A toast to home owning
This time last year I was peeling 30-year-old yellowed wallpaper off the walls in my bedroom. Or rather, off the walls of the room that would later become my bedroom.
We closed on the house (a misleading term, since really what you’re doing is opening the house) on May 1. School finished in the middle of May, so by the end of the month, I was hard at work almost every minute of the day. The plan was to get the place ready to move into by the first of June.
The plan wasn’t worth the paper it wasn’t written on. It was all I could do to get the bedrooms more or less livable, even with the generous and unfailing help of my girlfriend and our friend, Sarah. In those rooms, we repainted the walls, ripped out the cold-war era carpet to reveal beautiful hardwood birch floors, and tried to clean out the distinctive (but not unpleasant) smell that had established itself 49 years earlier, when the previous owners moved in.
That left the upstairs in decent shape. But all the carpet, wallpaper, and debris that we removed ended up in the dining room and sitting room downstairs. That part of the house was sealed off with plastic sheeting, and since I considered it unessential, it would be the last to get attention.
The sealed off area become known as the “garbage room”, probably because it contained a pile of carpet and building debris about 5 feet high. It was like an indoor landfill, but without the seagulls.
Now, it was also about this time, a year ago, that I stopped being able to breathe. See, I was working in the house all day, and it was an unusually cold May, so most of the time the windows were closed. That meant all the dust that had been building up for five decades was suddenly released on my unsuspecting lungs, like Gatorade on a winning football coach. The football coach, drenched in Gatorade, may also lose his breath, but only momentarily. I, on the other hand, developed a near constant asthmatic reaction.
During the day, with some effort, I wheezed and gasped in enough air to keep working. At night it got worse, and I could barely inhale at all. It’s hard to understand what it feels like if you’ve never been through it, but an asthma attack is like breathing through a soaking-wet pillow, with a belt strapped around your chest. It causes an extraordinarily controlled panic; you stay calm, because you know you’re probably not going to suffocate. But the word “probably” adds a noticeable tinge of fear.
Since then, the air quality in the house has improved, the trash pile is gone, and my breathing is back to normal. It’s been an exciting and terrifying first year of home owning. The feeling I got when the closing ended and I stepped into the sunshine, house-keys in hand, has never really gone away. And I truly believe that you breathe a little easier knowing you always have your own house to go home to.
So to you, 1550 Fulham, I say “Happy Anniversary.” May our years together be full of happiness and free of dust.