In every home search there comes a moment like this one: You will be standing in the formal living room of a sparkling white house, surrounded by white furniture and white painted walls, with white plush carpet underfoot, and you will say to yourself, “I think there is mud on my Tevas.”
And you will be right.
And as you stare up at the vaulted ceiling and scan the second-floor hall that overlooks the formal living room, you will know with certainty that if you buy this house, your children will drop a variety of objects from the railing down to the living room below “just to see which one will land first.” And to see which one will land on their brother. And while you are calculating the number of fights that will break out as a result of said dropped objects, the seller will swoop down the long white-carpeted staircase in a flowing white mumu that inexplicably conjures up Lawrence of Arabia. And then she will sweep rather haltingly back up the stairs, because she is stopping to wipe with a wet cloth where your family tracked dirt on the white carpet. Oddly, you can’t see the dirt she’s wiping and this makes you suspicious. (Goodbye Lawrence of Arabia, hello Miss Havisham.)
In the course of your home search you will, over a period of three years, seek the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood with the perfect combination of space, yard, schools, street, until fatigue sets in to a degree that you consider buying a Pod storage unit and moving into it instead. Which would at least take all the decisions off the table. You will reject the beautiful home with the thin stream of water trickling down the basement wall, even though it reminds you of a waterfall along Hawaii’s Hana Highway. You will reject the house that has floor ducts (see earlier note, “children dropping things on purpose”), and the one that smells like socks. But you do, finally, buy a house, after your Realtor cries on the telephone again, and it is one where the floor is covered with white shag carpet. But by this time, you are not concerned about the mud on your Tevas. You need a house, and your Realtor needs her life back. And the carpet is easily 10 years old anyway.
So, we did not buy the all-white house, but I often think about it and imagine what condition that carpet would be in by now, had we done so. I know you can change carpet; the point is the karma was all wrong. (I swear I’ve never said “karma” before, and I promise I never will again.) It was just the wrong house.
And there were three other contracts on it.
(Oh, did you think I meant that White House? From what I understand, that house is overpriced and in serious need of updating.)
After the sale, your Realtor will go someplace warm and you will never hear from her again. Not even a calendar.
Or maybe that was just my home search.
The days of three simultaneous contracts may seem long past at the moment, but I think of that first white house now because it was a blank canvas. This was, of course, the seller’s goal—to persuade us to imagine our stuff filling the white space. And in fact, I did spend a few minutes mentally situating the rubber band ball, the fleet of paper airplanes, and the photograph of Nixon meeting Elvis. I imagined them floating on fluffy white clouds, but I couldn’t imagine them landing anywhere.
This blog has one thing in common with that white house: It is a blank canvas. I’m going to splash some color on the walls and hope it comes out looking as if I planned it that way. Which, come to think of it, is not all that different from my decorating scheme in the house we did end up buying more than 10 years ago, and where we still live, track dirt, and store a large selection of rubber bands, to this very day.
