In The Beginning . . .

It‘s irresistible, the idea you can buy a better house than you can afford if you only fix it up yourself. It‘s irresistible, but it‘s insane. As your Mom says, if it were easy, everyone would do it.

Lots of people buy a fixer-upper once, but often only once. Lots of people remodel their homes, often also only once. With my ex, I bought four houses in various states of disrepair. We fixed them up into various states of livability.

The only one we sold at a profit was the only one we finished. We walked away from a one house, a two hundred year old mansion in England. Dropped the keys in the Vicar’s mailbox and left the country. Getting in over your head is easy.

The ex and I built two homes from the ground up. We didn’t mean to finish the first one, but the contractor went bankrupt, then more or less, so did we. The second time we built, we didn’t use a contractor.

We did, however, sub out work to a couple of guys who ripped us and other members of the community off and landed in prison in Deer Lodge, Montana. He escaped, so I’m warning you: there’s evil carpenters on the loose. Be careful who you hire.

I‘m still a sucker for a better house than I can afford.

My ex and I divorced, surprise, but not for living in a perpetual state of home disrepair. Not even for moving exactly twenty times during our marriage. Not for being homeless, living with friends, living in my office, and camping on our property all with four kids. We survived all that for some reason. We may have had a crappy marriage and horrid real estate market timing, but we did okay living in houses without plumbing or walls.

I’ll take credit. My parents designed and had built a big house while I was in high school. They did much of the work themselves. They also owned rentals in which my Dad spent every waking moment when he wasn’t working his regular job.

When we were barely old enough, we’d come with him on weekends and fill his places full of epoxy and Navajo white paint. Fixing up to us kids meant going out to lunch for a really long time, painting a wall or two, then talking to tenants about politics. We got paid extremely well for every minute away from our own front door.

If you want your kids to have good feelings about home repair, this method worked for us.

Charlie and I couldn’t afford to pay attention when we were first together. A friend’s mother passed away and she needed someone to occupy the condo while it was on the market. It was free and that’s all we could afford. Never mind we were a lot younger than the over-fifty age limit. We came and left in the dark so no one would know. If it weren’t for that, we were prepared for starting out our new life together in the comfort of Charlie’s truck.

As soon as we could, we found a bungalow for five figures. This wasn’t that long ago, so you know it needed work. With a lot of negotiation and prayer, we squeaked through a loan. The five thousand I hid to survive through my divorce was our down payment. Soon we were the proud owners of a rat-infested, asbestos-laden, Martha Steward on Acid-decorated starter home.

Every spare minute we worked on that little dump. Since then I’ve learned when you’re in a new relationship, you’re much more eager to show your work ethic and skills than when you get to know each other better. We fixed it up and were married on the beautiful new front deck a year and a half later. We sold it quickly and put the profit down on a ranch house in the suburbs.

The ranch house in the suburbs had its problems, but that’s why we could afford it. It hadn’t been remodeled since 1973, when it first went on the market. My retro-oriented kids say, “The floor’s giving me a headache,“ when they look down at the harvest gold and burnt orange Spanish style linoleum. Somebody was excited to buy this house back then. What were they thinking?

What were they thinking, building this house on a dry creek bed? Didn’t they guess the foundation would settle into the shape of a dry creek bed? No big deal, we thought. We fixed up the bungalow in a year and a half when our lives were in complete divorce and child custody chaos. So the house was a little more work. We were in no hurry.

We’re still in no hurry. We started off with a bang, literally. We did so much demolition there was nothing left to destroy. We took trailer loads full of fixtures to the Rebuilding Centre in Portland. Since it’s a long trip from the ‘burbs, we’d rip everything off the walls and floors to fill up the load. That’s why we’ve lived with glue on the kitchen walls where cabinets used to be.

The fifteen year-old wild child, Cheyenneh, hates the state of this house and insists on being dropped off and picked up at the corner. The seventeen year-old skateboarder, Dylan, doesn’t complain as long as he can skate through the kitchen and do tricks down the stairs with his deck.

The three basic human needs are food, clothing, and shelter. One, two, and three. If you don’t have the third, the first two aren’t any easier. Most of your life and your waking hours are rooted in what you call home. It affects you in ways you only know when you don’t have one.

If you have a home but it doesn’t have little things like sheetrock, windows, doors, it makes a difference. Sometimes it makes the difference between going home or continuing along the highway to Barnes and Noble instead. You don’t have to negotiate around the 12” DeWalt sliding compound miter saw to sit down in a bookstore. They play nice music. You can relax. We’ve been relaxing for three years, now.

Charlie says he’s fired up to finish the house, but he still has work and the Harley. The skateboarder says he’ll help, but he‘s a skateboarder. I can bribe the wild child with a mall visit to get the clean-up done. Me, I’m happy listening to the nice music at Barnes and Noble. I’ll go home when they kick me out. Then I’m too tired to notice where I’m sleeping.

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

A little help? [] 2:35:35 PM