Story Frame 24 – The Money Pit

Two years after moving into Jules Renaud’s quirky Alice in Wonderland house, where each little room led to another in whimsical and counter-intuitive ways, where the tulips bloomed mysteriously in the middle of the yard seemingly overnight, my mother decided she was no longer at peace with the idea of me paying rent.

She chewed on this for a while before springing her new idea on me one afternoon at a little coffee shop in Old Town while she was visiting from Sarasota. Coffee cup in hand, suspended halfway between the saucer and her mouth, an expression came over her face that told me big thoughts were going on in her mind. Conversation halted as she frowned slightly in concentration. Then she pursed her lips and cleared her throat.

I waited in nervous anticipation for what would come next. Other similarly expressioned moments had yielded bombshells like: “I think I’ll leave London and move back to the U.S.” and “I’m leaving your father” and “I think I’ll move to Florida and start an art gallery with your sister.”

But this time was different. This time, it was about me.

“I want to help you buy a house,” she said, without preamble.

Shocked and uncertain what it actually meant or what was expected of me, I digested this for a moment before replying.

“Thank you, but documentary filmmaking doesn’t pay enough for me to buy a house,” I said, thinking how stressful it would be to try and hold up my end of the deal. “Reasonable as it is, I can barely make my rent each month.”

To my surprise, this was not a deal-breaker.

“I’d rather see you in a house right now, building equity, while I’m still alive,” she said. “What’s the point of waiting until after I die for you to inherit what you need?”

Even though I’d lived with it my whole life, there were still times I found her Scandinavian directness somewhat disconcerting.

“I’ll put up the down-payment,” she continued briskly, “and you’ll be responsible for the mortgage payments. We’ll budget it so they will be roughly the same as your monthly rent.” She paused for a moment, looking into her coffee cup as if searching for numbers amongst the dregs.

“We’ll be co-owners,” she added, just to keep me in line. “My name will also be on the deed. But in addition to the mortgage payment, you will be responsible for all upkeep and any renovations.”

How could I resist? As a former realtor, my mother would be a good partner. And it wouldn’t be the first place I’d owned, nor the first I’d renovated. Two years out of college, I’d scraped together the money to buy a little garden apartment not far from the Potomac River. I sold that for the townhouse Steve and I lived in when we got married. Two years later, I sold that for the little mid-century modern fixer-upper of my dreams – and nightmares.

The mid-century modern house was owned by a retired international airport architect named Harry. I’d heard the neighbors were concerned about him – and the house – and rightly so. Unable or unwilling to pull himself together after the death of his wife, Harry spent most of his days sitting alone in a decades-old brown faux Eames chair amongst the shelves of books that lined the brown painted walls. Long brown transparent drapes drooped in front of floor-to-ceiling glass windows stained with nicotine – a tableau of suspended animation in shades of depressing brown.

Each day, Harry stared out through his stained-glass wall into the surrounding woods, smoking, brooding, and drinking. Periodically, he got up and walked into the old kitchen, with its once upon a time contemporary white metal cabinets, on which he’d painted black and yellow geometric shapes decades ago. Now a fading ode to a previous era in design, the cabinets were dinged and rusted out in places. He prepared his dinners on a vintage range top coated with tufts of cat hairs glued in place with the grease of many previous meals.

Harry had neglected himself and the house for years. He didn’t appear to shower or bathe. His family and the neighbors were both frustrated and concerned. A lawyer working in an office adjacent to the architecture firm I worked for at the time tipped me off about the house. He was one of the neighbors. Unhappy with what he could see of Harry’s house from his own back yard, he encouraged me to try and buy it. There was only one problem: it wasn’t for sale.

“Knock on the door and make him an offer!” the lawyer encouraged me, desperate to see a change. I thought about it. Hollin Hills was a super cool neighbor architecturally, and with its 1950s modern homes thoughtfully and discretely situated throughout its wooded setting, one I would love to live in. It had even been written up in Life magazine. Having not yet seen the inside of the house and therefore having no idea what I was getting myself into, I mostly thought why not?

