COLUMN: The ups and weirds of home ownership
EPHRATA — In February of 2022, my wife and I embarked on a new adventure — home ownership.
Prior to marrying my wife, I’d never really been interested in home ownership. I liked having all the maintenance be the landlord’s responsibility to manage and I usually lived in apartment complexes with amenities like pools, gyms and hot tubs.
That couldn’t remain my reality though as my lovely bride had a dream of home ownership and, surprisingly to me, I got the bug after we talked about it several times. I realized that I was tired of living with neutral colors and of patching up nail holes in walls when I moved to a new apartment. The moves were inevitable as we either changed jobs or rent was increased to the point where it would become worth it to move to a new apartment with similar amenities and a good move-in special of some sort.
Honestly, once you hit a certain point, the moves are just a big pain in the backside.
A cross-country move later and I was finally back in the Pacific Northwest in a house that was Pepto Bismol-pink. Not just one the outside, two of the bedrooms shared the color as did the curtains that had hung in the home for quite some time.
While pink isn’t my cup of tea — kudos to A.B. Allen, the previous owner of the home. He’d painted the exterior and two bedrooms pink for his wife, Mary, because it was her favorite color. There were other little expressions of love and faith he’d worked into the home as well, but I’ll touch on those in a bit.
The first thing that I did when I arrived while my wife remained in Texas to finish the move was tackle the interior of the home. It had sat empty for some time with only one of the Allens sons staying a short time to prepare it for sale.
I cleaned cobwebs out of corners, vacuumed and shampooed rugs, changed the filter on the heating/AC unit and other little touch ups that any home that’s sat vacant needed.
Next came the paint. The primary bedroom was one of those that was pink, so we settled on a calming blue color and, like A.B. before me, I painted the bedroom my wife’s chosen colors. We ended up with a navy blue accent wall to give it a bit of zest.
The guest bedroom was another story. I chose the color for that and I think maybe I should have waited for spousal guidance. Green is my favorite color and I somehow ended up choosing a weird green that looked great on the sample card but awful on the wall. The accent color, thought to be a dark sage, became the color of old avocado after a bit. Eighty dollars of paint for round one, and $40 of paint for round two and the room is much better.
And yes, my wife helped me pick the second group of colors.
Since that initial couple of projects, we’ve repainted the living room, removed wood paneling in my wife’s office, repaired various bits of the walls, replaced trim in every room, raised the cabinets in the kitchen, replaced the dishwasher, removed hundreds of square feet of wallpaper that didn’t match our tastes and painted three of the four exterior walls last summer before running out of viable weather to paint the last wall. I’ve even re-caulked all of the siding around the house to reseal it against the desert dust.
Thank goodness for a hedge that hides the last pink wall.
My wife has been a steadfast partner in all of these projects. I even came home from work one day to find her, tools in hand, standing in front of an empty and unplugged refrigerator while fixing the condensation drain.
The house has been a blessing. Perhaps because the projects have been fun. Maybe because A.B., being a man of faith, had placed saints’ tokens in the walls of the home when he was working on it during his and Mary’s time in the home.
Regardless, we’ve enjoyed the work, but there are some things we’ve learned that we want to pass on to other first-time homeowners.
It never hurts to get paint samples to make sure that the color you’re considering is the right one. Paint is expensive. We’ve spent several hundred dollars on it, and could have saved money if we’d gotten samples.
Pace yourself. Not everything is going to get done in the first year of home ownership. Choose your projects each summer and work on those. You’ll be happier with the results than if you end up with some half-finished jobs. (Case in point, my half-painted office…)
YouTube is your friend. Watching a few videos on how to complete various tasks will help you be successful, safer and happier with the end results of a project. Replacing light fixtures is where this came in especially handy, in my experience.
Talk to each other about your tastes and share pictures to get a common vision for the home.
Have fun with your projects. They can bring a great deal of pride and satisfaction to owning a home, but some of that is in the doing, not just in the being done.
Shop around for tools — especially power tools — and supplies for projects. It’s tempting to let a big-box home improvement store be your one-stop-shop, but you can save a lot of money by spreading your dollars to the other places in town. Plus, shopping local supports your neighbors.
Homeownership is expensive, but it’s worth it to put that investment forward as a priority. I’m still an amateur figuring out how to fix pipes, rewire fluorescent lights and install commodes — that was an adventure in January — but I’m also having fun and realizing equity both from the work we’ve done and the payments we’ve made over the last few years.
The after: A bit of color later and the room had moved into a serene blue with a navy accent wall and gray trim.