Old World Swine

"Damn the Resale Value!..."

It seems especially ironic that after this post I am spending the greater part of this week painting the interior of our house white - er, pardon me - almond.

The thing is, we need to sell it, and if you want to sell according to the rubrics of the current real estate biz, you (generally) paint the interior a light, neutral color. Light because this augments a feeling of spaciousness (to that end, we've been clearing out unnecessary furniture, too) and neutral so that potential home buyers will more easily be able to picture themselves and their stuff in the house, rather than spending valuable house hunting time making faces and wondering just how many coats of paint it will take to cover the fluorescent lime green you chose for your dining room. It won't do to have them retching into the sink.

In other words, our job is to scrub as much personality out of the place as possible. It needs to appear large, clean, solid and reasonably up-to-date... period. But that's okay. It wasn't actually our house to begin with, as it belongs to my mom and we have been renting from her. For that reason, it didn't seem like a good idea to go crazy making modifications. When we (God willing) get into our own really-for-true house, we will take more trouble to make the place over in a way that suits us.

This modern habit of always moving seems often to keep people from making a real home of where they are, whether by neglecting the art of the home, or neglecting to form friendships, etc... Perhaps we have grown wary of becoming too attached.

For that reason, once we find our new place, I am determined to adopt Jim Janknegt's recent comment as our motto "Damn the resale value, full speed ahead!".

In fact, I think I shall have it carved on a wooden sign and hang it in our pub room.

"House" and "Home"

It has occurred to me, as we are beginning to look for another house to call "home", that there is probably an unconscious "blank slate" fallacy at work in the modern understanding of housing.

Let me 'splain... I think that the modern, materialist mindset holds that things are meaningless in themselves, and that we only bring meaning to them, or project meaning onto them, or lay meaning over them in a kind of grid.

People, for instance, are viewed as blank slates from birth, and the belief is that everything is learned... morality, gender roles... everything. Life in the world means nothing, except what we decide it means.

So, for further instance, sex is neutral and meaningless, and whatever meaning there is in the sex act is extrinsic to it, is something we bring into it from outside. From this perspective, the only possible answer to the question "what does sex mean?" is "Whatever it means to you".

And I believe this perspective - this materialist, blank slate mindset, has spilled over into the realm of the built environment. That is, a house, a building, has no meaning except what we bring to it. So, houses more and more come to resemble each other, and on the interior come to be only an assembly of white boxes... variations on the white box theme. They are mass produced and laid out with all the poetry and soul of an egg crate.

The assumption is, of course, that people will move into the space and "make it their own" by populating it with objects, by painting it and living in it, and this is true to an extent, but the mistake is in thinking that this is only a one-way interaction. The house is presumed to be mute, but no created thing is mute. We speak through everything we do and make. What do our modern buildings and suburban houses say about us?

If I wake up in, work in, and return home every day to a dull, prosaic, box, will I not over time begin to feel the world is dull and prosaic? Will I not tend to think in predictable boxes and right angles? If I become more and more acclimated to an indoor, artificially lit, air-conditioned life, will I begin to see nature only as something alien, inconvenient and uncomfortable... and maybe dangerous?

We are increasingly cut off from the poetry of nature by our manufactured environment. If we don't bring some of that poetry into our homes, we will find ourselves spiritually starved even as we are physically overfed. In the words of Douglas Adams, "There is another theory which states that this has already happened.".

There are houses, and there are homes. The job of "homemaker" has been denigrated and dismissed, and we have all suffered as a result. Bringing humanity and harmony and art to the home is, in our time, an extremely important and yet neglected work.

House #1

We're beginning the great house hunt, and yesterday was our first look inside two in our "possible" file. The first was a little rough on the outside, but the view (lakeside) was incredible, complete with a nice sized deck and fenced yard.

Turns out that what was "kind of rough" on the outside was beyond horrendous on the inside. For one thing, every wall was covered in the cheapest dark wood paneling (wavy with age). The carpets were all at that end stage of life, and what fixtures were left were, again, the cheapest quality and probably at least 25 years old. The entire house would have to be gutted and finished again, which I would have been willing to consider, except that the layout of the place was its worst feature... just awkward and weird, as if it had been designed by a committee. No rhyme or reason to the placement or proportion of anything. Sadly, and pining for the view that might have been, we scratched that one off the list.

Next: The Money Pit