We talked it over and Steve drove me back later that week. Wordlessly, we pulled into the overgrown driveway. Standing well over six feet tall, I thought Steve might appear intimidating to Harry, so I decided to knock on the door by myself. I made my way cautiously through a thicket of bamboo and across a small patio of broken bricks and weeds as Steve watched from the truck, ready to spring to my rescue if needed. I knocked on what turned out to be the kitchen door and held my breath. Nothing happened. I knocked again. Then I heard the sound of footsteps slowly shuffling closer and closer towards me. Then they stopped.

The door jerked open and there stood Harry. He was tall and lean, somewhere in his seventies, with long grey, unkempt hair reaching down to the frayed collar of his baggy old sweater. One shaking hand on the countertop to steady himself, the other held the tail end of a burning cigarette. The reek of stale smoke nearly overwhelmed me.

“Yes?” he said, peering down at me through dirty glasses, like a ghastly and ghostly character from a Dickens novel.

I hesitated briefly before telling him my name. Hoping to establish some semblance of credentials and connection, I also told him the name of the architecture firm where I worked. His eyebrows went up ever so slightly, but still he said nothing. The cloud of smoke emanating from Harry and from within the house’s darkened interior, which he wore like a shroud, made me cough involuntarily.

“My husband and I would like to buy your house,” I said, wiping my eyes.

“It’s not for sale!” he bellowed gruffly, and perhaps just a bit defensively.

“Yes, I realize that,” I said.

Hoping to appeal to his memories of his own happy marriage years within these walls, of the times I’d heard about when he and his stylish wife would dress up just to go motoring around the neighborhood in their classic convertible, waving at the neighbors, I added, “We’re a newly married young couple with a small child. We love the wooded setting and the architecture of this neighborhood, and we were hoping you might consider selling your home to us.”

“It’s not for sale,” he repeated sternly. From what I could now see of the vintage, nicotine-stained kitchen behind him, I thought perhaps it was just as well.

 “Okay,” I said. “I apologize for disturbing you.”

I turned and began making my way back through the bamboo thicket and thorny, unwelcoming barberry bushes out towards fresh air and Steve.

“Wait!” I heard him say. I paused and turned around.

“What would you give me for it?” he asked. The lawyer had told me Harry’s daughter was after him to move somewhere he could be better cared for and perhaps that was on his mind.

“$150,000,” I said, having been coached by his lawyer neighbor as to a suggested price.

“Well,” he said grudgingly. “I’ll think about it.”

I pulled a business card from my pocket, hoping the architectural practice where I worked might at least reassure him, and handed it up to him. He grasped it in his long, thin yellowish fingers and looked at it for a moment, his cigarette sloughing ashes down upon it. Then, without another word, he turned around and slammed the door shut behind him.

Several weeks passed before we got a call and an invitation to come back and see the inside.

On the appointed day, Steve and I passed through the rooms quickly, partly because it was only 1100 square feet in total and partly because we could barely breathe. The combination of stale smoke scented by cat piss was so thick we were tempted to reach out to try and brush the air away from our faces. The house had just one bathroom. The fixtures were all original and from the 50s. We stared at them, trying to imagine how much cleaning we would have to do before we felt comfortable bathing and potty-training two-year-old Zoë here. Glancing into the old tub, I noticed a little dead cricket lying still, its matchstick limbs akimbo.

Eventually, either encouraged or ultimatum-ed by his daughter, we settled on a price a few thousand higher than what I had offered. Three months later, the house was ours.

Someone suggested I pick up Harry and bring him to the attorney’s settlement offices, to make sure he would actually be there. With his aura of decrepitude, smoke and alcohol, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of having Harry riding shotgun in the car beside me but I wanted this house.

