Ron & Jill Sitting in a Tree ...
Ron tells the story: I met Jill in an antiques consignment shop. I was looking for an end table/ magazine stand for my apartment. Jill was working the counter. Right off the bat, she was flirty and smart-alecky. I saw that she was reading "The Chronicle of Higher Education," something only college teachers read. So, right away, we had that in common: we are teachers. And we love old things.
Jill was teaching part-time and working in the consignment shop part-time. When I asked her out and offered to pick her up at her house, she said, "I live in a funky place," as if to warn me.
“So?” I said.
“So I’m fixing it up in exchange for a rent reduction.”
“Fixing it up?”
“It’s a wreck,” she said.
I was intrigued.
Her rental was a crumbling two-story row house in the ratty end of a working-class neighborhood. Though built of brick, every house on her block seemed to sag in defeat. Their windows were small, their interiors cramped. These were mill-workers’ row houses, made cheaply a hundred years ago and never meant to last.
I was surprised by all that Jill had done inside. Her house was cozy and arty. Had someone from 1930 visited her place, he would have found everything—from the deco light fixtures overhead to the hooked rugs underfoot, even the aged books on their crowded shelves--comfortably familiar. She had decorated the place with old oil paintings and ceramics from flea markets and thrift stores; she had bought used appliances from Traditions.
Her kitchen counter was a bench-top set across two office cabinets she had salvaged. She had found a fly-by-night electrician to fix some of the aged wiring and hang a chandelier in the dining room. Her Depression-era dining room table—which she had re-painted and re-glued—she had owned since her early twenties.
“It’s so cute!” I exclaimed. It was exactly as I would have wished had it been my place. Room by room, I was falling in love.
Six months later we were looking for an old house to share. Jill and I agreed that antiques and old stuff offers a kind of comfort. It takes us away from the mind-numbing cookie-cutter middle-class world of our parents.
Though we love the chaos of American life, we dislike shopping malls, fast foods, tract housing, top-forty radio, cable TV, Muzak, eight-cylinder engines, sealed windows, Styrofoam food containers, Formica countertops, and polyester.
But we knew then, as we know now, that our love of old stuff is a kind of fantasy. We don’t pretend that we should live in the Victorian age. It’s not about returning to a so-called simpler time. The Victorian age was in no way more humane or generous than ours and certainly no less complicated.
Jill and I love old stuff because it shows a respect for materials and workmanship that we seldom see today. A respect also for the consumer, who, it was assumed, would recognize quality. It even shows a certain respect for the people who made these things.
Our house honors this respect for the crafted, well-made object. We feel privileged that we got this oppportunity to
live and love a house like ours. Every day, when we walk into the house, we think, Oh, wow, this is very cool. It's like we won the lottery.
But keep in mind that, when we found our dream house, it was a wreck that nobody would buy. The house had sat on the market for a year. Jill and I knew nothing about fixing old houses. The only thing I knew about woodwork was the difference between a straight-cut and crosscut saw. I knew nothing else. That's why the condition of the house scared me. How would we manage? "We'll do it," Jill insisted. She could see things I couldn't see. And she had her own tool box, so I was somewhat reassured. Besides, Jill wanted the house and I wanted Jil. So I bought the house for $125K and financed another $60K for the rehab. Our realtor said we'd barely make the house livable with that budget. .
Our rehab loan gave us only six months to get the condemned house "up to code." We worked around the clock. I got no more than four hours of sleep every night for the next year. Jill and I were still new to each other. As you can guess, we had a very hard first year. We failed our first inspection and ran out of money and so much happened eventually that I had to write a book about it. See a sample chapter here: From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story
For a quick version of our story, check out the feature article that appeared in 2008 in in THIS OLD HOUSE magazine. It's been a life-changing, love-amazing journey. We've just celebrated our tenth year into it. We hope you'll share the rest with us.
xox Ron & Jill
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