Where You Live Is How You Live

Cheap housing comes with a high price: Fixer-uppers are more work than you can imagine, and a big house can consume all your free time

When people say old houses are a lot of work, they are not kidding. Buy a fixer-upper Victorian at your own peril! We lived with the stove in the parlor during this stage of kitchen renovation, and it took us a couple of years to finish it. We love this room now, though. That’s my husband, Harrie, removing the old flooring from the days when this section of the kitchen was part of a porch. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

Some years ago, a friend of mine whose job transferred him to another state sold the big old house he renovated himself, filled a dumpster with 20 years worth of accumulated stuff and rented a minimalist urban loft instead.

Instantly, he was freed from yard work and home maintenance. He lives alone, spends most of his time writing and never has to set aside his work in order to walk a dog, mow his lawn or unclog a drain.

Sometimes, I’m jealous.

My husband and I are still in a big old house

It’s a lot. I’d be embarrassed to tell you how big it is because I love to brag about being thrifty. OK, it’s 3,500 square feet. But that’s misleading because it was built in 1897 and we paid under $100,000 for it in 2008. We live in central Illinois, the land of cheap homes, and these Victorians are a bargain. (Or so they seem, before you start ripping out floors and updating the plumbing.)

Especially now that the children are grown, the house is too damned big, but we don’t really want to leave it because we’ve put our souls into it. Also, we still haven’t finished fixing it up. We’ve done a lot, but there’s still more to be done.

Not that it will be especially attractive to buyers when complete.

We went with butcher block counters because that’s the easiest do-it-yourself material. We designed and built the plate rail and most of the rest of the cabinetry. The backsplash came from the ceiling of the newsroom where I used to serve as editor. That tin ceiling was right above my desk. The blue Fiesta dishes match the kitchen floor I painted. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

If you want to make money on a house restoration, you do the kitchen and bathrooms and paint everything gray. It’s not that I’m unaware of that. But while we have redone the kitchen and one bathroom, our choices would make a real estate agent cry. I painted the kitchen floor blue. We dragged an antique claw-foot tub from another house that was being torn down and installed it in our “new” bath.

What, you say buyers aren’t looking for recording studios?

My husband, Harrie, gutted the attic down to the studs – he rewired it, put in a new floor, individually cut thousands of pieces of pine paneling to follow the cathedral ceiling, designed and built a recording desk and more.

Naturally, he does not want to give up his studio; recording and mixing music is one of his great passions. Too bad he struggles to find time to do that, because we always have a project underway.

We’ve customized everything on this property to our taste. Would anybody else even want to buy it, considering we’ve made every remodeling decision based on our own preferences rather than the (apparently) color-loathing, character-hating, gray-loving Future Buyer? We love it, though.

Plus, where could we live that’s cheaper than this? We’re so close to paying it off that last month our mortgage interest was a total of $12.97. Quite soon we will have no mortgage payment at all – that’s a very good thing for a full-time writer with unpredictable income.

Another advantage is it’s in a safe, quiet, walkable neighborhood. All kinds of municipal services, bars and restaurants are a quick walk away.

But still, this house has a lot of space to dust, vacuum and maintain, and I don’t have the energy and time to keep it up.

Do we own this house, or does it own us?

We’ve indulged ourselves in customization to an undoubtedly unwise degree.

Our backyard has a treehouse. And a goldfish pond with an adjacent patio covered with a pergola. And a covered deck. And a patio that holds a seasonal pool in summer and a fire pit in the fall. And a shade garden. (I dug the pond myself, and my husband built everything else with free scrap wood. He even built the patio furniture.)

Each of these things requires work. You don’t want to know how much time I spend maintaining the goldfish pond. Having coffee next to the pond on a summer morning – or having a glass of wine there on a warm evening while watching the fish – is lovely.

But dealing with algae isn’t fun. Neither is winterizing the pond. We blew two weekends changing out most of the water, vacuuming the sludge from the bottom, pulling and cleaning the pump, etc. And when you plant a lot of flowers, that means many hours of weeding and watering.

I dug this pond and it was hard! It’s deep enough to allow the fish to spend the winter outside. The feeder goldfish I bought (a dozen for 99 cents) don’t know how lucky they were that they ended up here instead of being fed to a larger fish. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

Other people spent their last autumn weekends having cookouts or taking hikes but we spent it mucking out a pond. We devote at least one day in the spring to putting it all back together, too.

We knowingly made things worse last year

We decided to use some of the windfall from my viral Medium piece, We Could Learn a Lot About Sex From the Dutch, to purchase patio pavers and a seasonal pool.

We knew that getting a pool would add a whole new category of work and discussed whether we should do it. I owned an above-ground pool at a previous house a lifetime ago, so I knew how much work that is. These seasonal pools are easier because they’re small enough to keep covered when you’re not swimming in them. You drain them and take them down at the end of the summer. That’s quite a chore and eats up a whole day. But the upkeep is far less taxing than that required by a full-size pool, so on balance we think it’s worth it.

That’s the thing, though. Each of these things takes a little time: Mowing and edging a lawn all season. Sealing the deck every spring. Clearing the patio of sticks and leaves at least once a week. Maintaining the fishpond. Maintaining the pool. Not to mention taking care of a huge house.

We do everything ourselves

When something breaks, we fix it. We patch plaster, we paint, we strip wallpaper, we repair leaking pipes. We gutted the kitchen and one bathroom. (When I say “we,” I generally mean Harrie.) I hang up all our laundry to dry. I wash our dishes by hand. I make almost all our food from scratch, including our bread.

Many people hire others to mow their lawns and clean their homes, to install their light fixtures and to tile their bathrooms. They order take-out after a hard day and know better than to dig a danged fishpond in the backyard.

So yes, I realize each of our choices got us to where we are. If we’d had the means, we likely would have purchased a home that was move-in ready … even though it would be more in line with contemporary styles and less to our odd taste.

If you can’t pay with money, you will pay with your time

That trade-off seemed like a better deal when I was younger and had more energy – and more years ahead of me.

Part of me wonders how much longer we can keep all this up. Will we reach a time when we can no longer handle it all? Yes, we will, unless we drop dead before we throw up our hands and accept the necessity of moving into a much smaller space. Not to mention, as we get older we might prefer a house that does not contain 54 stairs. (I just counted.)

I already wonder who I could trust to take care of my fish. I didn’t realize, when I bought a dozen feeder goldfish for 99 cents a decade ago, that they’d have babies every year and I’d be responsible for maintaining their world forever. Fish do not clean up after themselves.

Part of me wants to have more time to read and write, but that side of me is in deep conflict with the rest of me that likes to have drinks with friends in the treehouse and to hear live music coming from the attic. I sometimes complain about how much attention my two old dogs require, but I can’t imagine living without canine companionship.

If you have enough money to hire somebody to do all the things you don’t like to do, you’ve still made a bad bargain because then you’ve lost the satisfaction that comes from doing them. That cannot be bought for any price.

My choice of house had a lot to do with affordability; I would not be a homeowner at all if I didn’t live in a place like central Illinois. My mortgage payment is so much smaller than what most people pay for a tiny apartment. Yet a tiny apartment frees up a wealth of time!

We feel so much pride in our unique vintage home. Although we had no idea what we were getting into, we ultimately don’t regret that we dived in. The question is this: What do you really want to do with your time? Because what you do with your time is what you do with your life.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me on Medium or Substack. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.

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All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.