the perfect house

We're in the midst of renovating and adding onto my husband's childhood home.

I say "we." By that I mean "my husband and lots of other people who know what drywall and HVAC and trim work mean." My job primarily is to act like I understand how load-bearing walls and can lights and roof angles work. {Failing miserably and owning it.}

When the house is finished, our children will be the fourth generation to live there. My husband's grandparents raised their children there. My husband's parents raised their children there. And now we will too.

Picking light fixtures and flooring, countertops and doors has caused us to have a lot of conversations about this home: how we want it to function, how we want it to look, and what we want to occur both within its walls and outside of them.

We know this:

(1) It will be beautiful, but it will not be a museum. We want our children to be able to be at the dairy with their dad, to come home dirty and dusty and smelling faintly of cow, and to be welcome there. We want it to be cozy and inviting, but we do not want it to be sterile for the sake of a blown-out Instagram post. 

(2) It will be a secure, thriving, warm place for our children as they mature. Because we intend to educate them at home, we want our play/homeschool room dedicated to learning and discovery, a space where they will be able to decipher poetry and dig into the sciences, admire art and cheat their way through math. {Whoops. That was me as a kid. Forgot who I was talking about there for a minute.} We want the views from that room -- of trees and crops and a lake -- to bring the outdoors in and allow for imagination and even a little daydreaming.

 

(3) It will have a traditional with a touch of funky kitchen and an inviting dining room so that we can welcome others into our home and feed them and make them feel loved and cared for. We want them to sit at our 100-year-old kitchen table and look at the kitchen cabinets Chris's grandfather built for his wife by hand and have a good glass of wine and a steak my farmer put on the grill and a big salad and a loaf of bread that I hopefully didn't burn and tell stories and ask questions and debate and laugh and lift their glasses for a refill.

(4) It will have a library because reading is life. We have a space where kids and parents alike can lose the smart phones and immerse themselves in a good book for an hour or two, or pull out a map to find where the a certain battle occurred, or play a game of chess. We also have lot of books . . . from Hop on Pop to Kristin Lavransdatter, books about theology and history and agriculture and all the classics we can get our hands on. {Kristin Lavransdatter is, by the way, a great book that you should all read. It may take you all of 2020, but it will be worth it.}

(5) Our kids will share bedrooms, because sharing is caring. {Or just a good way to teach them how not to be selfish.} We want them to have conversations late into the night when they should be sleeping, to learn how to live side by side with another human being, to strengthen the relationship between siblings because they are all they will have in this world. And also because, channeling my mother, I want to be able to holler up the stairs at least once a week, "Kids, it's time to stop talking and go to sleep!"

(6) It will have a family room with a fireplace and piano so that we can gather together every night, as we already do, for devotions and giggles and singing and the general chaos that comes with small, noisy people, namely Dad roughing kids up and kids shouting for more and Mom telling everyone they're supposed to be calming down instead of getting riled up.

(7) It will have a guest space in the basement so that our family and friends who need a quiet respite from life can find it. We want them to sleep in, to enjoy the sunshine, to make a cup of coffee and look out over the fields, to have their own space, to feel replenished, to feed on some stillness in the midst of a world bent on noise and chaos.

(8) And it will have porches, because the First Article gift of being able to sit on a porch with a glass of lemonade, and a slight breeze, and the sounds of bugs chirping and birds singing and wind blowing through the corn is rare, and it is good.

Our list goes on, but we are doing our best to keep those main goals as our focus: to provide our children with a place to grow in faith and understanding, to care for those around us, and to enjoy time with one another in all the best ways that country living has to offer.

Perhaps, better put, our goal for our new-old home is this, as Tolkien wrote, "That house was a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness."

And if, when we're all finished, we -- and anyone around us -- thinks that, we'll be tinkled pink.