Robin
Robin, like Donna, is in the Slender Book Society and was one of the participants in the first 30 Sentences Project. This time around, she knew from the start that she was going to write about her obsession with real estate: “I’d recently given up looking at houses online cold turkey and it was sort of a revelation—that all the energy I poured into imagining another house could just be poured into dealing with my own house. That was the undercurrent of my 30 sentences: the energy wasted in wanting.” I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for profundity in the mundane.
PS: You’ll want to follow the links Robin included below.
I bought this house, my first house, almost nineteen years ago.
Almost immediately, I began shopping for its replacement.
This was before redfin.com or Zillow Trulia.
Dream house shopping then required squinting at postage-stamp-sized photos in the Saturday newspaper and just imagining the interiors of Larchmont Village cottages or Echo Park bungalows.
My wife and I developed a game called “The Cheapest House in Santa Monica.”
Based on the grainy, tiny newspaper photo and the three-line ad, we had to guess what they were asking for the lowest-priced standalone house—no condos allowed—in what Harry Shearer used to call “the home of the homeless.”
“Three bedroom in Ocean Park? It’s ugly, but I bet it is $575,000 at least.”
When the cheapest house in Santa Monica hit seven figures, the game stopped being fun.
I come from generations of “house people”—immigrants apparently hard-wired to turn swampy bits of the Midwest into farms and towns.
These are people who believe in investing in land because “God isn’t making any more of it.”
My great-grandfather, poor and gimpy from polio, got his first nickels to rub together during Prohibition because of liquor—not as a bootlegger but as a prosecutor.
Before the 18th Amendment kicked off Prohibition nationwide, Indiana passed the Wright “bone dry” law in 1925, which awarded prosecutors $25 for each liquor conviction.
So when scores of workers constructing a bridge across the Ohio River got smashed every weekend and wound up in jail, my great-grandfather got enough cash to buy several cottages that he could rent to the same working class men.
(The cottage would later flood in the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937.)
My parents, when they saved a bit of money, also bought apartments so that one of my first summer jobs was painting walls Swiss Mocha.
My younger sister just bought her third property, a beach-town getaway and future Airbnb rental in Virgina.
I am still living in my starter house.
Not for lack of looking.
I’ve wasted weeks of my life on Houzz imagining a better life with open-concept floor plans and subway-tiled kitchens.
I’ve lost countless weekend afternoons to open houses for unaffordable homes that have been flipped and staged into a sterile display.
Not long ago, I quit looking at real estate cold-turkey.
My withdrawal symptoms included a surrogate online shopping obsession—specifically in electric bicycles.
Surely an e-bike would change my life to the same magnitude as a new house: I would be healthier, greener, cook more often, relieved of global warming guilt, and generally perceived as having my shit together.
I spend a weekend cataloging my e-bike options on Pinterest.
Of course, I already own a regular bicycle—just like I already own a house.
I pulled my old bike out from under the deck, hosed it off and filled the tires.
I called a contractor to come insulate my walls and install and air conditioner.
My father once told me—in a conversation that was actually about cars, not houses—that you should always know what you want, just in case.
I’ve spent a lot of years trying to discern what I want from this starter house.
I think I just want to finish it.
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