Reading Room - Daily life in print
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"Love Affair With The Perfect House Is Short-Lived"

  I fell in love last month.  It was love at first sight.  And it was a textbook case,
with the fawning, the sighing, the longing looks, the endless dreaming. It happened 
the way these things usually happen.  I wasn't even looking, and the next thing I 
knew, I was head over heals.
  It started innocently.  I had been driving to work and took a quick detour to stop 
at a garage sale, which consisted chiefly of stuff I already have; musty old books 
and oversized vases.
  Minutes later, I was back in my car heading down the street when I saw it.  It 
must have been the For Sale sign in the yard that caught my eye.  And when I
stopped (in the middle of the street, of course) to give it a good, long look, it almost
took my breath away.  A house...  The house...  The perfect house.
  This perfect house was an old-fashioned, 3 story farm house, with a very new and
very complementary paint job, a big screened-in front porch, and roses blooming
in the manicured front yard.
  The soft morning sun shone on the wooden floor of the porch, the front door was
ajar and through it came the sound of piano music.  The house couldn't have been
more welcoming.  I couldn't have been more smitten.  And it couldn't have been
more wrong.
  Of course, I didn't know that then.  I scribbled the real estate agent's phone 
number on my check register, raced to work and called my husband to tell him all
about my new love.
  He was surprisingly understanding.  He even agreed to look at it even though we
hadn't, until that fateful moment, been in the market and were in no position to sell.
At our own home, a couple blocks away, we were halfway through half a dozen
home improvement projects, all of which would have to be completed before we
could put it on the market.
  Still, I wasn't deterred.  I imagined walking proudly across the manicured lawn,
sitting quietly on summer evenings and reading on the screened-in porch (a porch
much larger than the one our bungalow boasted), graciously entertaining guests in its
massive living room (not that I'd seen the living room, but I was sure it was massive).
  It took us a couple of days to get to see the house.  And in those couple of days, 
our humble home became a tenement.  All I saw was its shortcomings, which were
many and multiplying.
  On the evening that we went to see the perfect house, I was nervous.  I couldn't
decide what to wear, as if the perfect house would be examining me, not the other
way around.
  The real estate agent held the front door open and I held my breath as we walked
in.  I exhaled in a living room no larger than ours.  (My heart skipped a beat.)  The
dining room was large, almost too large, but poorly designed.  The sizable kitchen
opened to an attractive deck, but the kitchen needed updating, if not remodeling.
(My feelings began to falter.)  The staircase was dramatic, but lead to undersized
bedrooms.  The back porch was a ray of sunlight that was quickly dimmed by the
discovery that the perfect house had old-fashioned storm windows.  No 
combinations.  No air conditioning.  No massive living room.  And the paint job
that had lured me?  It would have to be repainted every five to seven years.  My
crush was quickly crushed.
  On the way home, I thought about my whirlwind romance.  The perfect house, I
learned, needed a lot of work, just like my own.
  I pushed open the front door and felt a sigh of relief.  We were home.  Our house
wasn't perfect, but it was ours.  And best of all, those many unfinished home
improvement projects would wait for us to tackle them... in our own sweet time.

Written by Connie Nelson, Home and Garden editor for the  Minneapolis Star Tribune.  
Published on  8-30-01.  Used by permission.

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