Wednesday December 29, 2004 – A House Is Not A Home

Wednesday December 29, 2004 – A House Is Not A Home

It has been raining on and off since we arrived in Southern California yesterday. One reason for the trip was to make arrangements with a local real estate agency to sell a house we had purchased in Irvine about a year ago. It had been a model home in a new development and when we first purchased the place it was completely decorated to give the appearance of a well kept home that actually belonged to someone. Upstairs the back wall of an open area that serves as an office is an array of photographs showing three generations of people—the earliest in the 1960s by the look of the fashions, the next generation in the 1980s and the current ones of today.

In this house, this was the only “family portrait,” but in other models we’ve toured, there are pictures in every room suggesting the occupants of that room, young children in some, adults in others, in living rooms, pictures of family gatherings, all implying that this house has a history. However, quite the opposite is the case. The house has no history and the interior furnishings are pretentious trappings of what an interior decorator believes some idealized family’s house would look like.

The reality is quite different as I visualize the house that we purchased in 1979 when our two daughters were eleven and seven. Our oldest M was in 5th grade and our youngest R was in 2nd grade. Each of them had their own rooms, which really became theirs about a year after we settled into the house. It became a home after our first Christmas. Our home no more resembled the model than I resembled a GQ model.

On the walls of our home there are pictures everywhere of M and R at various stages in their childhood. There are pictures of my wife “I” and me taken when were dating and after we were married. There are pictures of M’s and R’s high school graduation and marriages. There are also pictures everywhere of our four grandchildren. When this extended family comes together at Thanksgiving and Christmas, our home vibrates with the running feet of grandkids, the conversation of daughters and husbands, and the sound of cooking and the celebration that accompanies a feast of this assembled crowd.

The job of marketing packed into the exterior and interior design of a model home is to somehow convey that sense of family and home to prospective buyers. I must confess that the house in Irvine was an investment and not a house we ever intended to occupy. As you grow older, you seek commodities to purchase that will appreciate in value and ideally provide you a store of wealth that you can draw upon as you grow older and can’t work or no longer wish to do so. My father’s entire investment portfolio was tied up on real estate, except for his pension plans. He has lived well off the earnings his real properties have provided.

I grew up thinking of real estate as a place to live in, not something to own for investment value. I’ve since realized that humans delude themselves about owning materials possessions. I think of the great collectors, such as J. Paul Getty and William Randolph Hearst, who amassed great collections of antiquities, only to have them donated to museums or governments to pay off debts or to pass the possessions on to someone with the wherewithal to keep the collections intact. In reality, both collectors only held these precious items for a few decades of their lives. It’s the same with a home. You spend 30 years paying off a mortgage, fill the place with a lifetime of memories and memorabilia, and after your death the executor of your estate sells the property and its contents and divides the proceeds among your heirs.

Yet, I can understand why humans amass material possessions and want to have some place they own that they can call home. Home is, after all, a place where you’re surrounded by the memories of your 30 years spent there. You can hear the voices of your children when they were younger in the hallways. You can remember past holidays as you begin to prepare for a new one. That’s what the Irvine house we’re selling lacks and why we’re putting it on the market for sale.