A Case for the Imperfect Home 🏡

You already know this, but between 2020 and today, everyone on the Internet became a do-it-yourselfer. We painted our homes the oh-my-gosh-no-one-has-ever-done-this-before white with black trim. (Or just all black.) We re-plumbed entire bathrooms or changed out faucet fixtures for “a whole new look.” We added peel-and-stick plastic to our boring apartment linoleum. We were restless, we were stuck inside, and a global pandemic raged just outside our doors.

Our homes made us rage, too, in a different way. Updating them was catharsis, a way of grasping at control in an unstable world. And documenting that change on your social media platform of choice became a “middle-class obsession” (in the wise words of the one and only Anne Helen Petersen). We were home MAKING.

Against this backdrop, in the fall of 2021, I was house shopping, and I was not alone: existing home sales were at a 15-year high. Interest rates were still low, but they were about to get freaky high. In my case, I had also recently moved to a city where real estate was priced, on average, about 30% lower than where I’d been, so I was having some reverse sticker shock moments, imagining the possibilities.

We all, in our rabid, FOMO-prone, deeply human way, wanted in on the action. Whether we were buying, casually looking, or just carrying around the everyday class-laden, guilt-ridden burden of worrying that if we didn’t buy NOW we’d be blocked out of the market forever, we were dreaming VERY big.

We were cosplaying as HGTV renovators. We were scrolling Zillow like our lives depended on it. We were either setting our search filters to “must include that cozy breakfast nook I’ve dreamed about,” or we were walking into kitchens missing whole appliances and declaring, “this would be a fun and easy project!” We had cartoon stars in our eyes.

And why not? We didn’t know any better! Our wistful longing for homes that are as tidy/big/quaint as we dream of is part and parcel of our performances on the Internet, our curated consumerism, our perpetual reaching toward the highest shelf of perfectionism that will always be out of grasp.

My home search toxic trait was that I wanted a woodstove. And I was willing to sacrifice things I could purportedly “fix” (the shingles flying off the roof with every winter storm, missing pieces of siding, the lack of a dishwasher) to have it.

It seems for us millennials that this, our DIY Decade, the 2020s, emerged out of the perennial and deep-seated roots of home improvement culture/blogs/YouTube, the HGTV shows we all watched late at night while we were babysitting because maybe we didn’t grow up with television and we could hardly believe there was TELEVISION about HOMES. (Oh, just me? Ok.) As teenagers, we all wanted the same clothes, and now we all want the same farmhouse-chic, but also modern, and wholly original, but on-trend homes.

This home decor culture of our early days taught us that if you don’t Love It, you have to List It. Maybe you, dear House Hunter, compromised on the interior in order to have a great location, but don’t worry, you can TAKE STEPS RIGHT NOW to MAKE IT PERFECT. But if your budget doesn’t allow for right now, then you’re stuck with scrolling to witness someone else’s perfection (which we’re conditioned to read as contentment, satisfaction, joy).

So 2020 became our inflection point, the year when, if we were lucky enough to be safe and healthy and working from home, we had plenty of time to reach our own personal zenith of the home improvement constellation. According to TikTok, for example, I’d have no problem renovating my kitchen on my own. All I would have to do is:

• Watch seven hours of hyperlapse content of other people renovating their kitchens and using the voiceover tool to share various tips and tricks they learned that I should NEVER forget.
• Scroll long enough that one of those super meticulous PaintTok videos comes up (you know the ones, featuring the pro painters using nothing but high quality brushes and their RAW GOD-GIVEN TALENT to cut in edges around outlets—no tape, no problem).
• Take notes, since as you know I typically scroll TikTok very mindfully with a pen and paper nearby—never slumped on my couch, phone to face, sympathetic nervous system all hyped UP!
• Save all these videos to my profile (even though I’ll never watch them again), as reminders of the skills I don’t have and will need to build; the fixtures I don’t have and would need to buy; and the fact that, ultimately, until I, too, add shiplap to my powder room, I will always be searching for happiness.
  

