A Good House

Two days before our family moved into a boxy, modern, three-bedroom home—our first house, forty miles outside Boston and across the highway from the poetically named Long-Sought-For Pond—the painters we hired to paint the bathroom found black mold in a wall. A chunk of plaster had bubbled up and fallen off at the lightest scrape of sandpaper. A week later, we spent an hour in the pouring rain with the home inspector—at last. The housing market was so tight that we’d only briefly toured the house before closing. “Water is the enemy,” he said, lowering his binoculars and stepping back to get a wider view of the roof. He was in his fifties, tall with softening angular features, just beginning to gray. Water ran over his poncho sleeves in rivulets as he lifted the binoculars again.

After a summer of historic drought across the Northeast, a variable but relentless three-day rain had set in, slicking towering tree trunks, fallen leaves, and the clumpy blanket of rusty pine needles covering the yard. Even as we stood under a wide umbrella, the cold mist soaked our shoes and socks, pant legs, hands, faces, necks, everything but our core. It didn’t so much fall as hover in the air, like motes of dust in an attic. Dan, the inspector, came prepared with every tool he might need, including for weather. We followed his gaze, trying to see what he saw, and walked quickly to keep up. As his tempo increased, the precipitation followed. Having waived the inspection ahead of time, now we had to take our medicine.

Looking up, Dan confirmed that no aluminum kickout flashing had been installed under the shingles where a section of the roof met the dove-gray wood siding. “The way they built this—it holds the precipitation like a bowl,” he observed, snapping a photograph for us. Winter after winter, as snow piled up in the seam, freezing and thawing, the siding drank up the wet and rotted wood, the dampness feeding the mold in the walls. It would be a simple-enough fix, he told us, and ventured that we could have it done in a week for five grand. He’d already let us know we needed to repave the cracked driveway, and, obviously, the eaves needed gutters. “Every house has its issues,” he said, reassuring us. “Even new houses.” It struck me that his job was one in which he dealt people devastating news all the time, especially in the strained real estate circumstances of the moment. I appreciated his candor and sensitivity. And I hoped we hadn’t fucked ourselves.

When my wife and I bought the house, our friends asked if we fell in love when we saw it. In truth we took only half an hour to look around at the busy open house. It had a vaulted ceiling in the open living area, central air, a fireplace, a small section of finished basement, a basic garage, a delicate arching Japanese maple in front, and, in back, a wooden deck with a small arbor hung with a neglected wisteria’s tendrils. It seemed like a place that could be improved. But we didn’t fall in love. It was more like a marriage of convenience.

With slim prospects in our price range and steep competition in the region where we worked, not hating the house felt like reason enough to make a bid. We had gone to more than ten open houses in a matter of a couple of months, and we had seen how limited our options were—houses on the floodplain with no basements, houses that hadn’t sold for years before the pandemic, houses sold “as-is” with failing septic systems. In Massachusetts in 2022, houses sold in a day. A seller could reasonably expect several offers and a bidding war. Solid homes often sold before open houses when buyers approached realtors with cash in hand. Unless you pounced, you lost. The house we somehow won sat on a steep little hill back from the road, obscured by a small wood. The night we drove our thirteen-year-old son to see it for the first time, he caught a glimpse and said, “It looks like a palace!” My wife and I laughed—a sixteen-hundred-square-foot palace. We turned around and drove him by again to be sure he really saw.

For the last decade we’d been renting a compact, fifties-era hovel our landlord was letting crumble around us. The paint and plaster of our son’s bedroom wall cracked and flaked where moisture seeped through from the adjacent shower. The dining room window threatened to fall out of its frame. The roof on the three-season porch leaked. In the kitchen every spring, ants of various sorts emerged to scavenge breadcrumbs. Mice were such frequent visitors that instead of silverware and utensils in our kitchen drawers, we kept snap traps baited with peanut butter. The mice that didn’t die in traps occasionally died under the floors where you couldn’t get to them. The rotten-onion smell of them loomed like a familiar, unwelcome guest. We had the cheapest rent in town, however, which we reminded ourselves of when the furnace went cold, or when the coils on the ancient electric range refused to heat up, or when the floral 1980s wallpaper in the bedroom—the same pattern that was in my wife’s grandmother’s bedroom—peeled off in strips. All of our neighbors around us owned, including those next door who didn’t feel any remorse about running their leaf blower at all hours. Our decade of renting had set us back nearly a quarter million dollars with nothing to show for it but a kitchen full of mousetraps.

