The Promise of a Perfect House

The house was a two-hundred year old cabin that had been featured in a home magazine, and we lived in it for a year. This is the story of falling in and out of love with the perfect house.

Three years ago my family rented a cabin that had been featured in Better Homes and Gardens. It was two hundred years old and located on Main Street in a small town in central Maryland. The vine-covered gate was adorned with a blue sign that said “welcome.” Hostas lined the picket fence. Hydrangeas, lilacs, and a shady tree with a rope swing completed the picture.

Our family of five would spend one year there between two cross-country moves. We moved into the cabin from Colorado Springs, thinking we were finally moving east for good. We’d fallen in love with the east coast during graduate school in Boston. But the cost of being a young family there caused us to move home for the dissertation years, where we ended up staying long after the dissertation was done. After years of telecommuting for startups, my husband was employed by one that wanted to move us within striking distance of DC. We were game, because we could choose to live in the same city as my best friend and her family — something we’d long wanted to do — and the cabin was just five minutes from her house.

I’ve loved all things home since I was a little girl. I especially loved flipping through home magazines, where windows were adorned with boxes and gables and I could learn words like portico and mansard. The pictures seemed to represent a well-ordered life, where an individual’s interests were reflected in and supported by her environment: a book-lined reading nook, a table set for its most frequent guests, or a writing desk that overlooked the best view in the house. I saw intentionally curated spaces set up for human flourishing: music rooms, libraries, easels in gardens. The pictures seemed to depict the best of what home could be: a perfect blend of beauty and belonging.

So when I discovered a darling little cabin from the pages of Better Homes & Gardens that was in walking distance to my best friend, it seemed kind of perfect. The cabin was also walking distance from my oldest daughter’s middle school and my youngest daughter’s preschool. We walked up the street to get snow cones, walked our Christmas tree home from the lot, and walked along the railroad tracks, past old barns, for picturesque strolls. We biked to the library and to three different parks, and Sunday night dinners with my best friend’s family were regular events. On top of that, she and I were able to carpool kids to soccer practice, swap kids back and forth to help each other out, and easily meet for weekly walks.

But for all of the cabin’s pretty details, the experience of trying to run our lives from there was not easy. We had to step over raised door jambs when we entered some rooms, watch our heads entering some rooms, and be careful not to knock the ceiling light while doing yoga. The ceilings were low, the windows, small, the outlets and closets, scant. My oldest daughter’s room housed the stacked washing machine. When I ran the laundry, it drained into the kitchen sink. If I forgot to move the dishes out of the sink, the displaced water would overflow onto the kitchen floor.

So despite the charming facade, we were still experiencing real life as I’ve always known it—not the idyllic life of the magazines—and now we all shared a bathroom. Other than a few small businesses and an old church, the surrounding area was mostly rural or residential. We still drove to most things, and most professionals commuted or telecommuted for work. And the area was not transient, which made it hard for newcomers to assimilate. My kids were the only new kids that year in their schools, and I hadn’t realized how hard it is to make new friends when there’s no turnover in people’s relationships. There were significant pieces missing from our new life: long-term employment, schools we liked, friends other than my best friend and her family, a plan for after our lease was up.

I’ve organized closets and had my mornings run more smoothly, cleaned a kid’s room and seen it spark hours of creative play, even redid a family room and found we spent more time in there together. So maybe I was hoping that major changes to our living situation would lead to an overall improvement in every area of life? Yeah, that didn’t happen.

The version of home I’d fallen in love with assumed incredible wealth and time to spend it thoughtfully. Even though money dripped from the pages filled with ads for faucets, furniture, and countertops, the photos were staged to reflect a way of life that was untouched by the hustle for money. The stage was set for a leisure you aspire to: gardening in the morning, long afternoons spent reading, then pairing the perfect wine with dinner for friends. As a kid I hadn’t connected the dots that no job pays that handsomely and leaves you unencumbered from work.

Sure, we were taking a chance on a risky startup, which is its own kind of privilege. But we had to give most of our lives over to the hustle: I was freelancing with few contacts in a new area, and my husband was working for his fifth startup in five years and traveling between DC and New York. We had three kids in activities, and more yard than we wanted to maintain as renters.

And then came the coldest, snowiest winter the area had seen in years. The snowfall was recorded in feet, not inches, and our old-school registers barely heated the house. The seasonal affective disorder I’d experienced in Boston returned. School was often cancelled, the low ceilings made the walls feel like they were closing in, and there was a lot of walkway to shovel to get our car out. We were thankful my best friend’s home had a basement where my kids could go to play loud, sweaty games. We relied on them for constant company — and even showers when our water heater busted — and they got us through the winter.

Sometime during the winter, the startup we’d moved for started to fail. As hard as my husband and everyone at his company worked, it wasn’t getting off the ground. My husband would soon be looking for work in a city without his network.

San Antonio is one of the most under-appreciated cities in Texas, and it looked especially good after a long, east coast winter. When my husband’s current employer, a stable, non startup, flew us out to get to meet them and see Texas, we were won over. Despite our reluctance to move again, our good friends back in Maryland, and love of the east coast, we couldn’t see the job in San Antonio as anything other than a lifeline. We agreed to another move, and had a sad goodbye leaving our friends.

The drive to Texas was one of the most stressful weeks of our lives, asking all our kids to take on another adventure when they were still exhausted by the last one. We didn’t know what awaited us, but my husband and I were determined to stick the landing. No matter what happened with the job, we were going to turn into Texans.

We’d flown out without our kids and found a house in three days. Home considerations like walkability, mixed-use development, and charming architecture were replaced with one criteria: a safe bet. We chose a house in the outer suburbs that fed into a string of schools with high scores. It’s builder basic and not close to anything in the city we now love. But it’s better inhabited than looked at, and it facilitates great gatherings for our family and friends. Our doorbell gets rung frequently by kids in the neighborhood, which makes us feel like we’ve been here longer than three years.

My husband’s job is still good, I continue to freelance, and we spend holidays and vacations with my best friend and her family whenever we can. I still love all things home, and I will always be drawn to beauty and the promise of belonging. I look for thrifty ways to bring beauty into our home and strive to make it a place where my kids know they belong. I’ve learned to make space for real life in my mental picture of home, since it barges in anyway. I’m not always successful, but I never run out of opportunities to improve. And I’ll forever be thankful we got to try out our real lives in a perfect home.

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