And in the years since, we’ve just dug ourselves in deeper. Anne Helen, per usual, sums it up quite well, so I’ll just leave this here: “Just as the beauty and diet industry has been built on the insecurities incurred by those primary gazes, the remodeling industry thrives on the unspoken but totally spoken agreement that we should all feel bad about our homes. Hence: you stop feeling quite so bad, so less-than, so always-unsatisfied about your body….and start feeling really bad about your cabinets.”

My own home-buying trajectory mirrored that of real-life friends and Internet acquaintances, so I watched, listened, and weighed in as they belabored paint colors and bathroom fixtures, removed the plaster surrounding an old (very crooked) chimney, and turned living rooms into bedrooms.

That this was happening as I was moving into my own first home made two things about the process seem noticeably absurd: first, the bar for “this is unlivable” seemed extraordinarily high, and second, though we wanted to change things, we seemed utterly incapable of trusting our own decisions in the process.

Changing things is EXPENSIVE. No matter how low the cost of living is in your city, a house is THE BIGGEST PURCHASE. A gargantuan amount of debt to hitch your wagon to. After I forked over the down payment, I had no business buying fixtures or starting hole-in-the-wall plaster projects with as-yet-unidentified price tags.

Sure, home improvement increases your resale value, but unless you’re flipping a house, that’s more of a long game, I’d argue. It’s not “demo all the cabinets in your perfectly functional albeit dated kitchen the night you close on the house” urgent.

And the second absurdity, that we can’t make our own decisions, just serves to substantiate the argument that our collective taste is mutable at best and at worst… just bad. Google any style of the times (Board and batten! Herringbone tile! Jewel tone bathroom paint!) and you’ll get the suggested search term, “Is [insert style here] trendy now?”

Everybody’s susceptible to what others think of them or say is stylish, but could it actually be that we don’t know what we like? *checks notes* Abso-friggin-lutely! This is the Great Grasping! We are asking our friends AND our followers: should I put the cabinet here or here? Do you think this matches? Which layout of my living room do you like best? We are simply beside ourselves trying to cajole satisfaction into our lives! We are searching everywhere for it! Haven’t you ever bought an on-trend lamp before, only to get it home and say, crap, I don’t actually like this? I sure have.

Listen, MY HOME IS GREAT. THE WOODSTOVE IS GREAT. I am as guilty as the rest of ‘em of making my house into cute-looking content. But I am also searingly honest—with anyone who asks, or even brushes against a conversation about home ownership—that this ol’ house is deeply, rootedly imperfect. And the secret that no one wants us to know is that, no matter how many renovations we complete, it will always be imperfect.

I come from a long line of imperfect homes. I grew up in a beautiful, reverent place that I love deeply, but our home was not hip and cool. The kitchen counters were built for a 4’ 10” woman! (My parents were both a foot taller.) The bathroom had carpet! We ran out of water sometimes! The list goes on! And now you know why “House Hunters” was my TV show of choice: manufactured control and choice, baby!

My home is mostly unchanged since I bought it two years ago. (I ended up with a no-choice-but-to, very expensive, un-Instagrammable roof replacement.) The house still sometimes makes me rage—even though I’m not stuck inside it all the time. On my worst days, everything looks like a to-do list item: the windowsills desperately need to be refinished. The previous owners painted everything, but not well. My shower? It’s a little unconventional.

But this house has been imperfect for 10 DIY Decades, I remind myself, and it’s still standing. It’s where Lunch Box the cat lives, and it’s where I’m building a life, and the light is just SO good some days. Discomfort makes us so uncomfortable. The world is falling apart, the climate apocalypse is coming, but at least we can hunker down in homes that make us feel… oh, wait! We still feel bad? Even after all that renovating? Cool new tile floors, dude. But, like, how’s your spirit?