by Lisa Tognola
I rolled toward him and laid my hand on his chest, taking comfort in his warm body and familiar scent.
He heaved a deep sigh and placed his hand on mine.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling like I was stepping on his dreams.
He clasped my fingers, and we fell asleep.
CHAPTER 11: WE WANT IT ALL
Raymond Ave, Rye – August 2006
Iwas on a mission. We’d hired Luke just two weeks earlier and already I’d become a regular at the Construction and Home Repair aisle at Barnes & Noble. For hours I’d sit on the floor with piles of books stacked beside me, taking fastidious notes on all things renovation.
Luke had asked us to create what he called a “program” that included everything we wanted in a house. I’d always fantasized about owning my dream home, but much like the sex dream where the mystery lover is faceless, I’d never had a specific image in my mind.
“Do we create our dream list first and see if it fits the budget, or do we determine what we can afford and then decide what goes in it?” I asked Wim, almost giddy.
“Luke said to start with the program,” Wim said.
We knew how much a house would cost per square foot to remodel. We figured we could get a ballpark estimate on spending and then work backward, reducing space and fantasy features until we had a home that matched our budget. Wim would ensure that we didn’t stick ourselves with a house that we someday couldn’t get rid of because it was too costly for its own good.
But for now, on paper, we could have it all without worrying about money.
I’d always wanted a house with a front porch, where I envisioned us sitting in wicker chairs, sipping lemonade, and waving to the neighbors.
“What about a stone accent on the outside?” Wim said.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a fireplace in the bedroom?” I responded.
And so it went. We created a growing list offeatures—shingle vs. aluminum, skylights vs. no skylights, exposed rafters vs. smooth ceilings, until we’d covered every square inch of our new house.
The next time we met, we presented Luke with the document. As we sat with him in our small breakfast nook and listened to the sound of water running in the toilet a few feet away, I wondered how many times over the years we had debated whether to expand the kitchen and relocate the oddly placed downstairs bathroom. But I had the new house to obsess over now.
“Rules and instructions,” he read aloud. “We want the house to feel spacious yet cozy, a home that has the quality and character of an old house but has modern amenities.” He flipped the page. “Energy efficiency: Consider plumbing in one general area to reduce pipe distance and conserve energy. Interior Design: Make sure the doorways, hallways, and stairways are wide enough to move furniture through.”
The list went on and on.
In just two weeks, our program had grown from a rough outline to a ten-page, single-spaced, typewritten document. We began with general concepts, such as, “This is our forever home, so let’s do it right,” and then proceeded to include everything there was to know about home building, from verbiage on the best way to install hydronic radiant heat throughout the house to how to determine adequate turnaround radius in a driveway. It was a cross between a fairy tale wish list and a Home Remodeling for Dummies manual. We’d included so much detail and instruction, it was if we were planning to design the house ourselves.
“We’re only going to get one shot at this,” Wim had said. Still, as Luke sat at our kitchen table looking over our myriad needs, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going through his head.
Coming up with the criteria had been challenging since, as amateurs, we didn’t know much about home remodeling and didn’t yet speak the language. “We want one of those faucets that comes out of the wall over the stove to fill the pot,” we’d written, and, “Make sure those strips of wood around the windows are simple.” It was like being asked to interpret Dostoevsky without ever having learned to read. Eventually, I would learn vocabulary like “pot filler” and “casings,” and I’d even use them in complete sentences.
“You did your homework,” Luke said finally.
I felt proud, thinking about all the hours of research we’d done.
Above Wim’s head hung a series of four decorative plates, two on each side of a mirror designed to look like a window with open shutters. The first plate had a drawing of a red apple; the last plate was just seeds; and the plates in between showed a bitten apple and a core. Wim and I had often pondered whether the series started with the seeds or with the whole apple, much in the same way we had asked ourselves if we should start with what we wanted or what we could afford. We didn’t know at the time that it doesn’t matter which came first, the apple or the seeds—it’s all about whether you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
“This is just a starting point,” Luke said a few weeks later as he unraveled a set of plans across the kitchen table. It was early, and fall light streamed in through the small kitchen window; the day was filled with promise.
I told him about a book I’d come across recently—The Not So Big House by Susan Susanka. “She talks about designing rooms to feel interconnected and intimate,” I said. “Luxury that comes from detail rather than spaciousness. Quality over quantity.” Reading Susanka’s book had been like a revelation for both Wim and me. We had now taken her philosophy on as our personal paradigm—a way to frame exactly the type of aesthetic we were after, one we hadn’t been able to articulate before.
“I’ll add that to the program.” Luke smiled and made a note in his book. “So, here’s your foyer,” he said, pressing down the edges of his drawing so it lay flat. I looked down at the plans and froze. Wim looked crestfallen as well; I knew we were thinking the same thing. The drawing depicted a massive round entryway that looked more like a grand ballroom than a foyer—the exact opposite of what we now wanted. There was a double winding staircase leading up to the second floor. I didn’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t this.
“You wanted a house that’s unique, that doesn’t have the same features as every other house,” Luke began his pitch. “So, I thought of a circular foyer. It’s something you don’t see every day. The idea just kind of came to me!” He looked up and his voice dropped. “You don’t like it.”
