Less House, More Home

I haven't been writing. I haven't felt the impulse. What I mostly have been feeling is overwhelmed, and that has been true to varying degrees since the election. But it's not just politics, it's also the house and life generally.  The house did appraise for almost 45% more than the purchase price 3 1/2 years ago. At first I was ecstatic just to be out from under the PMI. A few weeks later I began to toy with the possibilities. Perhaps I should take out a home equity line of credit? That lead to questioning whether perhaps I should sell it, just take the money and run. Pay off all my debts, get out from under the mortgage, quit my job or at least take a sabbatical, and travel around the country and parts of the world catching up on all the vacation trips I have not taken in 25 years, living off the little nest egg that I wouldn't need to spend on renovations. It was very seductive, it was also very freeing, and it was part of a very long long long process, a multi-decade process, of coming to terms with some major life decisions that I made before I could legally drink. 

In time, my previous real estate agent came to the house, looking much spiffier these days, driving a very nice SUV, and after three hours of time for which he will not be receiving any compensation at all in the near future, he managed very gently to tell me the hard truth: nobody is going to want to buy your shitty little house for the appraised value. This blew my fantasy of chucking it all and taking a gap year completely out of the water, and I was more than a little crushed. 

On top of it all, I was sick all of January which caused Me to dro out of My choir for a concert cycle; gone away for a week with family; went to Winter fire; and in the middle of all that started physical therapy, continued taking a therapeutic yoga class, and also had some drama at work.  At some point in all that, I bought two little wooden plaques. One says: All Who Wander Are Not Lost.  The other says: Less House, More Home.

It has felt like everything I want to be solid is rolling under my feet, and I have felt more than a little at sea. It's not bad but it's disorienting.

It's not that I have nothing to talk or write about. It's that I don't know what to say. I haven't yet figured out how to make sense of what is going on around Me. It's one thing to write in a diary, and the blog is sort of a diary but it has an audience and it's also broadly open to the public, and that makes Me less willing to blow air out the top of My hat when I don't know what I'm actually trying to say. I'm also very sensitive at the moment to the possibility that things I say in writing -- those which are really much better suited to verbal conversations face-to-face. -- can be a little dangerous. Writing makes everything more real. Writing is a less forgiving than talk. Something slightly mis-stated in writing has a permanence to it which makes fixing the mis-statement extremely difficult. It risks an un-bridgeable rupture, and I don't feel comfortable with that at all.

The good news is that spring is almost here, it's time to spring ahead this weekend. The annual process of My clock winding down and winding back up is nearly complete, and for that I am thankful. The cherry blossoms are coming. I have new focus now for which projects the house needs, I understand their priority. I have amusingly learned that most of what I care about in the house is unimportant to most buyers, and conversely, almost perfectly inversely, what is important to most buyers has been totally unimportant to Me. It's time to create a convergence between those two groups of projects. From this point forward I improve the house for resale value, not for My own preferences. I understand the difference between what affect sales price and what affects appraisal value. I have clarity, and though it was uncomfortable to get, clarity is good, very little happens without clarity.  Now My goal is to get the house ready, as soon as feasible, so that I could sell it if I chose to, so that if I ever did decide abruptly to sell, I would be prepared. It would give Me peace of mind to know I am ready, like the Israelites ready to jump up and go when the moment comes. This has the interesting side effect of giving Me permission to live in a finished and beautiful, camera ready house. I think it's interesting that I've been willing to live in a renovation for 3 1/2 years. I wonder if maybe on some level perhaps I didn't believe I deserved to have it be perfect, just for Me. Now it's clear it must be perfect to sell some day, so it may as well be perfect before that, I may as well get to enjoy it Myself. It's an interesting scrambling of priorities. 

Growing up My parents tried to renovate our house at one point. They ran out of money and got stuck and the result was that I lived in a gutted house most of My childhood. I particularly remember that we did not have a furnace exactly, we had a hole where there used to be a stairwell but it was just a hole covered by a piece of 4x8 plywood. And in the hole was something very like a jet engine. It must've been some sort of a propane or kerosene furnace, laid on its side like a cruise missile. And in the depths of the Midwestern winters when the house got too cold, we would pull the 4x8 piece of plywood up and turn on the jet engine for about 10 minutes, to heat the house to the point of being unbearably hot, and then turn it off and let the house cool for four or six hours until it was so cold that it once again seemed like a good idea to tolerate 10 minutes of noise and kerosene fumes to be warm again. 

Reading back… That sounds just awful. It's surprising to read that that was My home in childhood, that that was the way we lived for several years. But it was. We also went a long stretch without a bathroom in the house. For a long time the only bathing option we had was out in the barn and often we had to move a sick calf out of the shower in order to be able to take our once weekly shower. Lord, I must have stunk. It was a lot more like living in Little House on the Prairie than one might expect for the 1970s. 

I have understood for a long time that this house renovation is on some level completion of a task that is not Mine, it is on some level finishing the renovation My parents could not finish. It's a wound I inherited that I carry somewhere inside, and in the way of such things I have created an external version of the wound for Myself so that I can heal it. My parents are helping Me with My house, and so by extension, finishing My renovation will bring them a little bit of extra closure for their past. It is perhaps for this reason more than all others, that My father has been here for the last five days helping, sanding and finishing the staircase, chipping out tiles from the utility room, replacing the damaged subfloor and putting it all back together. It is emblematic of My father that this is a tremendous act of love, yet for the most part he does it with a level of grumpiness that makes it feel like an imposition, a gift given begrudgingly. I have to work hard at remembering that it is love in action, and remembering to feed back to him demonstrations of love that he can receive. Amusingly for a FemDom, this means that for the last five days I have been getting up 2 to 3 hours earlier than I prefer, brewing fresh coffee for my man so he can start the work, baking cinnamon rolls for my man, washing and folding my man's dirty clothes, making sure my man is fed and feels adequately appreciated. And I worked 48 hours at My white collar day job. It was a slightly bizarre juxtaposition. And I am exhausted.

After dad flew home tonight, the bizarre culminated with Me peeing in My own backyard because I cannot get up the wet staircase to the single bathroom right now. So I said screw it, and went out under the tree. If I could have found a nice boy to lay down there first, I would happily have peed on him as well. It would have done Me a world of good.