Danielle Crittenden's 1905 house in Washington, D.C. has been undergoing a major renovation for the past year (and off and on for over a decade). In this weekly summer series, which appears Fridays on HuffPo, Danielle records what it has been like for her and her family to live through the construction with their builders, Virginia-natives Brent and John.
Our house before it had its facade ripped off in the Thirties.
Buying a house is like getting married. You make a hugely important, life-altering personal decision in a state of mind in which you should not be trusted to operate a motor vehicle. Sometimes you get lucky, and the decision turns out well even so. More often, the throes of passion have blinded you to important warning signs: signs that all your friends tried tactfully to alert you to. Your beloved drinks too much. Or she has a tendency to weight gain. Or comes with obvious structural problems and a mortgage you really cannot afford.
My husband's and my purchase of our first and only home was not a case of love at first sight. It was the winter of 1995. Under the rule of then-Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C. was suffering horrific crime, a deep economic slump and pervasive misgovernment. A thriving downtown had long been shuttered; intersections equivalent to Lexington and 45th looked like sets out of Blade Runner.
As we pulled into the narrow driveway of our future home, the realtor remarked we were lucky the snow had even been cleared. The city had just endured one of the worst snowstorms in its history, and it had taken more than a week for the incompetent local bureaucracy to dig out. Roads and sidewalks were impassable; District residents from cabinet secretaries and lawyers to gas attendants and retail clerks were trapped in their homes. Our friends thought we were nuts even to consider shopping in Mayor Barry's corrupt, dysfunctional fiefdom.
A buyer's market, one might say.
The house--at first, at second, and at a longer, disbelieving third glance--had no curb appeal whatsoever. It was a gloomy gray clapboard, set rather aloofly from the road behind a scruffy row of boxwood. It reminded me of someone's disapproving old aunt. My husband David and I exchanged the same thought: Why was our agent wasting our time with this?
Nice street, sure. Good neighborhood maybe, eventually, possibly--assuming that the United States would put some limits on the descent of the nation's capital into urban blight. But we were located inside the District line, dangerously far from the suburbs and exurbs where most of our friends lived, and where the authorities still collected trash and followed up on murders.
The house had been built in 1905. The realtor promised it possessed "lots of charm." After months in the market, we had learned to mistrust the term "charm": it was the euphemism realtors applied to old houses with leaky rooves, uneven floors, and erratic heating. Anyway, whatever "charm" this house might once have possesed had been long ago been blasted away from its exterior appearance. Later we would find old photographs that showed the house with a grand wrap-around front porch overlooking a nice spread of parkland from its high perch above a dirt road.
Now it showed the snubbed profile of a Pekinese dog. Owners in the early 1930s had pulled down the old wraparound porch. They then bumped it out a mere nine feet on one side, destroying whatever symmetry was left. The dirt road had become a busy thoroughfare. The park on the other side of the street remained, but the view was now obscured by a half-century old Tudor manse.
The realtor stopped the car in the driveway and led us past an ugly stockade fence to the back door. A 1970s-style "greenhouse window"--slapped thoughtlessly on one of the exterior walls--confirmed this would be a very short visit for us.
Then...well, you know how the movie goes. The plain secretary removes her glasses and lets down her hair. Suddenly, every other house we'd ever seen vanished from memory. For, hidden from view at the front of the house, was a magical, deep double lot with a carriage house tucked amidst mature hedges of boxwood. A vast screened porch at back overlooked soaring magnolia trees. The rear of the house had retained all the character that the front had lost.
We were shown inside to the living room, where we found the current owner roasting chestnuts in his fireplace. He stood and greeted us: a tall, silvery man with the hearty bearing and good manners of Old Virginia. The realtor led us on the house tour but I honestly can't remember anything she said. By then I was in full swoon: the high ceilings, the plaster mouldings, the eccentricity of the layout. All day we'd been led through sturdy but cheerless center-hall colonials, each one a perfectly qualified candidate, sensible homes, homes with which we ought to have happy, but that somehow now felt like blind dates generated by a computer matchmaking service.
We paused in the small breakfast room beside a table set for two.
"Can't you just see us sitting here twenty-five years from now," my husband mused, "eating spaghetti Bolognese, the kids grown and moved out...?"
"Yes! Yes!"
That evening, we spent hours dwelling on the house's virtues and minimizing its flaws: tiny kitchen; odd bathrooms, especially the master, which had been decorated in some post-vacational homage to Mexico; furnace, air conditioners, and water heaters installed in the Ford administration. The flaw to which we most resolutely closed our eyes was naturally the price: While the house cost only about half as much a similarly sized house in the suburbs, it nonetheless still cost a third more than we had budgeted or intended to pay. Plus, it remained immovably inside the District of Columbia where, when we last checked, people were eating their arms off because they couldn't pass through the snow to get fresh bread and milk.
"We have to buy it," I said.
"I know."
We were goners.
This series originates in the National Post.