“Well.” Wim looked from me to the drawing. “I don’t feel like it’s the look we’re going for.”
Luke’s face fell.
“It’s beautiful. Don’t get me wrong,” Wim said. “Maybe …”
If we were the Trapp Family Singers, I wanted to say. I pictured a scene from The Sound of Music, only it was our three children wearing lederhosen and standing in height order on the staircase, belting out “Edelweiss.”
“No need to apologize,” he said, running a perfectly trimmed thumbnail repeatedly across a small crease at the edge of the drawing, as if rubbing it would eliminate the damage. “It’s my job to get it right.”
“Look at this,” Wim said, moments after we’d shown Luke to the door. “That’s not a foyer. That’s the lobby at the Ritz-Carlton.”
I laughed, though I could have easily been crying.
“Seriously, Janie. We just gave this guy a ton of money. I’m pissed.” I could see the vein at his temple pulsing.
“Me too,” I said. My God, what had we done? A double staircase was the last thing we’d wanted. We’d already given Luke the equivalent of a year’s college tuition to draw up these plans, and he clearly didn’t get us at all. We’d been so diligent about picking the perfect person to create the perfect house. We’d asked for “cozy,” and we’d gotten nouveau riche. What had happened?
This wasn’t entirely Luke’s fault, I reminded Wim. We’d experienced our Not So Big House revelation after we’d given him our program.
I sighed. “What’s going to happen? We just hired the guy. We can’t fire him.”
“He’s going back to the drawing board,” Wim said. He was still shaking his head as
he walked away.
Wim leaned over his own drawings at the dining room table one Sunday morning in November. He was wearing old flannel pajama bottoms festooned with reindeers. His socks, the same wool pair he’d worn in Switzerland, were so riddled with holes I could see his baby toe poking through. Watching him from the doorway, I made a mental note to buy him new ones, though the likelihood was it probably wouldn’t get done. Everything had fallen by the wayside since we’d started this project.
Wim took a swig of coffee from a mug that our friends Ron and Nina had given him for his birthday the previous week, the words “40TH BIRTHDAY!” emblazoned in gold on the side. The other side said, “CELEBRATE!” though we barely had. At the time, nothing seemed more important than designing our house.
Snow was falling on the wood deck behind Wim, sticking to the rhododendrons, which had begun to sag from the extra weight, much in the same way I felt Wim and I had begun to sink under the weight of our house plans. In some ways, it felt good to me to be making decisions, feeling a sense of camaraderie, having a sense of purpose. But for months we’d been running in circles, unable to find a floor plan that we were happy with.
Not only that. We also hadn’t understood that there were things we couldn’t change even if we wanted to—stairway and load-bearing wall locations, low ceilings—either because it was too costly or because doing so compromised the structural integrity of the house.
To further complicate matters, as much as I wanted our house to be a reflection of our family, I found myself suddenly thinking about my childhood home and holding up a California ranch, with its open floor plan for easy entertaining, as my ideal. I conjured up warm memories of holiday dinners spent in the formal dining room, my grandma ladling out steaming bowls of matzo ball soup. After dinner, we kids would move into the adjacent living room to play pool while the adults remained at the table, schmoozing and sipping coffee.
I wanted to create a version of that with Wim in our new home. I craved a floor plan of intimately connected rooms, even though that configuration was totally inconsistent with the center-hall colonial we were working with. This, I suppose, is how we found ourselves in possession of a house plan with a living room and dining room that didn’t flow with the rest of the house, and a foyer the size of a supermarket.
Pinpointing what we wanted in a home had grown into a complicated exercise in examining how we lived compared to how we wanted to live; what we wanted to keep the same versus what we wanted to change. We asked ourselves, which rooms do we spend most of our time in, and why?
It seemed logical to me that our home office, where I’d recently started spending time writing, should be a short stroll from the kitchen and the coffee maker, and only a slightly longer stroll to the garage where I parked my minivan. “I want my work area to be in the center of things,” I told Wim. As I said it, I realized that, despite all the volunteering I’d done at my children’s schools and at our synagogue, it had been a long time since I’d strung the words “I” and “work” together in one sentence. My new daily ritual—rising at 5:00 a.m. and jumping out of bed to transpose my thoughts to page—felt important, productive, and satisfying, even if I wasn’t getting paid to do it. For the first time in years, I felt a kind of ecstatic joy in being so engaged with something that I didn’t even notice if I was hungry or tired.
But Wim said, “You can’t put rooms wherever you want.” I knew he was right, that we had to stay within the house’s footprint, but I didn’t want to accept it. We’d been so particular about finding the right house, and now here we were, working around someone else’s floor plans.
The one thing we did agree on was creating a guestroom for my parents to stay in when they visited from California. Our current home had no guestroom, so my parents always had to stay in hotels. It was expensive and inconvenient and made us feel like inadequate hosts. Wim and I wanted to accommodate them with a comfortable bedroom and an attached full bath on the first floor.