The morning of settlement day, I rolled down all the windows in my car, then drove over and picked him up from the house of my dreams and nightmares. To my surprise, Harry was actually ready and waiting for me. He’d tamed his wild hair slightly and donned a dress jacket for the occasion. I told him he could not smoke in the car, and he complied. I don’t recall what we talked about during the twenty minutes’ drive to the lawyer’s office, but I do remember my heart breaking just a little at the thought of how difficult this must be for him, for so many reasons.

Steve met us there from his jobsite.

As we walked to the conference room, I noticed a bottle of champagne on the table. The lawyer led us cheerfully and briskly through the paperwork. When it was all finished and everyone had signed, he pushed back his chair and stood up to offer his congratulations. Harry’s long shaky arm shot out to make a grab for the bubbly. After a slight tussle, the lawyer managed to wrest it from him, telling him it was for the new owners, not him.

Later, Steve and I wandered through the house for the first time as owners, taking turns drinking from the champagne bottle and struggling with a knee-buckling case of buyers’ remorse. What the hell had we just done? The flue wasn’t even attached to the furnace, Steve noticed – how on earth was Harry even still living? I saw the little cricket’s body still in the tub – three months after I’d first seen it – and took it outside for a respectful garden burial.

A few days later, we began the demolition of the interior, stripping out as much as we could, taking it down to slab and bare walls. Parts of it were like an archeological dig. Steve kept shouting out to me like the Count from Sesame Street in disbelief and surprise as he took up not one but two layers of indoor-outdoor carpeting in the kitchen, only to find two additional layers of linoleum buried underneath.

Gradually, a long pile of appliances, rotting carpets, kitchen flooring, old furniture, and odd shelving accumulated along the road. Contractor friends came over, helping us when and where they could. We paid them with warm pizza and cold beer. We bought fresh new appliances. I found an ad for 15 feet of beautiful rosewood kitchen cabinets second hand and a friend installed it all for us. Although we didn’t have any money to spare, we did hire a cheerful, three-person cleaning team to literally shovel out the room the cats used, then clean and sterilize it. That was something we couldn’t ask anyone to do for free and neither Steve nor I had the stomach for it.

In what would become a lifelong pattern, a film came to my rescue. I think it was Steve’s idea to rent The Money Pit. Over take-out and a bottle of wine, we watched it every night of that first week of renovation. Exhausted, sore, and filthy from the day’s efforts, we took some consultation our house wasn’t as bad as theirs.

“On the bright side,” Steve would almost always say, pouring another glass of wine as we watched the circular staircase collapse over and over under Tom Hanks or the bathtub crash through the floor for the fifth time, “our house is all on one level – no staircase!”

Our favorite feature of the house, and the main reason for buying it, was that each room had an entire wall of glass windows. I put my hand through one of them while scraping it clean and had to stop to pull out the glass and bandage it up. Then Steve had an accident that required having his head stitched up. But the idea that toddler Zoë would grow up in a house with nature always at her own little eye level kept us going. And gradually, what eventually emerged was a beautiful and simple little gem of a mid-century modern house with gleaming glass walls, surrounded by nature.

We lived there until Leif was born. This was the little dream house we lost when Steve’s business came apart at the seams.

Seven years later, a few days after that cup of coffee, Mom and I went house-hunting, something we both loved to do and do together. Eventually we found one she and I and kids could all agree on – and one that she and I could make work financially.

Zoë and Leif liked how close it was to their friends’ houses; I liked how close it was to the Potomac River with its wonderful 8-mile-long bike path; and Mom thought it was a good investment. We bought it and the kids and I moved in.

I painted a colorful jungle scene in Leif’s bedroom and Zoë and I wallpapered her room with photographs of her friends. The redesign and restoration of the gardens along with the complete renovation of all three bathrooms would come later, as time and funds permitted.

This was the house I would fill with the colors of Italy and Italian music.

Coming up next … The Art of Foreshadowing