Home Reflections of Life
How Our Houses Reflect Our Lives
One Chapter Closing, Another Soon to Begin
Today, we will be closing on the sale of our house here in Vienna. We’ll continue to live in it for the next two weeks, on a no-cost rent-back basis. The young couple who are buying it will never move into it — they plan to tear it down and build their dream home here on the property. We really like them, and like the idea that they will be raising their young family here, where we raised our son and spent the best 23 years of our lives.
Next Friday, we’ll close on the purchase of our new home in Falmouth, down in the Fredericksburg area. Then, we’ll move into it the following weekend, on the 20th.
So, for the next week, for the first time in 34 years, we won’t be homeowners. Then, we’ll take ownership of our third home.
I was thinking, in the shower this morning, how each house we’ve lived in has kind of reflected where we were at in our lives at that time.
Handyman Special
Our first house, the little cottage on the lake in south Jersey, was a true handyman’s special. I went into that one with little to no knowledge of home repair, and proceeded to get a crash course in it, especially over the first 7 of the 11 years we lived there. It was a lot like my life at the time. I was in my 6th year of sobriety then, still building a solid foundation upon which to build my recovery from addiction.
One of the first things we had to do on that house, after digging up and re-laying the septic drain fields, was to rebuild the entire foundation. Like my life before recovery, it had been built on sandy soil, with no foundation going below the ground level. Very shaky.
Building a Solid Foundation
I had to dig deep (4 feet down, to get below the frost level), mix and pour a foot of concrete, build a 3-tier cinder block wall, with mortar in all the joints), jack the house up with three 20-ton hydraulic jacks, one foundation pier at a time, all the way around the entire house. It took from early March to late October of 1986 to complete the laying of that foundation, of the house we lived in while we did all that.
The renovation work continued, non-stop, for the next 5 or 6 years, as we installed a gas furnace in the attic, horizontally (the only place there was room for such an appliance), continually dealt with plumbing and electrical issues, rebuilt every interior wall and ceiling, added a hallway between the bathroom and kitchen, and on and on. It was a hardscrabble existence, living in that house, and then, even after all that work to improve it, there was always some new problem cropping up to deal with.
Evicting All the Critters
What I hated the most was dealing with all the critters that wanted to live there with us. First, it was the squirrels we had to evict from the attic. They were used to moving in there in the fall, when it had been a summer cottage prior to our making it a year-round dwelling. After the squirrels, there came a cat who snuck in while we were doing the foundation work. It kept finding a way in, and I was deathly allergic to cats. I finally took it to a neighborhood many miles away, and hoped it would find a home there. It never returned, thankfully.
Next came the muskrats, who set up housekeeping in the area under the floor (not really even a crawl space, just about 10 inches beneath the floorboards), then skunks, and finally, the ones I hated the most — the rats. Rats really give me the heebee-geebees!
It Had to Be Rats!
There had previously been miles of orchards right up the road from us, that all got developed into housing developments, and apparently, all the field rats from up there got driven down into our neighborhood by all the construction.
They quickly found ways into the houses in the neighborhood, and it was a real problem. The worst was the time I checked on one of my traps, set where I thought they were coming in, and to my horror saw 4 too many legs. My snap trap had snagged not one, but two rats, at the same time. Who knows how many more were with them when those two got snagged? I was so out of there!
Where the Critters Know Their Place
An opportunity to move down to DC opened up at work, and I jumped at it. Back then, they had a relocation service that would buy your old house, while they helped you find a new one. We found this place and happily moved into it. It already had a solid foundation, and didn’t need any major repairs, at least not for the first several years. All of the critters stayed outside, in the backyard — we had deer, squirrels, chipmunks, a groundhog, foxes and coyotes. None ever tried to move in with us, although we did have to evict a family of chipmunks from our cars, where they took up residence in the air handling system. There’s a spray for that, that works well.
This place reflected our more stable status in life, as I was, by then, 16 years into sobriety, working at the national level of my organization, and pretty much putting everything I had into my job, and my family. Raising our son was our first priority. This house, and town, were the perfect places to do that.
By the time it did need major repairs, we were in a position to afford them — i.e., pay someone else to do them, as opposed to me trying to do them myself. I was never that good at home repair.
Town Enhancement Award Winners
We also lived in an area that appreciated us a lot more. Whereas, in our first home, we were used to getting nastygrams from the town about our leaves, here, we got invited to Town Hall to receive Town Enhancement awards, for our “alluring holiday display”. We won that award three times for our holiday lights and yard display. They liked us here! We, likewise, felt right at home.
We always loved how this town retained a small town feel, while being right in the middle of this vast DC metropolitan area. Our location was ideal, being in a quiet neighborhood with a lot of green space, but within walking distance of 4 major grocery markets, and every kind of restaurant you could imagine.
However, progress has taken over the entire area, and Vienna is slowly losing its small town appeal. Vast structures are beginning to go up in town, and every old house like ours, is being torn down to build vast mansions that go for 1.5 to 2 million dollars. It no longer reflects who we are.
Preparing For the Future…
Our new place in Falmouth does. It is ideally suited to an older couple, and to mobility issues. While I don’t have those yet, I may in 15 or 20 years. My wife does, now. It has an elevator! It has even more, and deeper, greenspace in the back, and just as nice a yard as here. The house itself is pretty amazing — twice the size of this one, it costs half as much. It will have plenty of room for someone to move in to take care of us, when we can no longer take care of ourselves. We’ve paid for the Cadillac of long-term care insurance for many years, for just that reason.
…While Relishing a Rich History and Connection
The area has a rich history. We’ll be right up the road from where George Washington grew up. We’ll be within 2 miles of where my great grandfather’s Union company fought in both battles of Fredericksburg, in the Civil War. My understanding is, the artillery cannons that supported the Union in those battles were located on the same hill we’ll be living on.
I love that connection, as I’ve always felt a deep kinship with Martin Hager, though he died 15 years before I was born. I was raised by his grandson, who he raised, much like his own son.
Even though we’ve lived here for 23 years, longer than we’ve ever lived anywhere in our lives — it feels very much like we are going home. There’s lots of places nearby for hiking and fishing, two activities I plan to embrace when I retire, which could be within a year and half, instead of six years out — another thing this move makes possible.
We are ready to go home.
