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FeedLoving Home
By holly dolezalek
Last summer, I bought my first house. I had searched for an entire year for a home with the features that I wanted, in the neighborhood I wanted, at a price I could afford. On a rainy Saturday when other would-be homebuyers were taking a break, I found the one. I made an offer just two hours later. I often drove past the house before I closed on the deal; I just couldn’t believe it was all really happening.I bought the house for the reasons most people do: I was tired of paying rent, I wanted to invest in something for the future, and I was sick of sharing walls and kitchens with other people.
But I also wanted something else: adulthood. I wanted to navigate the difficult and scary process of buying a house. I wanted to be the kind of person who shops for groceries, pays the bills, shovels the walks, and cleans out the sink traps—a strong, independent person, who isn’t afraid to take on the big jobs. I had often avoided responsibility, and now I was ready to prove that I could take it all on.
So I bought my 579 square feet of adulthood in south Minneapolis. It was a cute little one-bedroom with a shed, a garage, and the worst wallpaper you’ve ever seen. But my friends and I rolled up our sleeves and scraped it all off, and I painted the bedroom with a Martha Stewart blue, and the living room in an Ace Hardware green, and the kitchen in a bright, cheerful yellow. I sweated through June and July as I pulled up two rooms’ worth of carpet and cut it into pieces to throw it out. I moved in midway through the summer.
The problem came when it was time to leave off the big projects, which have a beginning and end, and start taking care of the routine chores I thought I wanted to do like cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Those were the tasks I’d always neglected, and it turned out that signing on the dotted line hadn’t changed me at all. I didn’t keep up on the cleaning, and I wasn’t around much to do it—suddenly I was terribly busy and had no time for the house.
Then I fell in love. I was positively giddy. I planned dates, I wrote love letters, and I drifted off at work. I was a mess, but a happy mess. The house, on the other hand, was just a mess. Once in awhile I would clean, but it was mostly to make it presentable for a romantic dinner with my new, fantastic girlfriend.
I made a point to do something every day to make my house a home, and then I stuck to it.
I felt guilty about the house, but I was too busy and too giddy to think about it much. When I did give the place a quick cleaning or do an emergency maintentance project, I usually gave up in despair after realizing how much more there was to do. Now and again I would make a big noise about getting the house cleaned up, but it was my usual MO: Get a bunch of things done in a big burst of effort, then neglect it all over again for a few weeks.
Then I got dumped. And though she broke it off for all the right reasons, still—ouch. I did all the usual things: I cried, I sulked, I leaned on friends, and I hid away from the world while I licked my wounds. It took a lot out of me.
And then something happened that really surprised me: I started to take care of my house. I wrote up a schedule to clean one room every day, and set aside certain days for the little maintenance tasks that crop up. I started picking up the living room every other day and cleaning the kitchen on opposite days. It’s not that I started obsessively washing the dishes to keep my mind off my failed relationship—though that was part of it. It was that I made a point to do something every day to make my house a home, and that I stuck to it.
Suddenly, I began to feel grateful for my house. I walked through its rooms and realized that I genuinely loved it. I took pride in the fact that it was clean and well taken care of, and I was happy when the floors were swept and the bathroom spotless. I still am.
Maybe there’s nothing original about this; maybe I was just giving in to an age-old instinct, to retreat to my cave because I was hurt. But it comforts me to know that even as I let go of one love, there’s another love that will remain: my home.
HOLLY DOLEZALEK IS A FREELANCE WRITER AND EDITOR LIVING HAPPILY EVER AFTER WITH HER SOUTH MINNEAPOLIS HOME.
11 ISSUES (1 YEAR)
