Our “Forever” Home

We closed on our “forever” home in early October, about a month ago. I put forever in quotation marks because this is the third or, maybe the fourth “forever” home that I’ve purchased. I can’t speak for Vanessa–having long ago learned the folly of attempting that. I do know this is the fourth house she has owned, but I don’t know what her expectations were going into the other three. So, this post is mostly about my various reactions to closing on our new forever home.

First, let me acknowledge how grateful I am to even be able to buy a house. I grew up in a house my parents rented for nearly fifty years. Granted, it was a good deal–a small farmhouse on several acres about three miles north of a small town in Missouri. I imagine they could have bought a house, had they wanted. They both worked, had stable incomes, and were able to stash away some savings over their lifetime. They just never bought a house. They weren’t house-people, I suppose.

Not me. As soon as I got settled into a good job, I wanted a house of my own. I wanted to garden and I wanted to build things–fences, sheds, bunk-beds. My first forever house was a 1,200 square foot remodeled brick farmhouse, originally built in 1928, on two acres just outside of Portland, Tennessee. It was a nice, little house, but with two growing kids, it didn’t take long to realize we were going to have to add on or move.

We moved. My second forever house was a 1916 mostly remodeled Sears Craftsman on one of the main streets in Portland. It was a rambling old two-story that was just shabby enough to be comfortable. One thing I remember about that house was that the hardwood floors in the main hallway had been laid directly on the joists without any sub-floor, so in winter when the heat was on and the humidity dropped, the floor boards would shrink slightly, and I could feel them clatter when I walked across them in sock feet.

I also remember thinking, This is my last house. I even said to my wife at the time something along the lines of “I’m not moving out of this house until I’m in one of the boxes.” It didn’t work out that way, however. Six years later, after the divorce, we sold the house and went our separate ways.

My fourth house, a 1938 cottage style in downtown Lebanon, had been owned by the same family from when it was built until they passed away in the early 2000s. It needed a complete remodel when I bought it in 2006. That’s why I bought it. The front porch was about to fall in, plaster was crumbling from the ceilings, every hardwood floor in the house needed to be sanded, and the big, flowery wall paper in the kitchen was straight out of Laugh In. Every time I walked in that room, I half expected Goldie Hawn to jump out and shout, “Sock it to me!”

I don’t recall ever expecting the Lebanon house to be a forever home. It could have easily been. I loved the house, and still do, but by that point I had pretty much given up on the notion of anything being forever.

Vanessa and I lived in the Lebanon house for a year before we bought the farm in 2013. A year before that (2011-2012) we lived in her house in College Grove. Both of our houses were good houses and would have been perfectly fine forever homes, but we wanted “our” place and we wanted a farm.

I’m not going to go into how much we have loved this place in this post. I’ve written about that extensively over the past few years. We’re not moving any time soon, anyway. We have too many animals. Some of them we can either sell or give away to good homes, a couple we will send to freezer camp, and three of the dogs, of course, will move with us. The hold-outs are Buck and Mr. G. (both goats) and Mike. They are all getting old, and none of them are suited for life in downtown Lebanon. Mike would bark all night long, Mr. G. would be lost, and the first time our new neighbors watched Buck aim a stream of pee at his own beard they would pretty much stop talking to us altogether.

So, we plan to make some repairs and rent the place in town for a couple of years while we sort through all the animals, tools, gadgets, implements, and machinery.

The house we’re moving to is just over half the size of our current house, so the challenge will be to figure out what goes with us and what goes away. We plan to have a massive yard sale.

The house was built in 1919 and needs some work. Quite a bit, actually. It looks good, but that’s just cosmetic. It’s been rented for the past 15 years, and it needs a new roof (completed last Friday), some updated wiring, a new breaker panel, new plumbing, and some masonry foundation work, and lots and lots of tinkering. The fellow who inspected it for us gave us a list of 95 items to be repaired, about two dozen of them with red flags.

But he also said the place was structurally sound and if taken care of would be standing for seventy-five more years. That’s not forever, but it suits my purposes.

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