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CHAPTER SIX
Who are you?
44. Who wants this house?
Though all men may have been created equal, they surely haven't stayed that way. Architecturally speaking, if all men were exactly equal they would live in identical houses, and wouldn't that be dreadful.
Whether you like it or not, your house is the visible, physical, static expression of you who live in it. At worst, your slips are showing. At best, the house is the considered, idealized picture of yourself that you would like the world to see and to think of as you, a tangible expression that still leaves you free to shrug off this idealized picture as the mood compels.
Come to think of it, a house is not quite static either. It gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night. It prepares for departures. It tells that the car wouldn't start. It says that the folks are home at last. Its complexion worsens with illness in the family. It warns that the occupants have had a hard night and are sleeping late. Without meaning to do so, I read my neighbors' moods with a passing glance. The signs have been posted.
When you begin to build your house, the signs for a while are in large print. Section 44, entitled who wants this house, becomes Chapter One of Volume Two, a description of yourself, written and paid for by you and your wife. You are Chapter One because you are the guy who has to get up the money.
You are the top banana. You are the meeter and the greeter and the mortgage deadline beater. You are the one who draws a deep breath and says it's mine and that's the way it's gonna be. Then you wonder how you ever got up the nerve.
You got it because you felt secure in yourself, or in your job, or both. Either one will do, but if your employment is essentially transient, you will need more nerve, or more self-security, than if you know where you are going to be working five years from now.
As a housebuilder, whether transient or not, don't sell yourself short. I assume you are a man of imagination and derring-do with one hand on your checkbook and the other on the escape hatch. If not, let me point out that many men who are short on derring-do still build houses.
Even if you do not believe the world is your oyster, you can figure out what to do if someone hands you an oyster to be opened.
If you are married, and statistically you probably are, I will assume that you are in love with your wife, a proposition on which no statistics can be gathered. To avoid saying "your wife" over and over, I will call this non-statistical female Mary.
Mary's happiness is one, though not the only one, of your goals. You realize that the house you are about to build will be Mary's house, that she will do most of the work and thus be entitled to make most of the decisions therein, while you will do most of the work but make fewer of the decisions thereout. All of this is all right with you.
You can hammer a nail if you have to. The greater your skill in this and related departments, the greater will be your satisfaction in surrounding yourself with the works of your own hands. Mary will like that, but even if your hands have ten thumbs, if you have domestic imagination, Mary will like that even better.
You, the alleged homeowner, will sometimes wonder where you are going to hang your hat, if you wear a hat. You may wonder sometimes why you drive an extra half hour to get to the place where you don't know where to hang your hat if you had one. The place belongs to Mary, but at least you know where to put your shoes.
All the while you keep a wary eye on Mary's indecisions, which you now know are biologically built-in. Where does she want to live? Does she know? If and when she knows, how much is it going to cost? Does she know that you want something out of this too? What you want, she ought to know, is something better than what the others boys have.
You, the perpetual interloper, will never occupy your own house in quite the same way that Mary occupies it. Call it cave, nest, dive, rooftree, castle, or pad, you will depart therefrom grasping your club (spade, axe, plow, or fountain pen) to challenge tigers, dig for worms, level the forest, till the soil, or get signatures on the dotted line. You are not unhappy about this and would not have it otherwise.
Your right to come home nights has been established by your combination of intelligence and imagination, energy and skill. Once home, if you can allow yourself to be proud of anything, you know that you can decently afford to be proud of your castle.
45. Who runs this house?
If your husband, who for convenience I will call Mike, is the one who spins the crank, you are the hub around which the wheel turns.
You are the queen bee, the executive director, the boss bird of the nest, the chief watch officer in all weathers. If you like your nest, all goes well; if you don't like it, ill befalls. My house, says Mike, is yours.
I am not concerned here with the color of your hair, your shoe size, or your taste in either evening gowns or nightgowns. I am concerned with your taste in houses, because it's your house we are talking about.
What you want is not always easy to determine. Your very womanliness, of which you are proud, includes a certain amount of indirection. Possessed of a number of wants, you will sometimes begin with the least important and work back from there toward the beginning. If some word discourages you along the way, you may never get back to mentioning the thing you wanted most of all.
I think you will agree with my proposition that your house should be the visible expression of what you want yourself to be. In common with almost everyone else, you don't always know what you want yourself to be. When you do know, you find it difficult to express the wish in terms of boards, beams, and plumbing, yet the whole thing is being built for you.
You, lady, are the key figure in this whole business of building a lot of house for little money. Without your help, the project fails. Here are some things which you can do to help the cause along.
You are essentially conservative, but you must be willing to take a chance once in a while.
You are conformist by nature, but on occasion you must allow yourself to be tempted by the green grass on the other side of the fence.
You are primarily interested in the comfort and welfare of your family, but you may have to let them rough it for a while in the interest of greater comfort later on.
You will be happier with unfinished or imperfect things than with no things at all. You know that the completely finished and perfect thing has become unusable, while the things you use every day are not perfect and never can be.
You realize that your happiness is one, but only one, of your non-statistical husband's goals. His happiness is not your only goal either. This fact will help you to be uncompetitive with a concern which may, for the moment, override his undoubted love.
You will not demand perfection as proof of that love. You will not look at the pictures in the magazines and then say if I can't have one of those you don't love me any more. You know there is just about so much of Mike to go around, and therefore asking for marble under your feet may keep beaver off your back.