We were also thinking ahead and planning to “age in place,” the new term we’d learned for planning a design that takes into account a couple’s changing needs with age. Wide doorways, levers instead of doorknobs, light switches at a lower, wheelchair-accessible height.
“The day might come when we’re too old and creaky to climb the stairs,” I told Wim.
“With a first-floor master suite, the office suite can become our own built-in ambulatory service center,” Wim said, laughing. But it was no joke. Over the fourteen years we’d been married, a lot had changed; our personalities, our bodies, even our sex life had waxed and waned. The further we got into planning, the more we both realized that, as much as anything, this house was a step toward making our marriage more permanent—a commitment to aging together. That even if marriage hadn’t turned out to be the Cinderella story I’d grown up believing it to be, that didn’t mean I couldn’t try for the fairy-tale ending.
Even after reducing the size of our foyer by half, with an office and a guestroom both situated on the first floor, our “not so big” house was beginning to bulge.
“We’ve run out of floor area on the first floor,” Luke said one rainy winter afternoon.
“What?” I said, not believing what I was hearing. The rain was falling loud and hard on the roof, and I thought that I’d misheard him.
“If we want to keep everything else we designed in the program, you’ll have to settle for a one-car garage,” he said after providing a mind-numbing explanation of our town’s policy.
He might as well have told me I’d have to live in a yurt.
“A two-car garage is one of the top features on our list,” I said. I refrained from adding, “And I didn’t move from California to New York to spend my cold winters scraping snow off my windshield,” because I didn’t want Luke to silently brand the word “princess” before my name.
“Maybe we should consider putting the guest suite in the basement,” Wim said.
I pulled a face. “The dungeon?” I pictured the dark, dank space under the first floor. “Why not just leave my parents out to die in the snow like the Eskimos?”
“That would solve the problem,” Luke said. “I don’t mean if you left your parents out in the snow,” he added.
“There’s a lot of space in the basement,” Wim said.
I thought about the spacious, sunny, above-ground space my parents had provided for us when Wim and I had lived with them before we married. Finally, we had the opportunity to reciprocate. “The ceilings are low,” I said. “You know my mom has claustrophobia. She’d never survive down there.”
Luke cleared his throat and looked away. “Why don’t you two discuss it and we can meet again soon?”
As we rose from the table, I found myself comparing Luke and Wim. Luke was taller, Wim broader in the shoulders. I wondered, If Luke were making this decision with his wife, what would they decide?
The following week, Wim stood bent over his drawings, completely absorbed, oblivious to his exposed toe and to the snow cascading over the backyard. He looked weary as he furiously erased a doorway he’d just drawn. For the past week we’d spent endless hours online, studying floor plans to help us define the space, but still, I was surprised to find him there, pencil in hand, taking a crack at the plans himself. I wanted to reassure him that we’d eventually come up with a floor plan that worked, but even I was beginning to have doubts.
“Where’d you get the drafting paper?” I pointed to a roll of vellum, a thin and translucent type of paper used for tracing over architectural plans. Its smooth, delicate quality reminded me of a cross between the tissue paper I used for stuffing gift bags and the waxed paper my grandmother used to lovingly line the glass jar lids of her homemade garlicky dill pickles with.
“I borrowed it from Luke,” he said without looking up.
“Isn’t this his job?”
Words tumbled from Wim faster than the snow falling from the sky.
“We expected a six-month renovation. We’re alr
eady six months into this, and we don’t have any drawings to show for it. Drawings we’ve already paid for. Paid a lot for.” His face looked so tense his eyeballs were practically shaking in their sockets.
“We can’t blame Luke,” I said, trying to calm him. “We’re the ones who keep changing the plans and changing our minds about what we want.”
It was true: Wim and I would stay up late, letting our minds go wild with ideas about what our dream home would look like. Then, the next day, we would start over again with a completely different idea.
“Janie, we own two houses,” he yelled. “We are paying two mortgages and property taxes times two. Time is ticking. It’s do or die.”
One morning, as I was sitting at the dining room table studying house plans, Wim glanced over my shoulder and pointed to a circular mark in a corner of the family room. “What’s that?” he asked.
“A tree,” I said.
“Why is there a tree on the blueprints?”
“I asked Luke to draw it in. I wanted to make sure that our ficus would fit the space if we end up having to reduce the size of the office.”
I cherished our ficus. We’d hauled that tree all the way from California to New York; I couldn’t abandon it now.
Wim stared at me in disbelief. “You actually had him create another set of plans just to show a house plant?”
“Yeah, why?” I asked.
“Janie, we have to pay for those plans.”
My eyes widened. “We do?”
“Of course! He charges us every time he prints a new set!” he said.
“Well I didn’t know,” I said, feeling foolish.
Wim made no effort to mask his annoyance. But who could blame him? I was at the mercy of my ever-present, stress-related, obsessive-compulsive focus on minutiae.
Still, I longed for an I Love Lucy happy ending, with me expressing chagrin, Wim forgiving me, and the two of us embracing, encircled by a satin heart. Instead, our bickering was escalating to the point that I’d begun to wonder if by the end of this project, like Lucy and Ricky, we would need separate beds. Or worse, separate houses.