Hold the Vision — The Dog House

This time last year, after Mark and I had gotten into our umpteenth argument about a house that only existed as a digital blueprint, I confided in my professor, mentor, and friend, Laura Farmer. It did not seem worth enduring internal anguish and relationship stress just to build a house when there were more than enough of them in the world already. From Mark's perspective, stress about the house arrived just when his professional stress was relenting for the first time in almost a decade; why jump straight from residency into the black hole of construction that promised to devour our money, time, and marriage?

Laura had witnessed our arrival at this point, from getting married to buying land to designing our forever home to, inevitably, deciding on the Dog House as a comfortable starter home before our family needed more than 800 square feet. She heard that I was weary but also knew me well enough to know that I could overcome the challenges ahead. “What you need to do,” Laura counseled, “is hold the vision.”

The vision of a home built into the hillside of a wooded lot at the end of a cul-de-sac in Nashville is one that Mark and I have shared from the beginning, but Mark would also tell you that I have been the primary fuel behind the project. Mark is a blessedly contented person. If I hadn't been in the picture, he would have comfortably lived in any number of places in Nashville—a house, a condo, an apartment. Maybe a cave if it had reliable wifi.

His contentedness is a quality I admire and rarely get to experience myself. What I have instead is usually a vision, a glimpse of some future thing that, with a little (or a lot of) work, I can obtain.

Laura's advice was a reminder to keep my fuel tank from running empty. She knew that I wanted to build this house, and I would be the one propelling us to move-in day. So, after my conversation with Laura, I added a reminder to my phone that popped up every Wednesday at 4 PM: “Hold the vision.”

I have been thinking about the end of this blog since I started writing it. I knew that I didn't want it to go on forever; I don't have social media precisely because I hate the nagging obligation to update a shadow audience about my tiny world. But when should the blog end? At what point is the Dog House, and its blog, done?

If you are a homeowner and reading this, you're laughing right now. A home that you own is never done. Mark and I have reached a few milestones these past couple of weeks—we passed our final inspection, got our U&O letter, moved in, and finalized our mortgage—but still there are walls to repaint, shelves to hang, and about 300 pounds of med school textbooks to nest somewhere. This past week I motivated myself to complete some of these tasks by enumerating my to-do list and using a random number generator to assign myself a job, making a silent pact with myself that I couldn't do anything else with my day until the particular assignment was completed. It's working, but I also add new tasks to the list every day, so although the “Completed” section of my enumerated iPhone note is growing, the “To-Do” section stays the same size. So is the life of a homeowner—especially one with the “vision” of a shower drain that actually drains. (I beg you: Do not tile your own shower floor! It is not for amateurs!)

There remain a few stories from this journey that I haven't written down. At some point I want to explore my conflicting feelings about “owning” land, especially in light of an interaction we had with a boy in our neighborhood who we found out liked to hike with his dog in our woods. In short, after consulting with a number of people, we decided to put up “No Trespassing” signs and haven't seen the boy since, and my heart hurts when I think about him.

I also want to document the very, very, very, very challenging process of building our spiral staircase, which required over a hundred hours of research and math and expertise and ingenuity that came from a cadre of incredibly talented people who gave their time to the project. Although I have sat down at my computer several times to write the story of the staircase, it has always exhausted me before I made any progress. It's going to require more energy and creativity than I have right now. I suppose I gave it all to the staircase itself. In any case, the story is out there, and eventually I will write it.

But I don't want to wait until that day to finish the blog. My to-do list may never end—this house may never be done done—but I'd like for this blog to be. It has served its purpose. I set out to keep friends and family informed of our progress and to process my thoughts and feelings about construction and homeownership. I believe I have done that, or at least done a “pretty good” job, which has often been my goalpost anyway. (As it turns out, I wrote not once but twice about it!) Does that mean the blog is complete?

This evening, after a long rain that brought a cool fog into the woods, Mark and I hooked my hammock to a couple of trees. We laid there together, along with the dog, who eventually jumped up into the hammock with us after a hooting owl in the distance freaked him out. From our vantage point we saw the house, but also the dry-stacked rock wall we have been building, the valley behind our house that has sprouted with lime-green grass, the little hump of concrete that started as residue from the foundation but became a sort of boulder-marker for the entrance to our woods. True to form, I also mentioned to Mark my vision of a deck around the front of the house that would “activate” an area that isn't getting much use right now. True to form, Mark said he liked the way things were right now.

Lying there with Mark, I realized that I no longer needed to hold onto the vision of our house. There it is, and it is great. Not just pretty good. Great.

Tuck got squeamish and jumped out of the hammock. It had gotten dark, too, so we decided to retreat inside before it started raining again. Mark went ahead of me to take the dog inside, so I unclipped the hammock and stowed it away with our garden supplies. When I opened the front door, I felt the warmth of the fireplace and saw Mark stowing the leftovers from dinner, and I was glad to be home.