New Home, Welcome Renewal

Welcome Home has a new headquarters

The end of a season and dawn of another is always a time of reflection, of endings and beginnings. There are 2.5 weeks left in summer—don’t let anyone tell you differently—but the truth is I’ve already pulled out my sweaters.¹ Fall is a time of anniversaries and birthdays in my family, so maybe I grow especially nostalgic.

All of that is to say, almost a year ago, I closed on the purchase of my first home, pictured below during one of the first light snows of last season, and the coming anniversary of the move has made me especially eager to write about it.² My partner, Samir, and I moved from Arkansas, where I was born and raised and wrote The Forgotten Girls, to central New York.³ We had very many reasons for moving, some of which you can probably guess if you read my book, and we were eager to move farther North.⁴

We’d spent nearly six years in Arkansas. That was much longer than we had expected to stay. The move took more than three months to finish, dismantling and reassembling our lives one U-Haul at a time. I traveled up in a caravan with Samir, his sister, and our pets in early October and thought I would go back to say goodbye to friends and close the Arkansas chapter of my life in some official way, but I never did. Once I was gone, I was gone.

After almost a year, I’ve realized that I have and will continue to have a lot to say about my old home, my new one, and life in general, so I’m restarting my newsletter. I have new obsessions that inspire new ruminations. I invite you to share them, and to share this newsletter if you think others will enjoy them.

The biggest thing on my mind is my house. It’s nearly 170 years old, and once sat relatively isolated between fields. There is a farmer who still rents the field behind us to grow corn, but we’re in what is now a mostly residential neighborhood with some newer homes and a McMansion or two, with other old farmhouses like ours sprinkled amongst them. We’re close to the small city of Utica—with its old industrial infrastructure, slightly bedraggled appearance, hint of an attitude, and its own cuisine, all of which is to say, exactly my kind of city—but just a little east and north of here we ease into real dairy farms and Amish homesteads and the foothills of the Adirondacks.

The house was in excellent shape and also mostly untouched by time, which means it needed a little updating. We vowed to take a light hand with it, preserving and restoring whatever we can—the wavy panes of glass on the original 6-over-6 windows, the cedar siding, the lath and plaster walls, the knotty pine floors. We’ve decided to do a lot of the more cosmetic, “easier” work on the house ourselves. There are benefits and downsides to trying to DIY your way through an old farmhouse. On the plus side, we save money and some of the start-up time, and can do things as we want to do them in our own way. There’s no one to blame if something goes wrong, which can be a blessing or a curse. We’re not pressured to overspend. We can change our minds midway through a project without too much fuss.

Some of the downsides are obvious, of course. It’s difficult work which often requires research and education before we even get started. It’s exhausting. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. The end result might not be perfect. For even a hint of what we’re doing, we’ve watched so many YouTube videos on everything from ripping up carpet to hanging wallpaper, from stalwarts like This Old House to newer channels like DIYWife. Samir and I joke that we should start our own channel called, “Old Fat DIY” where we show what it’s really like to, say, sand and stain flooring as a non-expert in a large, aging body.

I’ve been thinking about what makes a good DIYer. It’s not so much talent or education, though those things obviously make a difference. I think a lot of it has to do with risk tolerance and risk aversion. So many decisions in life boil down to how much risk we’re willing to take. How uncomfortable are we with an uncertain outcome? I’m ok with diving headfirst into a complicated task and possibly doing it a little bit wrong and having a slightly less than optimal outcome that I may have to do over again down the road. I view it as a learning experience. If I mess something up I will try it again. If I do something kind of badly I will live with it until I figure it out.

These kinds of questions determine a lot about how we think of everything from our own futures to our public policy. I will do some more thinking about risks, how we take them, and why, in the next few newsletters. But for now I’m going to talk about my house, which I’m obsessed with and could talk about forever.

House Update

Our plan when we first moved in was to mostly live in the “new” part of the house, an addition built in the 1920s, while we updated the older portion. The first two rooms we started with are the office and dining room, in the exact middle of the house. In truth this is one big room with a narrow, long walled-off portion that was probably once a butler’s pantry and which I have turned into my office. Because it’s small and not a main room and will mostly be used by me, we started here to experiment and learn what we liked doing and what we hated. (FYI we are never going to skim coat a wall with a new layer of plaster again. That SUCKED.) We probably also shouldn’t have picked the hottest time of the year to do the most difficult tasks, but we got it done. Behold, the mostly finished product!⁵

I couldn’t be happier with the result. More important, I was able to do what I wanted and adjust my expectations along the way. It’s such a nice room to write in. This may sound silly, but I’m so productive in it!

Pet Update

The logistics of moving all of our pets out of Arkansas were…interesting. We left with 6 dogs and 5 cats and made it here with all of them, though I’m very sad to say we recently lost our dear cat Marbles. One of our first acts of home improvement was to build a fence in our backyard for the dogs. They love it so much. We also have a small, weird, bonus room loft above the kitchen that is mostly unusable for humans. Naturally, we turned it into a cat room, off-limits to the dogs. The cats even have their own set of stairs.

Shortly after we moved in we found a local vet and starting hauling them in a few at a time for their annual checkups. Sampson, my ride-or-die, who’s been with me for 11 years and 5 moves now, was recently diagnosed with diabetes. I actually think he’s happy about taking his medicine because it’s served with a luxurious pate he wouldn’t otherwise get. Don’t worry, this ridiculous cat is going to live forever.

Book Corner

I am reading Long Island Compromise from Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I LOVED Fleishman Is in Trouble, which is kind of a story about narrative perspective, but I haven’t watched the show and probably won’t. I also like Long Island Compromise, but it is stressing.me.out. I have to take breaks and listen to audiobooks, which I especially love doing while I’m doing boring tasks like scraping paint off window casings and baseboards. I just finished listening to Funny Story by Emily Henry and have People We Meet on Vacation queued up. I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum or be a Debbie Downer, but Funny Story was…ok. It was cute. I did not love it. I think it didn’t have enough tension for me? Feel free to share your favorite Emily Henry with me. I recently finished Abby Jimenez’s Part of Your World series and really loved it and found the stories soothing, even though some of them were somewhat heavy.

I also recently finished Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper. If you don’t remember who he is, my mom summed it up thusly: “Oh, he’s the guy who the Karen went after in Central Park.” Yes, yes he was. He’s a good writer but, I’ll be honest, I thought there would be more birds. Which brings me to my nature book side quest: I read The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger and loved it, but I did have a mini existential crisis about whether I should kill the ferns that live wildly in my yard or leave that community of plants alone. (Ultimately I left them alone, but that was mostly out of laziness. This fall we have to tackle our yard.) Inspired by that, I bought Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, which I’ve wanted to read for a long time and is now on my TBR shelf. If these tempt you, you should obviously also read An Immense World by Ed Yong and Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. Feel free to share your favorite nature reads in the comments!

1. *We actually need them at night now, when the temperature drops to 50.

2. I am not rich and this was not easy. I may write about it in the future.

3. I still get emails and social media messages asking if I still live in Clinton. The answer is no.

4. ***The fact that I need sweaters at night in September and the winter is cozy AF was a big reason we wanted to move north. We are in love with our new home.

5. The other side of this room, which you can’t see, is a little cat corner.