Wednesday marked a personal milestone that I had to research before gracing it with a calendar entry: Twenty years earlier, my wife and I moved into the house that we still occupy today.
Signing the papers for that 1920 bungalow represented a step into the real-estate unknown in 2004. A few months earlier, realizing that the condo I’d bought four years earlier had appreciated to almost double that purchase price, it had seemed sensible at least to see what was on the market nearby–and after visiting 10 properties, one with a big old front porch and what we thought was well-renovated kitchen seemed like it would fit into our budget and provide just enough room for a family.
So we considered the reality of housing not getting any cheaper around here and chose to take the step that turned out to be more of a leap.
We didn’t want to move anytime soon afterwards–I hate moving so much–two of us became three of us, the seasons rolled on by, and at a point I didn’t even think to look up in 2019, our tenure in this house surpassed the 15 years or so that I had spent in my childhood home.
An equally unknown date in 2020 marked our home’s presumptive 100th birthday (“presumptive” meaning that the property-tax records that aren’t specific on the construction date could have the year wrong too). But the pandemic that gave us so much around-the-house time meant we couldn’t properly celebate our abode achieving century-home status anyway.
Another four years have elapsed, during which I have begun to enjoy seeing how much the balance on the mortgage drops with each payment, and here we are.
We’ve shaped the house in our own ways, repainting it on the inside and out while making minor and major repairs and improvements that in 2008 turned a shoebox of a room upstairs into a legitimate home office and this winter finally gave us a new kitchen. And it’s shaped us, turning me in particular into not just a cook but a baker and occasional homebrewer and providing me with a much bigger canvas for my gardening than the condo’s balcony (alas, I still suck at growing tomatoes).
The neighborhood, meanwhile, has advanced immensely as buildings have continued to sprout around the two closest Metro stops while Arlington continues to carve out more room along our streets for pedestrians and cyclists. It’s not always clear that individual blocks near us have improved as much when homes looking like ours keep getting torn down and replaced by McMansions–but I know one address where that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
