The House At Marsh Wren
On home ownership
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When my husband and I set out to buy our first house, I made one stipulation: I must like the kitchen. I could sleep in a small bedroom but I could not cook in a kitchen I already hated.
Our list of other qualifications seemed reasonable too: a certain proximity to our jobs, and another certain proximity from our families. Andrew had intense wishes for a house on a cul-de-sac and I, for a fireplace. But, being young and engaged and not very wealthy, we knew that finding an affordable house with a fireplace and a kitchen, on a cul-de-sac in the right part of town, might have to wait till middle age, if ever.
When we viewed the townhouse at Marsh Wren, I immediately adhered to it. Not only was it on a surprising cul-de-sac, but the kitchen had been recently reworked: a rarity in townhomes of its age. This kitchen held promise: room for more than one person, and the oven could open without fully touching the cabinet opposite or colliding with the dishwasher, although you couldn’t open the fridge. The backsplashes had been done over in dark gray subway tile and the cabinets painted white. I could envision future weeknight evenings: Andrew doing the dishes while I stashed leftovers from dinner for our work lunches the next day. As far as potential first kitchens go, I felt pleased. Very pleased.
Nevertheless, I kept my excitement to myself as our realtor (my soon-to-be father-in-law) showed us into the living room. It doesn’t pay to show satisfaction too early, I thought. What if Andrew didn’t feel the same about this house, the cul-de-sac notwithstanding? What if it was already under contract? In the arms race which was the current real estate market, that was more than a fair concern. Still, I hoped there were no pending offers.
We moved past the kitchen. The living room felt welcoming and ample, even though the sun had set hours ago. After dark is not the best time to view a prospective property. Yet seeing it at this hour had its merits: the worst foot forward meant we’d only like it better. And the room was bright and cheerful enough even at this late hour: an auspicious sign.
I turned from the large sliding glass door to see, of all things, a wood-burning fireplace! By all appearances it was in working order, complete with a little stand of tangled fireplace tools nearby.
My heart seeped into a puddle. If we couldn’t have this town house I might actually die. I might lie down on the wood floor of my apartment, let Andrew cover me with a shroud, and die. The truth is, I didn’t want another house. Out of all the houses we’d seen in our paltry price range that weren’t in the flight path of Navy jets or gang violence, this was the only house I could imagine us living in. I already loved it. All one thousand square feet of it. We explored upstairs, and found walk-in closets (another holy grail), and down again to peek at the sort of “Harry Potter’s broom closet” bathroom tucked under the stairs. I looked at Andrew, willing him to speak first.
“I...could imagine us living here,” he said.
Not wanting to put too strong a point on it, “Let’s buy it,” I replied.
And that was that, really. After the owners agreed to write a contract for us, things began to roll. We made terrifying heaps of promises to be in debt to the bank for the next thirty years which, as twenty-eight year olds, felt like an insane length of time to promise anything to anyone. We trailed an inspector with a large mustache through the house as he looked for flaws which might terrify us away from the purchase. There were papers to sign: a lot of papers; tax documents to collect; proof of income to show. And the whole time the little house at Marsh Wren was waiting for us, emptied by now of its prior owners and their belongings.
At long last, closing day arrived. A very odd closing due to Andrew’s poor luck to catch Covid-19. This was December 2020 after all, and we’d gone the whole year without falling prey. Still, it felt like a betrayal.
Masked and teary, we sat in separate cars in the parking lot of the law office. The notary “witnessed” us grimly through his office doors to avoid plague. We passed sanitized pens back and forth and scrawled our signatures on the requisite forms handed us by our equally masked lender. A photo exists of this ridiculous moment, and when I look at it, I look away again. It was not the closing we’d planned.
That evening I drove alone to the house - our house - and somewhat weepily tucked cheese and olives and a bottle of sparkling cider into the empty fridge. I’d spent a fortune on celebratory cheese the day before, not realizing Andrew was sick. The house felt too quiet and very unfamiliar. The owners had left their drapes and I pulled these tight across the glass door, covering its bare face. I deposited a stack of blankets onto the gray floors and made a small nest near the fireplace. Somehow, though entirely lacking any fire within, the proximity of it comforted me. I lit a candle and set it on the empty hearth and it comforted me a little bit more with its brave cheerfulness.
Our fireplace in our house.
I laid there and cried a little bit. The floor was hard and the house cold. Strange noises - the breathing of a new home - kept me company while the tears spilled. Tears of self-pity, concern, and frustration with how different this was than the celebration we had planned. Our first home! The place in which we would spend our wedding night and begin our new life. We ought to be savoring this moment together and spooling pretty dreams across the bare floor. There ought to have been glasses of golden bubbles with foam, and a toast to our future. Instead, there was me: snotty-nosed without a tissue, hungry and despondent.
