2 posts tagged “house”

At this point in my life, I want a house of my own more than anything else. It is a deep-seated desire that has steadily grown out of proportion. Now I can hardly contain it. I think about houses with the regularity and intensity that a teenage boy thinks about girls. Sometimes I can spend a whole day cruising down the streets looking at homes and remaking them in my mind. It is quite exhausting really.

Last week I neglected my studies considerably after phoning an estate agent just to get an idea of what is for sale and at what price. I ended up looking at one home after the next, until arriving at the one that really struck a chord. It is a quaint looking double story house on a street corner that is actually wonderfully large and spacious inside. It was built in the late 19th century, which explains the generosity of the space allocated to each room, the broad yellow wood floors, the high ceilings, thick walls and heavy wooden fittings. The garden is right beside the house, measuring its width and about one and a half times it’s length. It is flanked on one side by the house and by high walls the rest of the way around. Instead of making the garden feel boxed in though, it kind of wrapped it up and made it feel private and cosy. Despite the size of the house and garden they came together as a compact unit. No matter where I was standing I had a sense of where I was in relation to every other part of the property and this felt incredibly comforting for some reason.

Nancy said she felt the same heartening feeling the moment she walked through the front door. It was so easy to imagine us having a family there. For days afterwards we spoke about the house incessantly and thought of every which way to buy it. But there just wasn’t any, which left us sad and exasperated... Once I am working again next year I will probably be in a position to apply for a home loan and look for a place in earnest, but until then the idea of owning a home just is a dream.

Our project for the Design course method last week coincidentally had to do with housing too. We had to design a portable shelter for a homeless person that had the potential to be produced. My concept was a meter-square box on wheels that is small and light enough to push around. Inside the box are two slightly smaller boxes that can be pulled out like a concertina to create a 2.7-meter long shelter in which to lie down and sleep in. At the back of the meter-square box, a smaller half-meter wide box is attached magnetically and used to store things in. It can also be detached and used separately as a cart.

While I was working on the project I thought about what it must be like to be homeless. Do they even have the desire to own a home? Or is a roof over their head and a warm bed the most they could wish for? I am so caught up in my own world that I never really spare them a thought. They exist on the very periphery of my world, as I do in the world of the rich. As the homeless probably wish they could live in a house, regardless who owns it, I wish I had a house, regardless of how fancy it was. 

In keeping with the house theme, I am reading The Architecture of Happiness. Like all Alain de Botton’s books, it is well crafted, thought provoking and beautiful to read.

The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from the hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when it’s bricks held the warmth of newly baked bread…Although this house may lack solutions to many of its occupants ills, its rooms nevertheless give evidence of a happiness to which architecture has made its distinctive contribution. (p10 and 11)

“We value certain buildings for their ability to rebalance our misshapen natures and encourage emotions which our predominant commitments force us to sacrifice. Feelings of competitiveness, envy and aggression hardly need elaboration, but feelings of humility amid an immense and sublime universe, of a desire for calm at the onset of evening or of an aspiration for gravity and kindness – these form no correspondingly reliable part of our inner landscape, a rueful absence which may explain our wish to bind such emotions to the fabric of our homes.” (p.121)
 

It was my birthday today. I am now 31 years old. It feels pretty much like being 30 to be honest, which felt identical to being 29, which in turn was not all that different to being 28. Come to think of it I haven’t aged much since I got married. That was the real turning point towards adulthood for me.

Last night I went out with a couple of fellows in my class for drinks at a pub named the Rat and Parrot. We sat around talking about this and that when the conversation turned to women. One of the guys was explaining how he likes a certain girl in our class very much but had to put her off limits because she has a boyfriend. He then delved into this particular dilemma, branching off only to explain how loving someone means putting your heart on the line and how that is what scares him about getting involved in a relationship.

I couldn’t really care less to be honest.

I have been through all this myself countless times. Lord knows I have covered the length and breadth of the topic in a similar environment when I was sick for love myself. But I have long graduated from this kind of predicament. As an adult the whole issue is a lot simpler to me now. If you like a girl, let her know and take it from there. Girls want to be swept off their feet, and if you are a decent guy and treat her right and make her happy, she’ll probably end up being your girl.

In a break during the guy’s monologue I tried to put it to him like that, but to no avail. I came to realise that although we are about the same age, he is still a child and that he will have to grow and solve the mystery of women and relationships for himself. I felt awfully lonely in his company though. I would much rather have been talking to someone like my brother or my cousin about the kind of adjustments one has to make in life when you are intricately involved with someone. That is where I am at now. That is what makes me realise I am an adult.

For my birthday today I went cycling around Grahamstown taking photos of some of the homes in the area. They are average homes, modest even, but very homely. Many of the homes are date back to the nineteenth century when Grahamstown was stronghold town for the British settlers. In some areas all the houses are in the region of 100 years old. The gardens around them are equally established with such tall shady trees that it was actually difficult to photograph the houses nesting in the background.

I love Grahamstown. It is a wonderfully clean, tidy and peaceful little town. My wife, Nancy asked me today how I am enjoying it down here and I told that it has surpassed all my expectations - that it really agrees with me. If I were to be offered a post at one of the beautiful schools in the area, I would feel hard pressed to decline it.

Anyway, after looking at so many houses today I really wish I had one of my own. It needn’t be anything large or fancy, just a little place in a good spot that I can lovingly restore and turn into a home. My desire to own a home is nothing new to me. It has been growing steadily over the past few years. In Taipei, Nancy and I came very close buying property. Once we actually signed the papers and put down a deposit on a place before changing our minds about it at the very last second. I guess wanting a home is also a part of being an adult - In the standard order of things it is what comes next after getting married. Besides, at 31 I think it is high time that I had some property behind my name.