Home Sweet

My first 22 years were spent split between two apartments in New York City with my family. After living in three more apartments in less than three years in Southern California and an apartment in West Haven, Connecticut, for another three years, I bought my first house, a ranch, in West Haven, at age 27. It was the start of life as a homeowner.

I’m currently on house #5.

For a New Yorker with little to no mechanical talent, it has been an ever-evolving experience. Over the years, I’ve become a pretty good painter (because I am an ambidextrous lefty who can “cut in” with either hand), replaced roof insulation, installed wallpaper, learned to put in simple light fixtures and switches, and, until 10 years ago when an allergic reaction to a yellow jacket’s sting forced me to the sideline, regularly mowed and kept a vegetable garden.

I found my current house while scouting for places to live with my daughter during divorce; I was getting desperate. Living with a soon-to-be-ex is never easy. I wound up putting an offer on this cute, new little home we saw in a cul-de-sac, but because my purchase was contingent on the sale of the house I owned at the time, things went nowhere.

That’s when one of those moments in life occurs, as Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella said in Field of Dreams, where all the cosmic tumblers clicked into place. After a couple of months, the subdivision developer called me with an offer. “How’d you like to rent the place for up to a year, and then go ahead and purchase it once your house sells?” I told him I’d be cool with that, except I doubted that on one income I could afford half the expenses of the house I already owned and this new one. “Name your price,” he said. “What can you afford?”

I wound up renting for 10 months and then followed through buying it once my other house finally sold.

I was quite certain when I moved in this would be the shortest stay for me in a house yet. So much so that I left the builder’s paint remain—for what turned out to be nine years.

This week, on Sept. 30 in fact, I will have been here for 17 years. My little ranch has become the home I’ve lived the longest in my life—surpassing the apartment above Climax Cleaners in Jackson Heights, Queens, where I grew up. Coincidentally (except I don’t believe in coincidences), my new wife, Terrie, moved in just before Thanksgiving 2016, and this is now also the longest place she has ever lived.

The funny thing is that before she moved in and after, we looked at many homes in the region because Terrie does not like living in subdivisions. We couldn’t seem to find one that was comparable in price and privacy. And Terrie’s cat, Taz (nickname “7 Pounds of Fury”), decided she liked her “kingdom” around the outside of this house. She has become queen of the cul de sac, and we stopped looking.

We also decided to make this bachelor pad of mine an our house. Besides repainting three rooms together, in 2021 we gutted the kitchen and re-did it. Well, a contractor did. I may be into my fifth home, but I know when to write a check. You can read about the kitchen here on Terrie’s fabulous website: https://comfortdujour.com/2022/01/23/the-big-reveal-of-our-new-kitchen/. We gutted and remodeled our master bath last year. We’ve also put on a new roof (2021), gotten a new front door (2022) and had a new HVAC system installed (2023).

And right now, we are putting the finishing touches (this time with three different contractors involved) on a backyard project. I can’t call it a renovation, because, honestly, I had hardly touched my back yard since moving in other than to have a split-rail fence installed back in 2010 to hold our beloved Nilla, and red lava rocks along the back side of the house (to discourage Nilla from digging; it worked).

Now, though, the back yard is looking, well, spiffy! We’ve got a new fence and arbor, and we had pavers installed around the existing pad, linking it to a new, round second patio with a sitting wall behind it. The back yard is more a living space for us. And, for the first time since I moved in, I’ll soon have a backyard table, chairs and umbrella.

It’s taken me 17 years to admit it, but I think this is the house where I’ve made my stand.