burst. And 2 phone jacks quit working. You know, just in case we were growing secretly wistful about it…
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