When we’d moved in, our son had been a toddler who couldn’t speak in full sentences. Plagued by an undiagnosed gastrointestinal ailment, he slept terribly, getting up every day at 4 AM. We’d watch cartoons on the couch until the pink light of dawn spilled through the front window. I worried constantly about what might happen to him, wondered how we were supposed to make it as a family on no sleep, with no peace and no real help. My wife commuted to work three hours a day to the North Shore in heavy traffic while fighting off chronic migraines. In the winter dark she navigated amid headlights from oncoming cars and the technicolor auras scalloping the edges of her vision. I don’t know how she pushed through.

For all the fear and devastation of the pandemic, one benefit for us was that she began working from home. After days of virtual meetings, we cooked and took walks, and for the first time in years we prioritized rest and time together. We slept and nourished ourselves. Our son missed his friends and hated online school, but at least he no longer lived with low-grade gut pain. After years of medical intervention and countless hours of speech therapy, he could now tell us how he was feeling. We were on the mend in this private world. And with nowhere to go and nothing to do, we were able to save money for a down payment on a house.

By the time my wife began texting me Zillow listings in bed at night, I was cautiously feeling that maybe the worst was over. Maybe the life we’d dreamed of when we’d first decided to have a baby—a life of honest work and meaning and love and giving back—had finally arrived. Better late than never. We weren’t looking for anything extravagant in a house, just a chance to lay down our burdens in a clean, quiet space. As much as the future weighed on us, the past demanded a reckoning. I wanted to shelter our former selves—the weary, broken, hardworking, self-sacrificing people my wife and I had become to give our son a shot in life. I wanted a home for them. For us.

We began looking for a small house, preferably with an open floorplan we could age into. We talked cautiously about dreams of plants we might place in backyard gardens, colors we might paint the walls, how nice it might feel to be a touch—just a touch—more comfortable. Our son had high school coming up, and my wife and I had the remaining quarter century or more of our working lives. As young adults, we’d chosen graduate school in the humanities over corporate ladder-climbing, and by middle-age—even though we now made middle-class wages—we still lived paycheck to paycheck, squirreling any small amount we could into retirement or our son’s college fund. I sometimes calculated how old I would have to be for my wife and son to maximize the survivor benefits of my pension while also cashing in my life insurance before it expired. I used to joke that my retirement plan was to die in Percival 108, the classroom where I taught.

On our first ventures to open houses, I was mesmerized by how tidy and functional everything looked. Weekend after weekend we slipped plastic booties over our shoes and wandered into bedrooms and basements, greeting listing agents, judging the truth in advertising about newer furnaces, updated roofs, square footage, storage space, school districts.

I knew there wouldn’t always be cut flowers on the kitchen table and that the beds wouldn’t always be made, but indulging even a little in that fantasy felt nice. At the same time, my tendency for catastrophizing made the work of actually evaluating a house’s material value impossible. I saw low doorways I knew I would continually bump my head on and spend the rest of my life complaining about, or steep staircases my aging knees would someday be unable to climb.

We needed a handy dad or uncle with an eye for appraisal, who knew how to fix things and could come over in a pinch, but my elderly parents and the rest of my family lived a thousand miles away in Indiana. My wife had no one. Her mother had died when she was eleven. Her dad was out of the picture. We asked our knowledgeable friends for any advice they might have and quilted together their replies like research. As with everything else in our lives, buying a house was a task we took on ourselves.

