Melody and I are at that phase of house building when the decisions need to come fast and often. We recently spent part of an afternoon at a place called General Plumbing selecting faucets and sinks and finish colors. For an hour and a half we dug deep to find opinions within us about how curvy we wanted our faucet handles and which of four different finishes was to be considered better than the others.
A couple hours later, back in the house that we remodeled 27 years ago, I was brushing my teeth when I took a look at the sink and faucet that I’ve been using for a quarter of a century. They were nothing like what I’d been admiring in my recent session at the plumbing showroom. The faucet seemed to be a squat looking thing. The brass color so utterly passe. Not at all like the choices that had filled my thoughts that afternoon. There was no way I would have selected this faucet for my next house.
But this faucet was perfectly fine.
And that made me happy. Because in that small moment there was a glimmer of something profound. These decisions were not that big a deal. Life would go on just fine no matter what style of toilet was selected. Agonizing over choices was its own punishment.
When we outfitted our first house in the early ’90s, we did almost all the construction ourselves with some help from my dad for the plumbing. We would drive to good ol’ Yardbirds in Vallejo where we chose from their modest selection of faucets or light fixtures or cabinet pulls. We made our choices without much fuss and then lived happily with the results. Somehow now the stakes seem higher. But really they’re not. I think maybe we had it right when we just relaxed about all this.
This is good to keep in mind, because I still catch myself noticing differences about life in our current house and how certain little things will be different in the next house. It will happen in my daily life that I’ll observe some act I take for granted, like stepping out the kitchen door for the short trip to the trash cans. When we move into the new house later this year, the walk will be (gasp!) three times as far. Just what am I doing, I ask myself, giving up my life in this comfortable old shoe of a house in order to strike out for the undiscovered country of a new house?
But then I also notice other things that will undeniably improve in the new house – things that, if I were moving back the other way, I would totally covet and surely not want to give up. Like how a pass-through cabinet in our master closet will back onto the laundry room which will allow us to pass clothes back and forth with no need to lug a laundry basket around the corner and down hallways. Like how our shower will be large enough to dry off in while the full enclosure of glass will keep away cold drafts. And how my new home office will have a truly useful storage system for all my design projects. No more stacks on stacks. Hurray!
I spent many a Friday afternoon designing this house – going through countless iterations and reworking areas and tweaking details just to eke out every advantage I could think of. “When the sunlight bounces off the back wall of that skylight shaft it will give good natural light to the right side of the kitchen island, which will help balance the light from the windows coming from the other side over by the dining area, especially late in the day. Hmm. But if that skylight is too close to the back wall, it might create a bright spot on that upper wall which will create a bit of glare for the television across the room. On the other hand, the natural light in the kitchen will be just like that artists’ warehouse we saw in Emeryville. Can’t live without that.”
And on it goes. Like working out a puzzle that never fully gets solved. The deeper I go, the more I understand that there’s no bottom to this ocean. Always one more layer to peel. One more insight to glean. Lucky for me, I consider it fun. The hope is that if I spend enough time on this, surely I can make it all work out with hardly a sacrifice of any kind. Until I realize it resulted in something like a longer walk to the trash area and I feel a sense of failure, albeit a small one.
But then an even more comforting notion comes into play. It is this: We will surely adapt to any idiosyncrasies or unforeseen quirks that the new home puts forth because that’s what every human does with their living environment. An adjustment is made for something particular; we live with it and then the accommodation seems to be a normal part of everyday life and we quit noticing it. We find a place to store our keys that works in the flow of our life. We feed the dog in the laundry room because that floor is easier to keep clean.
For many years I’ve lived with a garage on the alley behind our house. It keeps the front of the house from being dominated by car storage but it also means that I sometimes have to walk in the rain to go between house and garage. You’d be surprised how little that troubles me.
I must have it pretty good if the number of steps to my trash can is something I notice and care about. Perhaps I hold myself to a higher standard because I know I have no one else to blame for not getting this stuff right. (Architect stuff.) Last night after a family dog walk that involved muddy feet and cleaning up, I was happy to hear Melody wonder out loud about how well our next mudroom is going to function at times like this. So even well-adjusted people think this way, I thought. That’s a relief. I suppose I’ll continue to fuss over these things, because that’s what I do, and then it will all be fine in the end. That’s just how it works.
Steve McKee is a Benicia architect.
He can be reached on the web at: www.smckee.com or at (707) 746-6788
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