Our house came with a lot of extras. When we were getting ready to close on the house, we did a walk through with the owner so we (he) could decide what he was going to leave behind when he moved out. We knew that it would be difficult for him to leave the home where he raised his family, difficult to get rid of 50+ years of stuff, both physically and emotionally, so Sean and I decided to just accept what he wanted to leave behind and deal with it later. While we did supposedly agree to what was going to be there and what was going to be gone, we found a lot more than we expected when we moved in.

Here is just a small sampling of what we found.

I have no idea how old this mattress is, other than too old. Please don’t overlook the green shag carpeting. The wallpaper is clearly impossible to overlook.

Sorry this one is blurry. The cross-stitched panels at the top of the built-in wall unit were hand sewn speaker covers. Notice the hanging dried flower arrangement: there were two of those. That blue couch was also not ours. Except I guess it was once we bought the house.

No home could be complete without a full set of The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau. This is tiny, tiny sampling of the books that were left behind. As though I didn’t already have enough of my own.

I don’t even know what to say about this one.

Dad was apparently right that we wanted it: Sean was stoked to find it, and yes, it is still in the upstairs bathroom.

And the pièce de résistance (or the coup de grâce, however you want to see it):

That organ was not supposed to be there. I really did not want to buy an organ. I was not happy about the organ.

Much to my surprise, Sean was very excited about the organ.

We still have the organ.

There was much more than this left behind. I don’t even think we’ve finished discovering all the things that were left behind. I haven’t even talked about the wood shop, fully equipped with a table saw, radial saw, band saw, joiner-planer, mitre saw, giant stash of scrap wood, old screws and nails, clamps, a big vacuum system, and about 70 different hands saws. The attic space above the wood shop that, we discovered, contained boxes and boxes of records from the former owner’s dental practice (and mountains of 20-year-old pigeon poop, which is a whole other story). The crawl space upstairs full of old issues of RV Living magazine. The end tables, small cupboards and cabinets, mirrors and wall hangings. The 40+ potted amaryllis in the sunroom.

So. Much. Stuff.

We’ve made progress getting rid of some of it. Sean has made countless trips to the dump. We sometimes argue over the value and aesthetic quality of the remaining pieces. That organ will probably be with me for the rest of my life at this point.

I can’t imagine what it feels like to dismantle a life you’ve spent over 50 years building. I can’t imagine looking at all of the things you have accumulated over your lifetime and trying to decide whether you still need them, or what to do with what you don’t. I can’t imagine standing in front of that house before you drive away for the last time, saying goodbye to the memories, to the home you spent nearly your entire adult lifetime in. I think accepting these left-behind objects was the least we could do if it eased that experience even a little bit.

And I wonder if any of these things will still be in this house when it’s time for us to leave it behind, ourselves.

When we decided to buy a house in December, 2015, we didn’t have any hard and fast ideas about what part of Sonoma County we wanted to live in. But there was one neighborhood I had a soft spot for in Santa Rosa. We’d been coming to this neighborhood to pick up our farm box for awhile, and I was drawn to the winding streets, the trees, and the older-but-not-too-old houses. It wasn’t a tract neighborhood where all of the houses looked alike, and it seemed peaceful and friendly. It seemed like a good place to have a family, with good schools and parks, and the commute to work for me was easy and very lovely, through vineyards and over hills with spectacular views. It was close to the parks where Sean does trail work and hikes, and there was a Whole Foods and a few good shopping centers nearby. It was more suburban than I ever imagined a place where I would live would be, but I’d more or less accepted my suburban lifestyle once we moved to Sonoma County.

There was a house in the neighborhood that had been on the market for awhile. It was at the very top of our price range, and the pictures on Zillow showed a very dated interior, but we decided to check it out; it was actually the first house we looked at. Here is what we saw.

I’ve always had a good imagination, and I could see the potential of this house right away. Yes, it was cluttered with stuff, and the carpets were surprising, and the wood paneling was extensive, and there would be a lot of work to do. But I could see what it could be.

We looked at a few other houses, but none of them seemed right. So finally, we came back to this one. On our second visit, the owner was there. He was an older gentleman who reminded me of my late grandfather, and he showed us even more of the house we hadn’t seen the first time around, like the giant wood shop and pantry, the paths down to the creek and the retaining wall he’d built with his sons, the way the upstairs bathroom could be turned into a dark room, and every detail of the home that he’d lovingly built with his family over the 51 years they had lived in the home.

After our second visit, we were in. We wanted this house. So we made an offer, and it was accepted, and all of the thrilling details of financing were negotiated and my parents came to visit and looked at us like we were crazy for buying this house, and finally, it was ours.

Then the real adventure started.

I mentioned that we bought a house.

We bought this monstrosity beauty two years ago this month. It all happened kind of quickly: In December, 2016, Sean determined that it was very likely interest rates were going to go up and that we should buy a house before that happened. We started looking, and ended up making an offer on the first house we saw. In late January, we signed our lives away, and by the end of February we were moving in.

It did turn out to be smart timing because, while we did spend probably more than we should have, housing prices have since skyrocketed in Sonoma County. Coastal California is a rough place for real estate. Everything is staggeringly overpriced, and after the fires we experienced here this past October, it has gotten even worse.

You may not be able to tell from the front, but this house is really big. It has four bedrooms, an office, a living room AND family room, a sunroom, and an enormous workshop. It’s on a third of an acre backing up to a creek, and there is a lot of stuff growing on that land. Like, A LOT of stuff.

The family who owned the house previously lived here for 51 years. And hadn’t done any re-decorating for the last 30. The house is in good shape, but it needs attention in a few key areas: We need a new roof, and probably a new furnace in the next few years. Not to mention removal of the excessive wall paper, wood paneling, shag carpeting, 80s-era brown kitchen tile and appliances, silly putty-colored paint, horrendous curtains, terrible chandeliers, and, oh, did I mention wall paper. Oh, and we need to put some serious energy into maintaining and re-doing the landscaping in both the front and backyards.

We definitely bought off more than we could chew. To be honest, this house has kind of been dragging me down lately. It feels like we never have the time or money to make the improvements that we need and want to make, we argue about what those improvements should be, and we’re a little bit muddling through the basic house maintenance stuff that neither of us has much experience with, like cleaning gutters and replacing air filters and cleaning chimneys and and and and and.

Part of my reason for jump starting this little blog is to rediscover my motivation to work on the house. When we first moved in we made some good progress right away, and then fell into the doldrums and haven’t done much else since, other than attempt to keep entropy at bay.

I don’t want to overwhelm y’all and try to cover our whole house story between then and now, so I’m going to break this up a bit. But if you want to see the transformation (oh god, I hope) of a 1960s ranch with a 1980s interior into the cool, modern house of our dreams, stay tuned.