Home Sweet Home

We have several friends who are in various stages of progressing from renters to homeowners at present. My wife and I have been homeowners for a couple of years now, and I’ve come to learn a few things about owning a home (although our friends may not appreciate this insight). Much like grief, owning your own home is accompanied by predictable stages. We all go through them - they just look different with each individual homeowner. For the sake of simplicity, I’m just going to use the five Kubler-Ross stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) to describe the experience of each stage.

It’s not that far of a stretch.

Denial - In the context of owning a house, denial is actually the blissful beginning of your home-owning life. You are flushed with enthusiasm over the most adult purchase you’ve ever made. You are thrilled with the opportunity this home represents. You are convinced that your home will look exactly how you pictured it when the realtor took you on that first walk through. You are certain you are not paying too much and that the bank rate you got is completely reasonable. You are totally in denial.

This period can begin as early as the first glimpse you get of your new house, and almost certainly by the time you close on the house and pick up your keys for the first time. But the end of this phase is somewhat less predictable. Sometimes it’s as early as the home inspection (lucky you!) and you can bail on this particular house and the process begins again with the next. Sometimes its move in day. For a precious few, denial may not come to an end until many years have passed or perhaps at all. These people (a) have purchased new, quality construction (rare!), (b) have low expectations, or (c) have someone upstairs looking out for them in a big, big way. Inevitably, over a long enough time line, your purchase is going to disappoint you in some significant way, even if it is just the typical psychological response to any big purchase known as “buyer’s remorse” and nothing more material than that. When that finally happens, the happy, oblivious homeowner progresses to ….

Anger - You found out the sprinkler system was leaking by getting a $4,000 water bill. You hire a chimney sweep who tells you the chimney cap needs to be replaced before your siding is permanently rust-stained. The property taxes got raised. Again. You spend every weekend of the summer missing out on the lake, the pool, the camping, the whatever because your manicured lawn has to be mowed regularly or it will choke itself. You forgot to get HSA approval before having the fence put in, and it doesn’t meet spec. You found out your home, according to some obscure source, is worth about 75% of what you committed yourself to pay for it.

Owning a home is a lot more work than renting under most circumstances. Even assuming you live in the middle of nowhere and can let the exterior of your house go to pot, there is a certain amount of work that must be done in order to keep a dwelling livable. If you rent, that work consists in calling the landlord or super when something breaks. If they are slack, or just a slumlord, you may have to deal with uncomfortable circumstances for some period of time, but legally repairs and maintenance are their responsibility (unless you’ve contracted otherwise). If you own, you have to track down the appropriate contractor and pay them, or do the work yourself.

The chimney cap thing - that was our first big surprise expense with owning our own home. We’ve had more such surprises since, but we’ve been fairly fortunate about surprise bills (in terms of both size and quantity), all things considered. Even so, I have had to learn a lot about basic Do It Yourself (DIY) home repair - plumbing and electrical mostly - to keep our checking account from getting too thin on occasions. And some non-essential repairs have been indefinitely postponed. DIY blogs and books are your friend. Even with a semi-manageable maintenance workload (your home is your new hobby, by the way), the combination of unexpected expenses and inevitable buyer’s remorse will almost always drive a homeowner to …

Bargaining - Maybe if you throw enough money or time at it your home will treat you better. Maybe a different house would be easier to deal with, or big enough, or small enough, or have the floor plan you really wanted in the first place. Maybe you should downsize altogether and go back to being a renter somewhere.

The “grass is always greener” mentality is pretty normal in my observation. You try and come up with some way to “fix” whatever frustrations you are having with your home through a greater investment of resources or a significant and probably unnecessary change in circumstances. We went through a brief and unsuccessful bid to sell our house about two years after we bought it. We tried to achieve this by moving out of the house and into a small apartment. Our primary motivation in selling was to cut our expenses, but I’d be lying if I said this “bargaining” mentality wasn’t part of the equation. The thinking goes “if we can downsize our life, pay off some things, save up for others, things will be simpler - i.e., better.” Yeah. Except if you’ve already grown into a house, moving a house full of stuff into an efficiency condo is a little like getting a polar bear into a cat carrier - even if you are successful you are going to be very uncomfortable. And so is the polar bear. After four months (and about that many people viewing our house) we decided we were better off keeping the house than living indefinitely in cramped, miserable limbo. Even if our “bargaining” had been successful, we would have eventually ended up in another house, and the cycle would have started again. It’s only by plowing through that you move on to the next phase of the cycle....

Depression - The futility of it all has finally gotten to you. The forty year mortgage that seemed like such a great idea is stretching out into a subjective eternity. That landscaping you spent the first three years nurturing has died in the oven of a South Carolina summer. The garage door opener shorted out again. The HSA has decided to fine you because you left the garbage can in front of the house too long. It’s just too much.

There comes a point where you throw up your hands in frustration or hang your head in disgust. A house is the most expensive purchase most people will ever make – it’s kind of no wonder it comes with more frustrations than any other purchase as well. But, like any other form of depression, there is a good prescription to treat the symptoms of home-owner ennui, until you can move on to the final stage of this process. The prescription is simple, but unique to each home-owner: Pick an aspect of your house that you like, and actively enjoy it. Ignore the grass in the front yard and cook something in the kitchen that had everything you wanted from the first time you saw it. Forget about the peeling wallpaper in the guest room and spend an hour in the garden tub that made you want to buy the house in the first place. For me, this prescription usually involves grabbing a beer and a pipe (yes, I do know exactly how pretentious it is for someone younger than fifty to smoke a pipe. I don’t care.) and sitting on my back deck, enjoying the somewhat overgrown but uniquely mine backyard. It’s good therapy.
Eventually, you can lay aside your frustrations and move on to …

Acceptance – At some point, you realize that your house is never going to be perfect, or stay in good repair indefinitely, or stop needing regular infusions of time and energy. You will realize that, despite what developers wanted us to believe at the turn of the most recent century, your house is not really an “investment” in the financial sense. In all likelihood, your house is not going to be in the local parade of homes, or grace the cover of Good Housekeeping or Home and Garden. Because, if you are doing it right, your house is not just a building, but a home – a place where people live real lives, break things, get dirty, and have community, and that doesn’t typically happen in perfect little idealized spaces we build for ourselves in our mind.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you still won’t occasionally get angry or frustrated with the problems of owning a home, but it probably means those little annoyances don’t define the way you view your house. You are far more likely to see the good than the bad. You can stop noticing all the flawed, scrawny trees, and pay attention to the pretty nice forest you’ve got going on. You can, more often than not, simply enjoy being home.

I’m not pro-owner or anti-renter. Whatever is right for you is right for you, and there’s an arsenal of considerations either way you go. Just know that the buckets of frustration that come along with owning a house are normal, at least in my estimation. And I think usually, the good outweighs the bad. And, whether you’ve owned for years or are just considering taking the plunge, that is my unsolicited two cents about it.