The light's how they find you

We bought, we moved, we are still fixing. It’s an incredible house that we won a bidding war – our third – to get, and yet I still feel that we got a bargain. Mostly because the house was custom-built by the prior owner, whose brother was a big luxury home builder in the area at the time, so it is full of beautiful design choices and top-of-the-line everything. But the prior owner aged in place, and let a lot of things go towards the end of her life, so yes we got a steal, but we also bought ourselves a bunch of problems.

These problems – well, the problems are fine. They’re all fixable, none catastrophic. The contractors who are allegedly solving these problems for us are stressing me the fuck out. I am project managing five of them at once on any given day, dealing with the flakes (most of them), and the liars (very few), and everything in between. It is brutal out here, guys. I call 8-10 people for each job, knowing half will never call me back, half that do will set an appointment and then ghost us, half that set the appointment will never send an estimate, etc. etc. How do these people stay in business!?

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that right now. Right now I want to dreamily describe one of my favorite places in the house to remind myself what this is all for.


The family room is about 14 feet wide and 30 long with light but warm oak flooring. All of the walls are paneled in a warm brown wood that we were told was cherry, but I’m not entirely convinced. Gorgeous beveled millwork floor to ceiling. Except that one of the long walls is taken up by built-in cabinets (we store stemware, games, and a lot of toys) and a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace with, you guessed it, beautiful and intricate masonry.

The other long wall is taken up almost entirely by glass doors. If you open one, you step out and down into a second story screened porch with the same dimensions as the family room. The floor is – we think, but are having someone come to confirm – long teak boards. Stupidly beautiful, and don’t get me started on how hard it is to find someone to do minor repairs on it, but we’re not talking about that now. The porch roof has multiple skylights. The room is lit but cool and quiet.

Eventually . . . someday . . . we will have a large rug in the family room in a warm cream shade, maybe with some gold in the weave, with our giant sectional on it. The current jumble of preschooler activities – the play kitchen, the art station, the car explosion -- in the far end of the room will be better organized. The screened porch will have some indoor-outdoor rugs. Something more colorful in that space. One end of the porch will have a big table that can seat six plus. I’m thinking acacia for that, but I’m not settled yet. We’ll be able to eat there – it will be just a few steps from the porch out a screen door to the deck, and right into the kitchen from there. The other end of the porch will have at least two padded loungers – I have visions of being able to sleep out there when the weather is perfect. Also some sort of outdoor couch. Maybe one of those beautiful teak ones with colorful cushions, and a low table for drinks. The breeze will be cool, and all the furniture will face out down the slope of the back yard towards the woods, where the deer and bunnies and chipmunks wander out. I’ll work out there in the spring and the fall, and we’ll sit there in the evenings while Cb plays, and we’ll go out when it rains to listen to the drumming on the skylights.

And no contractors will call me.