Buying Houses Like Proverbs 31

I told you what it is like living along a busy road. You can read about that here. A few days after I posted that, I was cleaning up my computer files and found a story I wrote in 2020 about the yellow house we were living in. I thought you might like it.

I couldn’t imagine why John looked startled. All I had said was, “You know? I feel like a Proverbs 31 woman and think I will buy our house from the landlord. By the time you come home from work tonight, you could be a homeowner.”

He eyed me suspiciously, as if I might be feverish and my reasoning crazed. “You want to buy this house? The house we don’t like?”

“Yes. It is the size we don’t like. We could attach the garage to the house and add a school room.” 

I already knew what the backyard could become if we put a picket fence along the flowerbed and added a flowering crabapple tree. We could seed grass in most of the garden, paring it down to a manageable size and giving the children more yard to play in.

“The backyard could be really cute,” I said. “Plus, we might like even like the house if it was twice the size.”

John was relentless. “The landlord said it needs a new roof. But I think what it really needs is to be bulldozed and rebuilt.”

We would not be homeowners by nightfall.

No doubt about it, the house is quirky. On moving day, we learned our doors were too small for our couch to fit through--we had to buy another couch. All bookcases leaned forward dangerously on our slanting living room floor until someone came with a level and shims to prop them up. The landlord had recently changed the staircase enough that a double bed mattress was stuck upstairs and everything bigger than a single bed was stuck downstairs, including the wardrobe for our closet-less bedroom.

The house was built in 1806, the year Lewis and Clark explored the West. You can expect hand-hewn beams to have some curve and character. I got used to having toys with wheels roll two feet away from the wall when I forget to turn the steering wheel when I park them. The children have new games to play like racing matchbox cars by lining them along the baseboard and letting go on the count of three. 

Lewis and Clark contemporaries didn’t need spacious houses or closets, apparently. Zillow says our house is 608 square feet. By the time we added our belongings to the small rooms, the house shrank still further. That’s why, if we are going to stay here a long time, we should own it and add on. Connect the garage to the house and add an upper room where we could host guests or have a brightly lit schoolroom lined with all the closets I'm missing out on now. 

My plan seemed brilliant until it rained.

Rain made lakes in the yard and a river in the pasture. It dripped onto boxes of winter coats in the attic and flowed steadily through our basement. I took off my socks and picked my way through the basement to find the stream's source. Water bubbled from the floor in a pencil-thin fountain from the floor, dripped from a doorframe, and spouted out of a crack in the wall. The three streams converged to form a river almost large enough to show up on maps.

My children thought it was a personalized gift, judging from a pint-sized prayer that said, “And thank You for the water in the basement so we can play in rain without ever having to go outside and get cold.”

But it was the same water that convinced me of John’s wisdom. We didn't want to buy a house with have a leaky, 214-year-old foundation. 

With fresh inspiration within me, I opened a realtor’s website. The first house I saw took my breath away. It was built from the same blueprint as my childhood home. I knew which room would be the school room and where I would put my bookcases.

“I found the perfect house!” I texted John. “I feel the Proverbs 31 woman stirring within me again. You might be a homeowner before nightfall.”