Part I |
| This is the picture used on the listing of the house. |
So a year ago I did a thing and bought a house.
You may have heard me talk about it once or twice.
The first time I came to look at what would become my home, it was the 36th I had looked at in my nearly three month sprint to find a home. It was also the fifth house I made an offer on. The process was long and exhausting and mostly disappointing. Some houses I would get really excited about, only to show up and see it was a dump, or that the fish-eye lens on the realtor's camera had drastically over-proportioned the room sizes. Biggest heartbreak of course being a house that was perfect but with a dozen families already looking at it when I got there.
So Kieran (my realtor) and I pulled up to what neither of us was thinking would be my house. When we got here, it had dumped snow a few days earlier so everything was covered in that weird combination of mounds of white, puddles of water, and troughs of mushy crud. Kieran asked if he could just let me in, he had a phone call coming in that he needed to take and I knew the drill very well at that point. So I shrugged "sure," because I was moping after leaving the previous house that was almost perfect but with too low of ceilings upstairs for my giant ass self. Above the screen door into the front porch was a bundle of dried lavender, which I thought was quirky, and there were some crystals hung by wire around the doors as well. I thought it felt kinda witchy.
Kieran unlocked, looked inside real quick, and then stepped out so I could poke around.
What hit me first was the smell. It wasn't a bad one by any means, but it immediately triggered a memory of as a child going to the giant Victorian house my Great Aunt Betty owned in Indiana. The stairwell reminded me of that house, the layout into the living room... and don't get me wrong, it was by no means even remotely close to a grand Victorian house, of course, but the memories just came flooding through me. Curious, I started walking through the living room and dining, and by the time I reached the kitchen I just knew this was going to be my home. This was it. The colors were horrific, the decor was even worse. The pantry was filled with jars of seeds (adding to the witch vibe I was getting (nothing wrong with a witch vibe, sign me the fuck up)), the house creaked and groaned, and everything was just a little off-kilter. I went out into the backyard and got a whiff of decaying leaves and pine trees, and that immediately brought me back to Northern California and visiting my Grandma Natalie. So if I wasn't already convinced this was the house, that sealed the deal.
I went back inside and Kieran was coming in having finished his phone call, and he asked if I was ready to leave. I chuckled and said "I think this is the house," and he gave a sorta "the fuck you talking about?" look but went along with it.
A month and a week or so later, I was moving in.
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| The house as it looked the day before I took ownership. |
It was terrifying to stand there on May 30th, the day before signing what felt like my life away. I was waiting for Kieran to show up so I could do my final walk-through, and having not really seen the house for a month apart from one or two drive-bys, I was shocked at the amount of plant growth. He got there a bit later and I think maybe read what was on my face (or he'd just seen it before), and told me right away that we could still back out.
It was an option.
I nodded and we walked through, checking out everything that was done per my request in order to buy. And it was fine. Was I fine that it was fine? No, but sometimes you need the landslide to keep on thundering down the mountain if you're ever going to move. And so I got ready to move.
The next day I signed all of the paperwork, with Kieran and my awesome lender Carolyn at my side, and then the keys were mine. Below is the video I took and sent to my family and closest friends as I unlocked the door for the first time.
When I turned the camera off, I stood in the middle of the living room looking around. Noticing that the shades were broken. That the wall was cracked. That the wood lattice over the air return vent was shattered. That not a single power outlet out of four in the living room alone matched the other. I sat down in the middle of the room and I cried.
I wasn't ready for this, not to own a house. I hadn't been single for a year yet and in that time I had taken a promotion, bought a new car, decided not to move back to the comfort of Wisconsin and then went and bought a house.
...the fuck was I thinking?
After a few minutes of tears, I pulled myself together and rallied. I got the few bags of things from the car and hauled them inside, brushing cobwebs off my face as I walked through them. I plopped myself down in the living room again and figured it was time for the first selfie in the new house. It was more than just a selfie... it was a moment in time. Capturing me at maybe my strongest, maybe my weakest, but me all the same.
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| He's an "I can do ANYTHING!" kind of gay, and he knows how to rock that hair. |
The rest of this blog is divided up over several, because as you can assume, I've got lots 'o pictures to post and a few videos to boot. The next several posts should be read in order, but the actual content is in no particular order seeing as the work for each section was completed over the course of the year (the living room, for example, was the first room to be painted but wasn't completed for 10 months).
That being said, I hope you enjoy the first and only FULL reveal of what I have affectionately dubbed the Minneapolis branch of Parker Manor. The biggest thing to note is that in this house of mis-matched EVERYTHING, my overall goal was to unify. The wood stains. One trim color. One accent/door color. I wanted the downstairs to be pulled upstairs, and the upstairs to be pulled outdoors. Let's take a trip and you can see what I've been killing myself to finish.
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