To Make A House A Home

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

“I don’t like our pictures,” I told my husband one night. We were sitting on the couch, finally together and alone (and typically exhausted) after a long day and the marathon of putting the kids to bed.

“The pictures of us and our family and the people we love?” he said, as though verifying that we were talking about the same pictures. Damn it, it sounded bad put like that.

“It’s not the pictures,” I clarified, “it’s the frames. They’re all mismatched and hung haphazardly. I’m terrible at decorating, I’ve never had an eye for it.” I could hear the plaintive tone of my own voice. I should go to bed, I thought. Whatever I fixate on when I’m overtired, it always ends up feeling way worse than it normally would. Yet, I kept sitting there, staring at the wall I used to think was artsy in a low-budget, keep-it-simple-so-you-don’t-detract-from-the-woodwork sort of way. This old house is the first house we’ve ever owned and the only place we’ve really felt settled in, having lived here more than twice as long as anywhere else since we’ve been married. It is an uneasy truth that, as much as I love the property and my trees and garden, I’ve never really felt at home in our house. This awareness has been making me increasingly uneasy lately; uneasy enough, apparently, to lash out at the pictures I had just painstakingly swapped out for more current ones and rehung with care. It was past time I did something about it.

My problem with the house, I believe, is three-fold. First off, as much as I have always been a homebody, the house I shared with my family when I was young always felt a bit like a minefield. Only when everyone was asleep was I safe from inadvertently setting off one of my parents, or my brother. There was not a single square inch inside the house that was truly and solely mine, nowhere to retreat to when the pressure got to be too much; so I spent as much time as I could outside, in the barn and the woods. My body remembers and tenses up inside, it’s not something I’m even aware of doing most of the time. This is not something I can easily or quickly fix, although it’s on my mental list of baggage to unpack with my therapist once I find one. So, for the purposes of addressing my immediate house problems, I’ll have to set that whole mess aside for the moment.

My second issue is the gnawing feeling that the house is trying to kill us. This suspicion began to take shape within our first year here, when I realized—despite the previous occupant’s vehement denials, that we did, indeed, have a mold problem. It grew more deeply rooted with each passing year as the mold got worse despite our every efforts, culminating in the realization that we had a leaky roof and a barrel full of health problems likely linked to the fact that we were suffering from mold toxicity (I tested positive for this in 2022, and while the test was prohibitively expensive to test everyone, it seemed reasonable to assume that everyone living in the same house would have it). That next year was very expensive indeed: new roof, mold remediation and sealing of the dirt crawl space under the house, treatments for the mold toxicity for all of us. When it was all done I drew what felt like my first deep breath of interior air in years, but the suspicion hadn’t been scrubbed out of the air along with the mold spores. It was a very old house, parts of it dating back to the 1860s. What would go wrong next? I’ve never been able to completely shake that feeling.

Lastly, and this took me the longest to realize: there’s still far too much of the former occupants lingering here in the house for me ever to feel completely at home. For all my decorating and repainting the kitchen and the girls’ bedrooms, it still feels like “their” house, not ours. This isn’t helped, of course, by the fact that we know them and they live right across the road from us. They are lovely people. They raised three sons in this house, homeschooling them before homeschooling was even a thing, or legal (she had to meet with the school board and get special permission, which they gave only because they thought it likely she would do what she wanted regardless). She’s quite the force of nature, our house’s former mistress; more than strong enough of personality and presence to haunt the house she ruled for thirty-some years like a benevolent ghost. We moved here from a small apartment, they were downsizing, and selling a good bit of furniture along with the house made sense for everyone. Wall decor was left behind, too, and I left it where it was because it just seemed to belong there. I had never trusted my own taste in house furnishings, I just hadn’t ever cared enough to learn what I liked or what looked good, and the house seemed to like everything the way it was. The more I tried to make small changes, especially in the living room, the more frustrated I became. This has been going on for seven and a half years now. Too long. Far, far too long.