What makes a home?
I’m sitting here sipping coffee and watching the morning light stream through the windows of my new home. It’s odd to write that sentence. As a Millennial, I have developed deep skepticism about homeownership. In my 20s and early 30s, it wasn’t clear to me that buying a home was the automatic best choice financially or emotionally. I liked having flexibility and resented the idea that homeownership served as a marker of real adulthood. And I was a content renter, particularly when something broke and I didn’t have to pay for it.
I stand by all that. Yet here I am, a newly minted homeowner with a greatly diminished bank account. At 34, I finally got tired of flexibility, tired of moving, tired of negotiating with landlords. Saying goodbye to all those things is an enormous privilege and I’m a little nervous about trading them for a new set of problems. The search process ate up all of my spare time and energy over the past five months and I’m just now coming up for air.
For me, one of the really uncomfortable parts of trying to buy a home is telegraphing to all your friends and family how much money you have to spend. And it doesn’t end there, because then there’s the pressure to spend even more on stuff to telegraph one’s “good taste” (i.e. class status). It’s easy to consume photos of beautiful homes on Instagram and TV. I do it a lot! Interior design can be a delightful source of creativity and self-expression. But design “rules” can be suffocating too, and it’s hard not to internalize deep disdain for dated cabinets, white appliances and wall-to-wall carpet. At the end of the day, though, when I started looking at homes I found the unvarying sameness of flipped properties deeply depressing. And sometimes I look at a beautifully curated photo and think, “It doesn’t look like anyone actually lives there.”
I grew up in a double-wide mobile home with 90s wooden cabinets, beige carpet and vinyl flooring. Most of the time, the living room floor was covered in Legos and the couch cushions were perpetually collecting crumbs and other detritus. And the biggest furniture investment my parents made were the wall-to-wall Billy bookcases from Ikea. It would never, ever be featured in magazine, but it was our little nest in the woods. Right outside the door spilled seven acres of land, covered with trees and a winding creek. My mom cleared a small pasture out back for her ever-expanding herd of alpacas and goats. We found artifacts in the upturned earth from people who’d lived there before, broken bits of what looked like 19th-century pottery and much, much older arrowheads. At night you could see the milky way from our backyard, and sometimes dad would wake us up at 3 or 4 a.m. to watch a meteor shower from the back deck.
It was, frankly, a pretty magical, hobbit-ish way to grow up. But as I got older, driving 30 to 45 minutes to get … well, anywhere, became tiresome. I yearned to have a closer-knit community around me. After college, I decided to live in the city instead of the country. I still live in a city. But looking at homes made me realize that I couldn’t entirely let go of those early memories. My blueprint for what feels like home has nothing to do with subway tile or hardwood floors. It has everything to do with trees, sunlight and bookshelves.
Guess what? My new home (built in 1985!) has original cabinets and appliances. It has wallpaper and so, so much beige carpet. Even though I’ll change some of those things eventually, and even though it’s not a cabin in the woods, I love it already because it has huge windows, natural light and tree-lined walking trails. And I’ve already started planning where I’ll put up bookshelves in every room.