Back when I was in college, I remember thinking that a few thousand in student loans would be a piece of cake to pay off, and after that happened, I'd be living on easy street. I'd live like Tom Hanks in Big, with fountains of Diet Pepsi flowing in my indoor arcade,
next to my indoor gun range / bowling alley / ski slope. The concept of a home loan was totally alien to me.
Two years later, I'd be putting ink on a series of 500 home purchase documents being handed to me by a lawyer under the careful supervision of two salivating real estate agents.
I grew up in a 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, so stepping into a home that would me mine (MINE!!) was huge. The grass, the driveway, the front porch, the water heater, the garage... *pant* *pant* *pant*... what am I gonna do with all this
space?! The possibilities were rushing to my head. Even my then fiancé was going a little crazy with the ideas.
So, our canvas was a two story, 3 bedroom home with two more rooms to play with on the lower level. Somehow (and I'll bet every 20-something year old new homeowner goes through this) we decided a bar would be a great idea in the lower level.
Yeah! We could trim it with cedar and brass, and have a nice polished banister with a sink and a minifridge, and maybe a neon sign that blinks "Kovats' Olde Towne Pubb" - you know, in that old timey, unnecessary appended letters fashion? Yeah, that'd
be cool!
We planned it out, drew up plans, and even started pricing the material costs... before it finally dawned on us that neither one of us really drink all that much. I mean, I like my beer, but not enough to need a whole room for it. So, we scrapped
that.
The next thing that seems to happen is the slow, gradual learning process of handyman work and home repair. It starts with painting - most of us have been doing it since Kindergarten. Granted, that was using fingers and the results were a stretch even for the most
encouraging audiences, but the basic process is the same.
The thing that ain't the same is the color selection. In grade school, you had somewhere between 12 and 64 crayons - maybe 128 if you were rich or something - and that's it. The extent of your browns were "burnt sienna",
"light brown" and "dark brown". Today, when you go to Home Depot, they unleash a world of browns you never imagined, and their names don't help at all. You have no friggin' clue if "toasted
cyprus" is any different or better than "mystic fudge", and it ain't cheap finding out.
So, you lay down the tarps and paint your first room. After some acceptable splatter ("enh, we'll be replacing the carpet anyways"), you finish your first room. You've got a paint job under your belt, and so you graduate to changing light
switch plates. In a month, you're ready for installing shower curtain rods.
Around this time for us, my wife's parents came up to visit... and to reconstruct. My father-in-law is an all-around handyman who can effectively build a home with a few piles of wood and a sharp stick, and my mother-in-law has enough motivation and energy to power a
small city. Possibly St. Louis, if you gave her an extra cup of coffee.
Now, when you get your first home, like anything else, it's your baby. You want control over every inch of it, according to the plans buried deep in your mind (and possibly years from reality). When my father-in-law came up with a truck full
of tools, he had plans. A Bob Villa was now running loose in our new home, and he stuck on auto-pilot.
Their first visit was nerve-wracking, because everything they did seemed to be a surprise to us ("oh, but that's not how I pictured... oh, um, uhmm... crap."). The second, third and fifth vists were still full of nail-biting. We'd come home from work in the evenings expecting to see an addition to the garage or a gazebo hanging
off our front porch.
The humor in this is that my one gripe with my in-laws at that time was how they'd constantly work and build on our home when they visited. I tried telling this to a few other married folks in conversation and learned that my complaint was almost like winning the lottery compared
to some of the other "in-law" stories.
One guy told me that to this day, after years of marraige, his mother-in-law has a standing offer to pay for all divorce expenses and his wife's next wedding costs. Ouch.
And so, today, after living in our home for 2 years, we've basically hit a point with most rooms where we're content. You're never really finished with any room at any time; you just reach a point where the paint doesn't turn your stomach
and the furniture doesn't make your eyes sore. We've paid off about 3% of our monstrous home debt, and have learned to accept the American Dream of perpetual debt.
Nowadays, we're more than happy to help my wife's parents with whatever plans that have for the home. When you reach the point where you've spent your first year constantly in the middle of house projects, you learn that help is a blessing in any form.
Yeah, we were thinking of crown-moudling in this room, but hell if the one-man Jakubowski construction team is willing to put up a drop-ceiling, I'm happy to help cut the ceiling tiles.
In the end...
After all the work and all the money you put into your home - which never ends - you're left with a deep appreciation for the place you call your home, and a serious understanding of why some people choose to rent instead.
Your first house
The next thing that seems to happen is the slow, gradual learning process of handyman work and home repair. It starts with painting - most of us have been doing it since Kindergarten. Granted, that was using fingers and the results were a stretch even for the most
encouraging audiences, but the basic process is the same.
Their first visit was nerve-wracking, because everything they did seemed to be a surprise to us (