My husband gave me a toilet for my 35th birthday.
I met Dan when I was in my mid-20s and he was an adult. He had an actual career as opposed to my wanting-to-get-out-of-waitressing-and-pretending-to-be-an-out-of-work-actor self. He could fix things that went wrong with his car. He owned his own house. In fact, he was remodeling his own house!
Dan’s best friend had bought a house right after he and Dan finished college, and the two of them stripped it down and rebuilt it into a beautiful home. They decided that Dan should buy one too, to be their next project. By the time I arrived on the scene, Dan had purchased a house 45 minutes away from where he (and now I) worked, had completely gutted it, and was working on it every evening and weekend.
I asked him out on a date (via some inappropriate pressure from the office manager) and he agreed. We went out on a few more dates after that, and then he invited me up to his house. (Not like that, Dan was a perfect gentleman.) Before the homemade manicotti (swoon), he gave me a tour of his dream house. He made it come alive with his excited descriptions of the primary bedroom with the walk-in closet and ensuite bathroom. I marveled over the spacious bedroom spaces framed by bare studs, and pictured the “library” on the main floor filled with books. I was so impressed by the project, and the love and skill it took to shoulder it.
We continued to date, and he was lovely but wishy-washy, and so one night I determined to get him drunk and ask him why. It turned out that he had a plan, and I wasn’t part of it. Yet.
As far as I could tell, Dan’s Plan™ went like this:
Finish the house.
Get a wife. (From, I assume, Walmart. Housewares, perhaps?)
I had thrown a wrench in the plan by showing up too early. I have terrible timing. I’m also stubborn and refused to disappear, so instead I tried to be a part of the process. Our first summer together, I’d head up to the house on the weekends. I would clean his kitchen or organize cupboards or cook meals for us while he hammered away upstairs. In the heat of the afternoon, Dan would come downstairs and we’d hop in his truck, driving a mile or so down the road to the Sunrise River to jump in and cool off. We drank beer on the couch in the “living room,” and watched movies on the old TV that sat on the floor in the middle of that space. We would eat dinners of smoked fish, cheese, and olives on a makeshift coffee table consisting of a piece of plywood on top of a popcorn tin. (One of us famously kicked that “coffee table” over while watching The Others. What a mess!) We took our coffee in the early morning on the sprawling front porch… being careful not to spill as the porch floor was at a precarious 45° angle to the house.
A year into our relationship, the house and all its quirks still seemed like an adventure. My friends and family would come and visit, and we would proudly give them the tour — I was living there by then, and added my own sense of ownership to the fairy tale. Dan and I wrote our initials in a heart on one of the studs in the main bathroom, imagining that we were infusing the idea of us in the very bones of Our House. We got engaged, and envisioned our finished house as we registered for gifts. Packages began to come, showing up in the front seat of the old plow truck in our front yard as if by magic.
There was a shadow, however, hovering in the background of our Love Story/Fairytale. Dan and I only had eyes for each other; we only wanted to spend time together. But Dan was supposed to be getting the house done, and it was harder and harder to find motivation. Not only that, but a lot of his help dried up. His best friend — whose house Dan had worked on every spare second of his life — was married with kids, and didn’t have the kind of spare time they had a decade earlier. Not to mention that he had a girl around all the time, so any of his friends who used to show up to pound nails and drink beer were less likely to appear. Dan’s Plan™ had never involved him remodeling a house on his own, and progress slowly ground to a halt.
Then we got pregnant.
It wasn’t an accident. We had been trying and we were thrilled. However, reality slammed into us and all of a sudden we were panicking about bringing a child into a skeleton house — a house where I once shot a mouse in the ceiling with a BB gun because the ceiling consisted of insulation and poly and nothing else. (Yes, I’m pretty badass.) In the 9 or so months that it took to bake our first child, the three upstairs bedrooms and the hallway were insulated, sheet-rocked, and taped. The bathrooms were plumbed, which was exciting but also moved the downstairs bathroom to its new location, which did not have a door. The heating and air was vented, which meant that the hot air didn’t just blow up into the “living room” through a big, square, hole in the floor. Downstairs, the only major thing that happened is that a stud had to be removed the wall of the library/our temporary bedroom. One morning I woke up and my belly barely allowed me to squeeze out… if a two by four wasn’t removed, I would have had to stay in there until I gave birth. Altogether, it was a ton of progress! It just… wasn’t enough.
We brought our beautiful baby girl home, and a few days later my parents paid us a visit. In the most loving way possible, they expressed their concern that our house was not an appropriate place for a newborn. My mom said she had literal nightmares about the giant hole in the kitchen floor that displayed a portion of the basement. They didn’t have a solution for us, but they offered to help in any way they could. When we got over our initial hurt and anger and told them thank you but no, they were gracious and kind and never said another word about it. Dan, however, made sure that he got that hole patched up ASAP so that my poor mom could sleep at night.
Despite this particular conversation, we were feeling hopeful: A group of friends and family came to a painting/hold the baby gathering and my gorgeous red primary bedroom was finally a reality. Eventually, we even moved upstairs and slept in it! That’s where my birthday toilet came in, by the way: my husband loved me so much that he didn’t want me to have to walk all the way downstairs to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. True love, folks. I was over the moon. There was also a terrible storm that went through and left the kids and me staring at our side yard through a hole in the kitchen wall. That might sound horrendous, but that storm got us a new roof and siding in a gorgeous, buttery yellow.
Those of you who have been reading for a while know what happened next. In short, life got really, really difficult. As you can probably imagine, it was all exacerbated by the fact that we lived in a home that was fully under construction with no end in sight. Almost ten years in to our marriage, most of our wedding presents were still in their boxes and stacked in the basement.
We left our beautiful house unfinished. The strength displayed by my husband in walking away from his dream project is hard to talk about. I have never admired a person more than when Dan looked at me and said that the house was not his dream, his family was his dream. We needed to do what was best for our family. So we did, with resolve and optimism for our future, but not without tears and heartbreak.
Every so often we drive a bit out of our way on the way to or from the Twin Cities to check on our house. The new owners have cared for her beautifully. She has a brand new porch, and a deck off of the back. She looks lived-in and homey. We are happy for her. There are pangs, but they aren’t terrible. We did our best for her while she was ours.
Facebook, December 28, 2013:
Goodbye, my yellow house. Thank you for being a lovely dream, for sheltering my babies, and for being the place where my husband and I started our lives together. Onward.
Thanks for reading.
Love, Susie