Progress Is a Constant Process
A Home Improvement allegory for the times we find ourselves in
Dear Reader,
I promise this long story about home renovation has a bigger and more important point.
❤️ Sarah
In 2010, we moved to Fort Wayne in the middle of a national housing crash.
We couldn’t sell our Indianapolis house. Because our house payment was so low, we were able to convince the bank to give us enough money to buy a fixer-upper for our new home.
We were idealistic 31-year-olds with a toddler and dreams of what this huge house with weird additions and a walk-up attic could be.
Every carpet was soaked in cat piss and fecal matter. The paint was peeling from the kitchen cabinets, and once we started cleaning, we discovered mouse droppings in drawers and in the corners of cabinets. There was water damage in both the basement and the lower level of the tri-level house. The bathrooms had rust stains from years of neglect and iron from the well water. Someone had tried different paint colors on the wallpaper in the living room and quit before they were finished. Everything was covered in a heavy layer of dirt and grime. And that was just what we could see before we started taking things out.
Before we even moved in, every carpet came out. We knew there were wood floors in the house because they were laid bare in the living room, but we quickly discovered that the hardwood floors ended where the first addition began. If we didn’t want to be walking on plywood in the master bedroom or our daughter’s bedroom, we would need to install brand new carpet in both rooms. We were immediately spending money we didn’t really have in order to gain some level of comfort at bedtime.
With my dad’s help, we refinished the wood floors in the other two bedrooms; both sets of floors had been protected by carpets and had minimal damage from everything that soaked through.
We tore out water-damaged cabinets from the lower-level entrance and put down a laminate floor in our designated family room. We gutted the main bathroom, ripping down pink tile, filling in the window with glass blocks, and replacing all fixtures. I spent countless hours painstakingly removing wallpaper from our living room walls, repairing crumbling plaster as I went, until the entire first floor was finally ready for a fresh coat of paint. The stick-down tiles in our dining room started detaching from the floor on their own, so I finished the job. When it became clear that our living room hardwood was far too damaged, we finally decided to use the floor as a foundation for new laminate floors that seamlessly covered our living room and dining room. And when we decided we were moving to Texas, we gutted the kitchen, replacing every cabinet, the sink, and the countertop in an attempt to persuade a new family to purchase our home.
In many ways, the house was a money pit that kept taking more than it gave. The first time we turned on the air conditioning, the AC unit quit and we spent the rest of the summer depending on small window air conditioners to keep us comfortable until the leaves started to turn. Then, when we turned on the heat for the first time, we realized the entire unit was fried, and we would have to buy a whole new HVAC system anyway. The day after hosting our first Thanksgiving in the house, our well gave out, and we spent thousands of dollars we didn’t have on an emergency well repair. While trying to cover a vent going into the attic to keep out unwanted critters, my husband accidentally sent the ladder through our back window, requiring glass replacement in a bay window, a few years before another broken window convinced us we needed to replace all of the windows. When we sold the house, we ended up paying for a new roof, the cost of the roof wiping out much of what we were hoping to gain as we walked away from our home of five years.
But it was our home, and as much as I loved to complain about one more thing going wrong, it was still the place where we were raising our babies. We had put our literal blood, sweat, and tears into making it ours.
As we worked to make the house a home, we slowly learned the story of our home’s collapse from neighbors willing to share the tale.
According to lore, the house had belonged to a doctor and his wife who loved the house too much to move, but they kept wanting more room. The multiple additions to the tri-level with a basement were a result of a husband giving in to his wife’s wishes. Then another family moved in. It was a large family and the house provided all of the room that they needed. Eventually, the parents decided to get a divorce, one parent moved down to Florida and left the spouse with teenagers in the house. Then the parents decided to get back together and reconnected in Florida, leaving the house in the care of the youngest members of the family: a handful of young adults in their late teens to possibly early 20s, with no idea of how to take care of the home.
Over time, they stopped paying the bills. The electricity got shut off, and they occasionally asked one neighbor if they could run an extension cord from their house for a few needs. That meant they didn’t have running water, because a well requires electricity. They had multiple cats that they allowed to run feral in the house, including some that got in through broken vents in the attic. Eventually, the bank foreclosed on the house, and the cats continued to run feral inside. When we finally took over the house for a low price, the house was a disaster, dirty and in disrepair.
In the five years we lived in the house, we did the best we could. We made decisions about where we could and could not spend money. Sometimes we had to spend money we didn’t have and take out more loans when emergencies (such as an irreparable furnace) came our way. I didn’t always get to do things the way I wanted to do them, such as designing a kitchen that would sell, that I would never really get to use. And there were major projects that never got completed. The greenhouse and koi pond in the back corner of our lot remained unusable, continuing to become more overgrown with each passing year. The garden was never fully rehabilitated. I never got to redo our master bathroom or make our basement usable. The people who purchased our house had new dreams that would build on the work we had already done. And chances are, the next owners of our Fort Wayne house will have to do the same.
The only guarantee is that change is a constant, and it will most likely take longer than any homeowner wants to accept.
In some ways, a country is like a house.
If you take good care of it and work on maintenance, you will only have to do major repairs every great once in a while. As time passes, surfaces will need new paint, electrical work will need to be updated, and major renovations will be necessary when what is old is no longer attractive or functional to meet modern needs.
But if you ignore small problems or stop paying for pest control or refuse to repair things along the way? Suddenly, you find yourself with big issues that will take significantly more time and money to fix. And chances are you will have to occasionally strip everything down to the studs and build something completely new.
We currently have people with the egocentric foresight of teenagers running amok in our government. (Even in writing that, I fear I might be insulting teenagers everywhere.) Agencies have been gutted, experts exiled, buildings destroyed, land given away, forward-thinking projects ended, and so much more.
We’ve been here before. The years following the Revolution were a period of building and learning. The years following the Civil War were a period of reform and rebuilding, until those in charge decided we had changed enough for the time being. The years following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 transformed the globe, and a new century of further economic, racial, and gender equality rose out of the ashes of World War II. With each rebuilding period of American history, mistakes have been made, and people have been left behind. People have gotten frustrated by the slow progress and argued about best practices, all while change did inevitably happen.
And we are approaching a similar period of growing pains once again.
America 250 should give us the opportunity to both look backward, to how far we have come, and forward, to how far we still have to go to a “more perfect union,” but we should always be looking for progress along the way.
Humans are impatient beings, and I would argue that right now, we have every right to be anxious for change. There are far too many things that are holding us back. There are far too many issues that need to be resolved. There is far too much reform that is necessary for us to be the nation that most of us want us to be.
As I look at the United States and the many debates I see popping up on social media, I think back to our Fort Wayne house. Our house wasn’t finished. It wasn’t what we wanted it to be when we handed the keys to new homeowners. We weren’t giving up the dream; we were passing the dream along to someone else to fulfill.
So it is with a country. Whoever we select to govern this year, and in two years, and every two years after that, is going to have a lot of work to do. Decisions will have to be made. Sacrifices will have to be offered. People aren’t always going to be happy. People are going to have to think more than one step ahead. They are going to have to look at the long-term vision. We are going to need leaders who can get us to see the vision and understand the difficult process to get there and the potential challenges we will face along the way.
But I believe we will get there, because I cannot believe that the American Experiment is over. It’s just entering a new phase.
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