Above all, you will understand that the functions of your house are these: a place for your family to meet, work, play, wash, dress, eat, be comforted by each other, express love, and sleep. With these functions as your goal, you will be more pleased by the approval of your family than by the approval of your acquaintances. You will regard housekeeping as a necessary but minor aspect of homekeeping.
In designing a house which will help you carry out these functions, there is much to be hammered down about nails, varnish, floor lamps, laundry chutes, door knockers, faucets, panoramic wallpaper, thermostats, back fences, linen closets, old glass and new glass, trim, patina, foot scrapers, a mail box with your name on it, and the grapes growing purple in the kiss of the autumn sun.
While the hammering goes on, you can save or spend a great deal of money. Your decisions on what not to buy are the greatest factor in building your own nest at a bargain price. In not-buying, you will have your troubles. For example, being able to see the timbers that hold your house together may bother you at first, not because you see anything aesthetically wrong but because it's different. In a little while you'll be proud of the difference. You will exhibit pride-fully your double oven, your soap storage cupboard under the sink, your ballroom-size living room, your out-size mantlepiece and your built-in ironing board, all paid for by the wall-to-wall carpeting you decided you could get along without.
I want to tell another story. This one is about a woman who was wrestling with the question of where she wanted to live. It goes like this:
I'm standing in the woods, talking to a handsome lady who insists that she has always wanted to live in the country. She tells me, and her husband nods agreement, that the fresh air would be good for the children and she has been trying to get him to move to the outdoors for a long while now even though it would mean being that much farther from the office.
"I myself," she said, "have always enjoyed being in the country. Now how far did you say it was to the nearest drugstore?"
"Just three miles," I whispered. And that was the last I ever heard of that.
My own wife, Caroline, has a sense of proportion, a sense of what is important and what isn't. I'm spoiled. She is aware of what goes on. She is keenly responsive to people who don't have sense enough to come in out of the rain, but she herself knows when it is raining, and finds her own womanly ways to keep dry.
She even manages to be grateful when the roof doesn't leak. She has taught me that it is better to have a leaky roof than no roof at all, but then trying to describe my Caroline is harder than fixing the roof in the first place. Trying to describe a good woman is like describing the color and dimensions of the cloud the rain came from.
Two people in love can build a house. Two people are much more than twice as good as one.
46. Who builds this house?
When it comes to building a house, two people are more than twice as good as one, provided the two are in equilibrium. The funny thing about equilibrium is you never notice it. A teeter-totter going up and down all day long is assumed to be in good working order, but let it get lopsided and it calls attention to itself. Equal weight is needed on each end of the board.
Mr. Paragon might manage to be intelligent, aware, imaginative, compliant, energetic, persevering, skillful and versatile. If he could achieve all these virtues, he wouldn't have to get married at all. He could live alone. Indeed, he'd have to live alone since no one could possibly be good enough to live with him, and his superb genes would not contribute to the preservation of the species.
Cut the list of virtues down the middle and suddenly millions of couples can meet the specifications. Here is the list in diagram form:
Intelligence plus Awareness Imagination plus Compliance Energy plus Perseverance Skill plus Versatility
Divide these columns between you as you will. Our society assumes
that man is at the left, woman at the right. This may be biologically
as well as socially correct, but you can swap the words around
between you. If most of these skills are present in one or the
other, you have an excellent building team.
It's like trying to move a great big rock. One guy heaves on a crowbar. The other guy pushes the rock sideways. Guy one has used energy, the other guy has persevered.
When the rock didn't move, the intelligent guy says that he should have been heaving on the light end rather than the heavy end, and the aware guy says that in either case the crowbar was slipping in the mud.
The rock moves a little, but not much, and the skillful guy says all right, he'll cut the thing up into little pieces. While he attempts to do so, the versatile guy finds his gloves, sharpens his chisel, and brings him a cup of coffee.
Several chunks having been removed from the rock, the imaginative guy detects a resemblance to Benjamin Franklin, and the compliant guy says yes, I see him too, and he's handsome, but I'll like rocky Benjamin better with some petunias planted around his base.
If between the. two of you, you possess any four of these eight virtues, you're in good shape to start building a house. You may pick up the rest of them as you go along. Any more than four to start with is money in the bank.
If the word compliance appears in both virtue columns, you are indeed fortunate. I believe that in planning a house, compliance is the most important of all virtues. Compliance with a stubborn rock, with nature, with the weather, with your site, with your income. Most important of all, compliance with each other.
Compliance does not mean conformity, it means the rare ability to yield when the yielding is good. You can win an argument from a wise man. You can't win one from a fool. The fool is dead certain he is right; the wise man is not so sure.
In designing and building your house, I hope you will let yourselves lose an argument now and then. Lose an occasional argument to the architect and to the builder. Not all the time, just when they happen to be right. If you are wrong, on the evidence, say so quickly. This is the approved technique for coming out on top in the end.
Having practiced the technique for a while, try losing arguments to each other. This saves a lot of money, yet arrives at a house where all domestic functions are nicely in balance. Your workshop and kitchen, your office and sewing room, are equally well lit, ventilated, and equipped.
By the judicious loss of an argument here and there, you will arrive at a house which tells your story as you want it told, which looks the way you would like to look, a place which is better than what the other boys and girls have. The place will look as if you both lived there, and were pretty happy about it too.
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