Illustrations and photos by the author.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my house lately. It’s with me in my imagination a lot. Our roommates recently moved out, so we have twice as much space to manipulate. I have so many dreams about long red curtains, crushed velvet couches, things that I think are called “light fixtures,” but I can’t be sure, because Googling “light fixtures” does not ever produce what I’m picturing in my mind. I daydream a lot about stumbling on “amazing rescue pieces” (which I understand to be sets of chairs from the 1930s or whatever) from Facebook Marketplace for very cheap.

(As an aside — I can no longer navigate Facebook. I feel confused when I open it, like I’m looking at a map of a mall in a city that I have never been to and never plan to visit. It seems like a lot of the furniture on Marketplace links to websites like Wayfair or Crate & Barrel, which I am completely capable of visiting on my own, and which do not have any “amazing rescue pieces.” The whole idea of a “rescuing” a piece of furniture is that you’re saving it from a terrible fate, like the kind of demon trash compactor that’s in “Toy Story 3.”)

The upstairs living room has the best window in the house, absolutely. It’s a big, south-facing window, and it looks out into a lot of trees. Our former roommates turned it into a cozy sitting room with a huge television and lovely drapey plants. Since assuming ownership, we have so far done two things with it: (1) run around it with my one-year-old while making noises intended to elicit echoes; and (2) daydreamed about it.

The dog Doc is sitting on the part where a superfluous wall was removed; see below.

The floor upstairs is crooked. If you put a marble on it, the marble rolls. This is not high up on the list of things to fix.

That list is never-ending, as it always is with a house like this. Honestly, when we saw it, I didn’t think there was any way in hell we would buy this house. The pictures on Redfin were great, but pictures can lie, and these pictures’ pants were on fire. The roof leaked, there were mice in the walls, paint peeled in every room, the haphazard addition to the kitchen rested on cracked foundation, and every appliance was caked in decades of scum. Grime had etched itself in between each bathroom tile. The owner had a problem with collecting broken things from alleys and storing those things floor-to-ceiling in the basement and the garage. The floors were the kind of floors where the person showing the house would go, “Oooooh, these are the original oak floors!” Without looking anywhere to see if that was true, because it must be true, because the floors splintered and appeared to be 100 years old.

A picture from Redfin. This room is technically in our house, but never looked this beautiful.

I didn’t want to buy it. My husband Luke wanted to buy it. It reminded Luke of always-under-construction homes he lived in as a kid, where he’d sit with his brother eating oatmeal crisp in a nook while the kitchen was being renovated for months or years. He liked living in a place that was constantly transforming. Luke never wants to buy anything, and so his desire for this house was meaningful, and so we bought it.

Since we bought it, we’ve replaced the stove, the washer-dryer, the water heater, the furnace, the air conditioner, the fridge, the toilets, and the microwave. We’ve rebuilt the roof, some windows, insulation, drywall, and certain floors. Other floors were re-done. A former roommate painstakingly unpeeled wallpaper from an upstairs closet, and knocked out a superfluous wall. Every room has been painted. Some have been re-painted. A mural was added, and a projector. An entire room was created out of an open porch in the back so that our daughter would have a place to sleep her first year. (Someday, she’ll look in that room and go, “THAT room? I slept in THERE? But it’s a CLOSET!” But honestly, it was a great first room.) Leaks have been mended, rats have been… relocated. A raised bed in the back yard for vegetables. A chicken coop. A guest room in the basement, which flooded multiple times a year, and was recently moved upstairs. I am looking at the length of this paragraph with the knowledge that I could go on for at least 2,000 more words, but that you must be getting bored, and surely you’ve gotten the point.

Mom, in the just-added raised bed, four years ago.

There’s that room from the Redfin picture, after we re-did the floors, but it doesn’t look like this anymore.

AND EVEN STILL, the list is never-ending! Truly, it seems infinite. As Lorelei says in Season 4 Episode 20, “Hey, do you know that if the entire population of China walked by, the line would never end because of the rate of population increase? […] That’s my list. Every Chinese person in the world.”

But here is a thing Luke (my husband, not the Luke in “Gilmore Girls”) has said at least once a week, and usually more like daily, since the day we moved in: “I love our house.” And then I go, “I love our house, too.” And I’m not lying.

The fact that we should deal with the wobbly deck hasn’t prevented me from lounging in a chaise on it for actual hours, staring at tree tops or listening to music. Our bric-a-brac dining room sees a joyful, delicious family meal almost every single night. (Once a month or so, someone makes something that is too salty. I don’t know how this happens — I am a person who will eat salt right out of the shaker and find it pretty satisfying, but still, sometimes the Brussels sprouts feel smothered and parched, and those meals aren’t delicious. However, we always say that they are, so the cook’s feelings don’t get hurt. You only know for sure that the meal you made was bad when the leftovers get quietly thrown out two days later, without any fanfare.)

The room in the Redfin picture again, the way it really looks.

Maybe it’s a little easier with a house than with a life. With life, too, there will always be so many things to do, and there’s an impossible belief that someday all the things will get done, and then you can finally rest, and find pleasure in what you’ve made. You’ll finally be thin enough to enjoy your food, and successful enough to enjoy your job, and rich enough to enjoy your money. (Or to give some of it away.) As a person who has been enjoying her forever-unfinished house for four and a half years now, I can attest to this: it’s OK to enjoy it now. It’s worth it. Time is not like money: it doesn’t accrue if you keep saving it. Unfortunately, heartbreakingly even, it only runs out faster.

Since I met Luke, I’ve been totally bug-eyed at his ability to be content. He can have thirty-five things on his to-do list (and I can KNOW THAT THEY’RE THERE, because I PUT some of them there! Those spices aren’t going to decant themselves, Luke!), and there he’ll be, lounging on the couch reading a New Yorker on a Sunday afternoon. “HOW?!” I used to wonder. And I’d write it off as being obviously so much easier for men. And there is some truth to that.

But also, he grew up in one of these houses, where someone was constantly hammering; and nevertheless, there were family members happily gathering and his mom made oatmeal crisp. No wonder he wanted to buy this one. This kind of house doesn’t let you get everything done, and so you have to choose to rest while it’s all still a big mess. And once you do that, the secret’s out: the mess doesn’t get in the way of the joy. You can have the joy right now.