Fortunately our real estate agent, Brigid, had no problem sniffing out a home’s trouble spots. In her fifties with blown-out blond hair and a perfect manicure, she drove a shiny black Porsche Macan. She was married to the VP of a professional Boston sports franchise, but in a former life she’d been a nurse. There was something almost clinical in how she dug her car key into woodpecker holes in the siding, wondering aloud for our benefit about asbestos and rot. Where I saw imaginary problems, she saw real ones: biohazards and expensive repairs.

“There,” she’d say, pointing to cracks in foundations, leaky sewage pipes, loose shingles. “You want no part of that.” We stood under the deck of one house, and my son leaned against the pole holding it up. My wife grabbed his elbow before the whole thing toppled over onto us.

Brigid also guided us through the business of home buying, connecting us to a lender who got us a good interest rate and needed only a modest down payment. She helped us understand the complexities of borrowing. Our vocabulary swelled to include escrow, amortization, appraisal gap, prime rate, contingency, earnest money. Brigid couldn’t see through walls, however, and for all the dangers she helped us avoid, the risks remained substantial.

We already lived by such thin margins. One bit of bad luck and we’d have nothing. We knew this as a reality. In a normal market we would’ve put off buying for a year or two, saving money until we found a house we loved, but if home prices kept going up, we’d soon be priced out. It felt like a risk not to buy. Our unspoken agreement with our landlord was that if we didn’t complain, he wouldn’t raise the rent. But he wasn’t young. His business selling baseball equipment to elementary schools had taken a hit during COVID. We feared at any point he could jack up the rent to market value, or retire and sell the house from under us. Even two-bedroom-apartment rentals in our area were now comparable to a mortgage payment.

One house we visited had problems even I could see: rotting siding; potential for the pond it bordered to flood into the home; original wooden windows; creeping mold in the basement where the dryer, instead of venting outside, had been venting into an old pair of pantyhose. “You can’t make this up,” we’d tell friends and family after, awed by how we all live and go on living. But it was only a mile down the road from our rental house, in a neighborhood we knew and liked and hoped to stay in. It looked out on a marsh full of cattails, where red-wing blackbirds perched and cheerily sang. I could imagine having coffee there in the early-morning quiet, the sun slowly rising over the water.

After the open house my wife did some digging online and discovered that the former owner, an elderly woman, had died the summer before. It was being sold by her grown son. The obituary detailed how for many years she’d raised strawberries in the backyard and sold them from a stand by the side of the road. I pictured a table under a shade tree with quarts of berries lined up for sale. A hot summer day. Dappled sunlight on the grass. The wholesomeness of the image couldn’t make up for the house’s many problems, but I marveled at its power over me. Who cared about cracks in the foundation when there were fresh berries to be picked? What was a moldy basement compared to those quiet mornings with blackbirds and coffee on the deck? There is a reason it’s called the American dream. A dream feels good. Hope feels good. Never mind the unhinged risk, sacrifice, and struggle that come with such a massive financial commitment. Never mind those houses in every neighborhood with their silent rebuttals: weeds in the yard, moss-covered shingles, peeling paint, boarded-up windows. Embracing a dream won’t keep you from being crushed by it.

We hadn’t expected our bid on the Long-Sought-For house to win. By that point we’d been to enough open houses to know better than to get our hopes up. Most places in our price range had big problems, because those without big problems could have at least a dozen offers. But out of duty we climbed the hill up the driveway, admiring the Japanese maple and the way the surrounding white pines blocked any view of the neighbors. Inside, sunlight spilled onto hardwood floors through a couple of big, south-facing picture windows.

That night we asked Brigid to draw up an offer. She called the following afternoon. I heard my wife on the phone in the bedroom saying, “OK. OK.” And I knew right away. I remember feeling like I’d felt thirteen years earlier when she’d shown me the faint lines on a positive pregnancy test.

Oh shit, I thought. We’re really doing this.

I n the weeks afterward my wife was on the phone every day with our lender, our lawyer, our bank. The seller didn’t want to move until the end of the summer, so we negotiated a use-and-occupancy agreement, which may have been a deciding factor in the seller accepting our offer. Before we finalized the paperwork, the septic system failed its inspection—the only one required by the state before a sale—so the seller needed to have an engineer draw up plans and to hire a contractor for installation, all of which delayed closing by more than two months. More words entered my vocabulary: gray water, grease trap, effluent. I told my wife I was starting a dad band called the Leach Fields.

