Maine Family Robinson: It's Time To Be Interested In Houses Again

This Old Roof in Rumford

Some readers have asked me to do my job again, and talk some more about buying and renovating a house in the wilds of western Maine in a desultory fashion. How did you do it? What did you look for? Can I do that, too? I've seen pictures of your house; what sort of medications are you on? Are they even legal?

So you'd like me to tell you what to look for in a ramshackle house that makes it worth painting instead of torching, and with the acuity of Hillary Clinton sizing up cattle while they're still grazing, please, because you’re tired of dumping money into Zillow nightmares, or maybe saving starter house downpayments for so long they’re turned into retirement funds before they’re spent.

I'd be glad to tell you about the nuts and bolts of houses, because I love the nut and bolts of houses. And don't be fooled; all the bolts are installed rusted, and all the nuts are loose right after you tighten them. I don't mind that. You shouldn't either. Houses are an ongoing proposition. You have to work on them endlessly, whether they’re brand new or ancient, like a shingled Twitter account. But first, we need context.

You're currently getting all your context about houses and housing from two places. Both places rightfully should be broadcast from a tent with three rings inside and calliope music accompaniment.

They produce nothing that anyone

could bear to look at five years hence.

First, the soft media. You know, the shelter shows: Home Depot explodes on the screen, hosted by stringy botoxed women, and men made less masculine-looking by their facial hair and muscles (a difficult feat), all only hired because they’re not smart enough to sit still and read the teleprompter on a local TV station, and so will work cheap. They wreck houses, and produce nothing that anyone could bear to look at five years hence.

I dare you to go to the library and read House Beautiful from 2000. You won’t even be able to stand looking at the typefaces on the pages, never mind the pictures of the houses. It is unwise to set fads into mortar.

How about the hard media? They’re all community college communications grads, have never been where the subway doesn’t go, and are sent to fetch your information about housing from realtors and government hacks. This is akin to getting directions to the Coliseum from lions.

So who is going to be your expert? Not me. You are.

You're going to be your own expert. Why not? I know plenty of guys who never made it to tenth grade math who can calculate and lay out a bird's mouth on a rafter with a speed square in a heartbeat. You can’t, but only because it’s unfamiliar to you.

The greatest Americans in our history were all amateur architects.

You did differential equations, once. You could be designing cathedrals. All that is required of you is that you become interested in houses. Not interested like the last twenty years or so. Not “flipping Whitewater lots to launder money and croak a Savings and Loan” interested. Not “building snout houses in Las Vegas for imaginary people that would want to live in a desert without gambling when there’s nothing but the desert and gambling there, and not enough of even that anymore” interested. You need to be interested in houses, period. Period houses, period, I mean.

And why not? The greatest Americans in our history were all amateur architects, and only partly because there were no professional architects around. They loved it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson et al spent as much effort laying out their footings and parterre gardens as founding the country.

I don’t think George was fooling when he said he’d rather go home to Mount Vernon than be President a second time, never mind a third. I’ve been to Mount Vernon and I can’t blame him. Talking to some eighteenth-century version of John Boehner or Henry Waxman all day doesn’t have the same appeal as your own home to any sensible person. Washington knew the American house is the symbol -- the sticks and bricks manifestation – of the values of its society, nothing less. The government was just a bunch of politicians.

Washington Irving's house is more American

than Washington Irving's books.

In some ways, housing in America, throughout its history, is the most interesting thing about its culture and traditions. American housing was immensely interesting, and off on its own tangent, long before any book authors got over being slaves to European fashion. Washington Irving's house is more American than Washington Irving's books, still heavy with the fragrance of Grimm and The Continent. Thoreau's cabin made him more interesting than he made his cabin. Edith Wharton didn't understand people all that well until she decorated their houses with Codman first. If you understand what makes people choose one wallpaper over another, believe me, you understand people. The rest of writing The Age Of Innocence is just punctuation.

If you’re of a traditional frame of mind, or dare I say, conservative, you should be striving to restore housing to its place as an anchor of the family, a seat of learning, an incubator of culture, an engine of commerce and a font of amusement. Traditional values always seem to elude those hanging on a strap in the subway on the way home to their rent-controlled dovecote, so you should help ensure there’s an alternative around.

Taxing food, clothing and shelter is evil.

I hear all sorts of people who should know better sniffing around the shambles of taxing mortgage interest again. Making it more difficult for people to own a home so that politicians have more money to spend isn’t wise. Taxing food, clothing and shelter is evil.

Those who don’t care for civilization much don’t like single-family housing. They instinctively know it’s a counterweight to collectivism, and attack it on every front. Every home is a potential citadel of individualism. The sooner they can round up those bitter clingers, using anti-sprawl legislation and carbon-footprint arithmetic, and get them relying on the sanitation department to shovel their collectivized driveway and the mayor to salt their food, the faster we’ll all be happy, they think.

I think not. I think you think not, too, but maybe don’t know how to go about sizing up the tottering piles of sticks and mud we call a house. It’s not your fault. It used to be fairly traditional where I’m from for college-bound persons to work construction jobs to earn money to pay for school. I’ve had many employees of this kind myself in the past. This isn’t the case so much any more, as there haven’t been any construction jobs for anyone for four years now, and most of the scut work got done by legal and illegal immigrants instead of your brother-in-law’s neighbor’s kid home from Cornell for many years before that.

 Their wives are forced to call a plumber

 if the shower curtain comes off the rings.

The old tradition allowed at least some educated people to have some inkling of the mysteries of the home, or to at least have one friend, or if really lucky, a spouse that did. Now anyone that went to college thinks making top ten lists of tools that include duct tape and nine other randomly selected cordless thingies they saw in a Lowe’s flyer is manly, while their wives are forced to call a plumber if the shower curtain comes off the rings because their husband’s only summer job was selling Ecstasy at raves.

College kids and drywall contractors both know how to drink Nattie Ice until they throw up, but now only the drywall contractor knows how to hang board and tape the seams. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can do it. I know you can, because I can, and I was a Poindexter just like you, but my summer job never went away.

So I lied. I will be your expert. Well, I’ll tell you what I know until you tell me to shut up; it’s a lot the same. Let’s start out with something interesting and easy, that will explain why I throw a shoe at the TV when a TV realtor calls a Greek Revival “a Colonial.” Go to the library, or head on over to Amazon, and buy A Field Guide To American Houses by Virginia and Lee McAlester, and read it. Then we can go find you a hovel to shiver in and bang on, just like me. Learn about your All-American out-of-plumb birthright. Time to be interested in houses again.