Trials of Being a Homeowner

The difficulty of knowing what truly exists versus what is a fabrication of our unwitting senses is a problem that confounds daily living. An example from personal experience is the first-time purchase of a home. In the early 2000s, the price of real estate started an upward trend that led to over valued property, and eventually gave rise to the real estate boom and bust of the decade. Some first-time home buyers had a certain naïveté in the practice of house hunting. The psychological effect of watching demand outpace supply is that it creates a feeling of wanting to take the first “good thing”, especially for first-time home buyers who may unknowingly wear rose-colored glasses. The housing boom created an illusion of ever increasing home equity. It was difficult to walk away from potential homes that seemed good on the surface, but in reality were either money pits or less than desirable.

For the uninitiated, making sense out of the chaos when things start to go wrong is an emotional process that lends itself to the gradual disposal of the rose-colored glasses. The upkeep and maintenance that homeownership requires of the inexperienced homeowner, particularly an older home, is comparable to taking on a new entry-level job with diminishing returns. There is a prevailing chaos amid the turmoil of a broken water pipe during a holiday weekend. The first trip to the hardware store presents a dizzying array of possible items for purchase and leads to a feeling of helplessness of trying to sort out all the choices for pipe repair. Solder, flux, butane torch, and pipe cutter are strange objects that belong in the plumber’s arsenal, rather than the hands of an inexperienced homeowner. Learning to solder and repair copper pipe on the Fo...

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...ss is hard to qualify in a world where the acquisition of material goods masquerades for success. A home is a material object that exists within a concrete reality. It exists with its own qualities of a house built of materials that do change and degrade over time. The costs of homeownership are harder to dismiss when one becomes disillusioned with the effects of a lack of attention to those costs.

As someone with a passion for writing, my final project will be an extended expository essay about the history of homebuilding from ancient to modern times. It will discuss the different types of dwellings throughout recorded human history from the perspective of how art and culture influences building design. This will fulfill my own curiosity to understand the different influences on homebuilding and design over the years and how people have dealt with these changes.