And yet, we owned this house. The thought somewhat cheered me and the tears slowed. Bad things could be mixed with the good and still not tilt the scale to despondency. We had still done something massive, and Marsh Wren with its kitchen and fireplace and cul-de-sac was ours! Rallying, I Facetimed Andrew and showed him my tear-spangled face and the house we now owned, and we made promises to celebrate properly as soon as we could reunite. It was an odd closing day, but my spirits revived as we spoke and adjusted our plans. Besides, I could see Andrew was not dead or dying.
We had always planned for me to be the first to move in. Being the one with the most impermanent living arrangements, it made sense. Besides, I am the decorative brains. I felt that to live in the house for a month or two before our marriage and get it really sorted out visually would be a boon to our future cohabitation. Our young marriage would somehow be aided by pictures on the wall and well-organized drawers.
Accordingly, I spent the first month preparing the house. I painted our laundry room twice to get the proper shade of bright yellow and chose cerulean knobs to replace those on the cabinets above the washers. Andrew was still quarantined. There was no one to stop me.
Self-propelled by the desire for everything to be fresh, I painted the cabinets themselves, transforming them from their 1980s dark wood to white, matching the kitchen. I concocted grand plans to wallpaper the broom-closet bathroom, but never ordered the wallpaper. The master bedroom became a deep, French blue under my willing paintbrush, and the guest room a cloudy color reminiscent of doves and fog.
Each night after work when I ticked off more house projects, I’d Facetime Andrew and prop him up on a stool, or an empty electrical socket. We’d talk while I painted. And painted. And painted. And washed paint brushes and painted again. Never before had I more deeply appreciated my skill-set gifted to me by a handy father who involved his children in home improvements.
Marsh Wren became mine - ours - through these projects. What little things I’d moved over, I found places for. A saucepan here, a hoard of coffee mugs there. A potted plant in the otherwise empty living room. I learned the light in this new home. The way the kitchen fills with sunshine in the morning and the great patch of daylight that falls over half the living room in the afternoon. I learned which day was trash day by spying on our neighbors’ cans, and discovered that hostas grow in our front flower bed. My yellow laundry room felt just bold enough to defy anyone else to live here: always the point of a daring paint choice. I recommend it.
When I moved in a month later, the adjustment was seamless. My projects continued: I reworked my gallery of frames with the help of a friend who’d gone to art school. I pounded nails relentlessly into the walls of this house, haphazardly taking a chance of accurate picture placement without measuring.
“There are two methods to gallery walls,” I’d explain defensively to anyone who questioned whether I ought to measure: “One is highly curated, and the other just looks like it grew organically on the walls over time. That’s this kind,” I’d reassure them, tipping a not-very-straight frame back the other way. Exact placement didn’t matter in a gallery wall such as mine. The point was to hammer everything in and hang everything up before Andrew had recovered and come around again to worry about that many nails in the wall.
At long last came the day of our reuniting. He’d been sick a month and within that time I’d accomplished rather a lot for a procrastinator. Proudly, I showed him the work he’d only seen through Facetime. He approved of the yellow laundry room and the painted cabinets and the bedroom colors. He inspected the baseboards I’d scrubbed and the informal gallery wall above the spot where we’d eventually have a couch. We lit candles in the fireplace and toasted our future together, as we had no wood to burn. And though this ritual was a month late, we spooled our dreams across the still-bare floors and everything was right again.
In another month we were married, and the cohabitation began in earnest. I do believe the decorating efforts helped, for it has been a happy marriage so far. We are very fond of the house at Marsh Wren. Our fireplace is small, much beset by soot, and not effusively reciprocal about our great love for it. If I question whether I really like a bedroom that is such an earnest shade of blue, I have only to think about the ordeal of repainting to realize I do approve. Beetles sometimes show up in unexpected corners, and the tub is a thing of dollhouse proportions in which I barely fit. There is not enough daylight inside and too many neighbors outside. We often have to dismantle the garbage disposal over the slightest obstruction. A plumber came to fix a drip in the shower and cut a massive hole in my beautiful dove gray guest room which he patched, but I took a solid year to paint over again.
It is, in short, just a normal house with its attendant quirks. Now we are settled in, we feel its smallness and know that when we eventually have a family, we will require a bigger place with more room to stretch out and a yard larger than a Post-It note. I pre-miss this house in those moments, and often wish we could expand its size and carve off a few of the neighboring homes and stay here forever. But for now, we light a fire against the autumn chill. We stretch out on the velvet couch, bury our toes in the shag rug, and admire the work of our hands. It is warm and generous here, with a friendly sort of artistic clutter borne of my absentminded style of housekeeping. We burrow into the cozy feeling of unalloyed happiness. It’s nice to be in love with each other, with our little house at Marsh Wren.