Home.

They say owning your own home is the American Dream.  It’s certainly one of mine. Maybe it’s because I moved around a lot growing up.  Maybe it’s a nesting thing.  Perhaps it’s one of those fantasies we grow up with, like meeting Prince Charming or being a Rock Star – an American fairy tale.  All I know is that for a long, long time, all I’ve really wanted is a place that was MINE.

Not just any house will do though. I have an obsession with restoring old homes.  I can spend hours on OldHouses.com and envision how I would paint and decorate and landscape the hell out of one of those Queen Annes (in fact, I’m doing it right now, while I write this blog). I just spent hours on youtube watching episodes of This Old House from 2007 where they restored and remodeled a house in Massachusetts that was built in 1897.  I have subscriptions to This Old House magazine and Better Homes and Gardens. I pick up the occasional copy of a variety of other home-related magazines, too.  I could watch HGTV all day long. It’s ridiculous.  Do I have any related carpentry skills? Hell, no. But I’m familiar with all the Do-it-Yourself instructional workshops available at the local Home Depot, and I have books. And the internet -oh, how I LOVE the internet!

I currently rent a 1200 square foot home that was built in 1986. It’s…a house. But it’s not MINE and it’s far too new to have any of the real character I enjoy in the old Victorians. I also have rocks in both the front and back yards, with limited desert landscaping. Meh. I think previous posts have covered exactly how I feel about the desert. I do have a limited amount of freedom with improvements I can make to the house if I want, but who wants to pump a bunch of money into someone else’s house?  

So I spend a lot of time looking at houses for sale on Zillow.com and other sites, hoping to someday make my dream a reality. And as I do, I think a lot about what home means to me. And I wonder what home means to others. I see a lot of investment homes. There are still a lot of houses that appear to have been bought just to renovate and flip to make a profit.  You can usually see their sales history on the websites. It’s crazy, you’ll see some houses that were owned by the same people for like 30 years, then flipped 3 times. Are they truly investor homes, or is there something seriously wrong with the place? Is it haunted? Or is there just a constant stream of people who have Goldilocks syndrome, still on the quest for the one that’s “Just Right”? (I’m looking at you, Mom)

I think of a home as an extension of yourself. You improve it and decorate it to your own tastes and lifestyle.  You decorate it for the holidays (or not) and invite all your friends and family to share time with you there. You raise your kids and your pets there. Maybe it’s even where you work.  I can’t imagine buying a place you didn’t love, and I certainly can’t imagine wanting to sell a place you love every couple years.  I look through these houses and it makes me sad that for some of these people, they surely feel as I do, but the economy and their financial situation is pushing them out of the place they love.  Pushing them out of themselves.

Maybe I’m just overly sentimental. For some folks, a house is just a place to store your stuff. But is it a home?