We packed up at our old rental, thinning out our wardrobes, donating a bunch of our son’s old toys, leaving furniture and odds and ends at the curb for anyone to take.

Standing in the mist and rain with the house inspector, we learned that the dirt around our foundation needed to be dug out to keep the siding from rotting further, the front-walkway steps were not level and therefore a hazard, the back deck was in danger of termite infestation because its boards touched the bare dirt, the well cover needed a nearby crab apple tree removed lest its roots become entangled, the power line from the street hung too low, the house’s electrical connection was touching the roof, water was leaking into the electric box, and the gas meter smelled of a possible leak—which the gas company promptly responded to when called, and which was, in fact, leaking. And that was just the outside. Dan made notes and patiently answered our questions, offering advice from how not to get fleeced by the pesticide people to how to mitigate the explosion of poison ivy along the edge of the drive.

Inside, he slipped on tennis shoes and methodically flipped light switches and took measurements of the width between stairwell railings. Pulling on a full face mask, he crawled into the crawl space with a high-powered flashlight, then climbed a ladder and poked around the attic. Along the way he found evidence of carpenter ants, water damage from a leaky exhaust vent in the roof, and electrical wiring not up to code. The water heater’s vent pipe was put in at a strange downward angle and bent around a corner, posing a carbon monoxide risk. The filtration system for the well water hadn’t been run in years. Every copper pipe—in the kitchen, the bathrooms, the basement—bore the telltale blue-green crust of corrosion. “Those pipes could last another fifty years,” he said with a shrug, “or they could all start leaking tomorrow.”

He tapped notes into his tablet, each one requiring an investment of our time, energy, or money—sometimes all three and sometimes immediately. I looked out the window at fallen trees slowly disintegrating in the woods and envied them their journey.

With each problem he pointed out, it became clear that the tentative but hopeful people who’d bought this place in the drawn-out process over the summer, who’d just wanted a little peace, were not the ones who were going to be living here. To solve the house’s problems meant life was about to get hard again, just when it had begun to feel manageable. At our old house it hadn’t mattered when things went wrong because they weren’t our things. We just lived with them and around them. Now we owned every faulty light switch, every weeping pipe. The white pines looming over the house—trees that could come tumbling down in a storm—were ours, too. I’d expected that becoming homeowners would change us, but I hadn’t thought the change would come so quickly. Trailing the inspector from room to room, I felt like a stranger to myself.

I knew my wife felt just as sick as I did, but to watch her with Dan, you’d never have known it. She struck an easy rapport with him, asking smart questions, laughing at his jokes, thanking him for his insights and tips, and taking copious notes. She knew we were at the mercy of what he told us. We needed whatever map he could provide. But later, when he left, the mask would come down, and there would be no comforting her—no words I could say to alleviate the dread that had seeped into everything like radon into a basement. We had bought the dread as well.

Still, I remained grateful for Dan. He’d been thorough and honest, and shared information without a trace of condescension, describing each problem or code violation in detail, telling us what we’d need to do to take care of it. Finished for the day, he slipped off his tennis shoes and put his boots back on. As we said goodbye, my wife apologized and said she had one last question. She hesitated, then finally asked, “Is this an OK house?”

It was a question he clearly didn’t feel comfortable answering. But maybe he heard the quaver in her voice. He said yes.

“Really?”

“It’s a good house,” he said.

I don’t remember if she cried, or if maybe she laughed, or both. But I remember feeling a moment’s relief. The words were something we could hold on to in the coming days of stress and hard work and debt. We waved goodbye from the porch and watched his sedan pull away. It was still misting relentlessly. Rain fell onto the driveway’s crumbling asphalt, and onto the roof, the rotten siding, the poison ivy’s red-tinged leaves.

What Do You Think?

Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.

SEND US A LETTER