dressing rooms and man caves

I've been giving a lot of thought to my clothing problem, and the inordinate amount of influence it's having on the process of buying a house. Vintage homes charm and delight me, but when I begin to consider the amount of closet space they tend to have (not very much), I shy away. I have a ridiculously large wardrobe of my own, and also the remaining stock from a vintage clothing site I used to run. I can fill a generous walk-in closet with those things alone, but there are also several large tubs of fabric, trim, patterns, and the sewing machine that will one day turn them all into something more useful.


Photo by abbyladybug

My husband has a similar problem with ugly electronics (he owns five computers, by my count) and their messes of cords. He also refuses to buy an actual dresser for his clothes and insists instead on hanging most of them and transferring the remainder between two mesh laundry hampers.

We both have things that I wouldn't want anywhere near the public areas of a home because they'd be in the way and unsightly. I don't them to be the first things I see when I wake up in the morning, as they are now (our bed faces the closet, one of the more depressing views I've ever had). I want them confined and organized in spaces designed to accommodate them, not sheepishly shoehorned into what pretends otherwise to be an orderly home.

I'm considering that a vintage home with scant storage could work out perfectly if it only had one room big enough to be carved up into a dressing room and a man cave. I've been getting inspiration for my mini-domain from these photos from decorology on Flickr:



The nice thing about my husband having his own private space is that I don't have to care how he decorates his.

can a condo have a garden?

The seller of the second house I'd offered on was not so impressed by the price I was willing to pay. This is too bad, but fair. I don't believe that goods or services have a single "market value". They're worth different amounts to different people. In this case, the house is worth more to the seller than it is to me. The main reason for the discrepancy is location. While the house is a block from a good elementary school and four blocks from the lake, it's a mile and a half from downtown. For a lot of people this would be a great, but for me it's a compromise.

So, trying to take some sort of lesson from the experience, I thought about whether I wanted to live right downtown. There are condos for sale in my price range, and one of them even appeals to me (the track lighting would have to go, but otherwise it's nice). But in making the offer on the other place, I'd done a lot of fantasizing about outdoor spaces, and I find it hard to let that go.



When I think of a perfect backyard, I inevitably think of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. I like gardens to be overgrown, with leaves spilling everywhere, swallowing up moss-bitten statues and crumbling structures. I like 'em romantic, suffocatingly so. I see plants everywhere that survive Austin's dry winters with and remain stubbornly bucolic in appearance, and I can't imagine it would be hard to build a wild backyard of my own. In a condo with no balcony, I'd be giving that up.

That doesn't mean no plants, though. It probably means no climbing plants, unless I want to ruin my walls, but there are plenty of plants that can grow indoors, including palm, citrus, and fig trees. I think it would awesome to have a staged forest behind a beaten-up velvet or leather sofa.

The reality, though, is that I'm slowly killing the only houseplant I've ever owned, a philodendron. This means any kind of indoor garden I might substitute for the traditional kind needs to be undertaken with immense caution, lest piles of dead leaves and broken branches take the Miss Havisham effect further than I'd intended.

conception

There's a scene in the movie Pandora's Box when Louise Brooks is dancing across the landing of a great stairwell. The windows behind her are at least three times as tall as she is, plants are everywhere, and the setting has a feeling of epic permanence, like something that would have existed for hundreds of years and will continue to exist for centuries to come. You can see what it would be like with dust accumulated in the corners and the windows clouded with years of metropolitan soot. You can see that it would still be beautiful. When I think about my own home, that's what I want it to be.



Windows twenty feet tall, however, are an unrealistic goal at this point in my life. Even if I could afford a grand-ceilinged townhouse, I'm aware of none to be had in Austin, Texas. The most beautiful old buildings here all seem to belong to state government and it seems unlikely they'll be relocating any time soon. There are plenty of squat, utilitarian houses in what used to be the bad neighborhood just east of downtown. When I decided to put down roots, it quickly became clear that's what I'd be settling for if I were to do so in Austin.

With a very patient real estate agent, I've seen at least thirty of these houses. Most were in pretty bad shape, any charming features that had survived their ownership by unabashed slumlords in such poor repair that, were you to remodel them, all you'd be able to salvage of their vintage pedigree would be the year built on the title. A few were mostly gorgeous, but these were smaller and, frankly, seemed to have had all their potential realized.

A big part of the reason I decided to buy now is the same reason most other people I know who are doing so have: you want to buy low and sell high. At the very least, you want to buy low instead of waiting until the next bubble to get ripped off. I decided that the smartest decision I could make would be to buy a cheap house with good bones and put a lot of work into it. A lot of what's involved in home ownership, I loathe. I hate debt, and I hate not being able to control my debt. I bought a car once and paid it off in a year, skimping on everything else, because the thought of owing money haunted me and I was terrified of just paying the minimum and letting the interest snowball. If I'm putting equal parts money and labor into a home, at least I can exert a little control over its value. Given market conditions of late, that small amount of control is the only reassurance I have. That means potential's a big deal. I was looking for a house that needed more work than money to become amazing.

The pictures above are what I'd hang over the mantle, if the house I've made an offer on had one. In the late Domino magazine, I saw a lot of inspiration boards. I'd make one of those, except there's no way I'm going to print off a bunch of pictures, wasting paper and ink, just to pin them on a board. Better I begin with a single concept, a single goal, and store the bulk of my resources online.

As of this moment, I have nowhere else to store them. I currently have offers in on two houses. Probably that's a little sketchy, but the first is a short sale and I've all but given up hope of ever hearing back from the bank. I only hesitate to withdraw the offer in case things with the second offer go south, or something untenable comes up during the inspection. I'm waiting to hear a response to my offer from the seller of house number two. It may come today, and I'm hoping it does. The sooner it comes, the sooner I find out exactly how terrified I should be.