Oh the indignities you'll suffer!

Warning to all readers: this week's blog post will confirm once and for all my all-encompassing, all-consuming obsession and passion with old houses. Maybe you already knew that, but this time I think I've outdone myself. Just to let you know ahead of time, you've been warned!

With that out of the way, let me fill you all in on the way I spend my evenings here on campus at UW Green-Bay as the semester winds down and I find myself with an empty afternoon filled with the promise of only...studying. What do I do you ask? Well, realizing I had an 'old houses itch' I decided to scope out different real estate websites in my hometown of Sheboygan and look up some old houses for sale in the area. (Now you understand why I put the disclaimer in the beginning, don't you?) I don't know if I've mentioned this before but most of Sheboygan's old houses are clustered on the northside, and I unfortunately - and fortunately, depending on which way you look at it - live on the southside, so the only time I get to really peruse these collections at the slow pace I desire, is to 1) Ride my bike over there, 2) Go on real estate websites or 3) Go on google maps. Yes, I have done number's two and three very frequently, and when I'm home I also enjoy watching the real estate channel. Like the billions of people in the world, there's also myriad varieties of houses out there, both young and old, and it never ceases to amaze me how completely different they all are.

What does amaze me however is how old houses can change over the centuries they've been planted in the same spot. Now I know I've talked about how owners can completely defile the age of their homes by 'remodeling' them when what their really doing is applying a facade of vinyl siding, vinyl window casings, carpet and paint. But this blog post will be a little different. And it involves my reactions to most of the old houses I eagerly clicked on, on various real estate websites only to be plummeted back to earth with a mocking laugh and pointing finger, and a voice in my head that said "did you really expect those houses to portray their original character? You know what happens to most old houses these days right? Why do you keep believing the best of people??"

Like the nut I am, I answered my own question, and replied "well, there's got to be some hope left, isn't there? I mean, I'm sure there are still old houses out there, dilapidated or not, that look more or less the same today as when they were first built. There must be people out there that don't drag their old houses kicking and screaming into the 21st century from head to foot, but actually stand there on the threshold and ask themselves "why am I adding this white paint to this luxurious cherry woodwork? Why am I carpeting the stairs? Why am I doing this, why am I doing that?"

Now I could be cynical and say that the only reason old house owners are doing such atrocities is because the owners next to them are doing it, or it brings a better resale value. So what? People want old houses nowadays that look like new houses but yet still have that age and old house feel? I can't wrap my head around that, if it is indeed true. Are people ashamed of the dark woodwork, the antique wallpaper, the scarred wooden floors that they feel so compelled to cover them up with layers of the 21st century? Now again, maybe I take such a stance against such layering, if you will, because I'm the type of person that wants an old house that's falling apart so just a breath pent up from its early days and a cracking fieldstone foundation are all that's holding it up. I want the leaking, wooden windows, the creaking and sagging floorboards. I don't care if my house is dysfunctional or the paint has been stripped from the siding until the wooden planks are gray and brown like the once thick and tousled coat of a trusted family dog who's now slowing down and graying around the edges, though he tries to hide it. Is that what all these owners are trying to do? Blend in their old houses with all the new copy-and-paste facades of new houses until its this uninterrupted glossy sea of perfection without a ripple to be found?

I hope I'm not getting cynical again, but perhaps you can see the bone such an issue has been chiseling at ever since I fell in love with old houses in middle school. But, I digress. Let us move on the real topic of today's blog post, which involves the story behind the title: "Oh the indignities you'll suffer!"

You see, while I was disappointed with old house after old house that looked promising on the outside but whose facade was really just a thin eggshell disguising the sometimes meticulous but more often sloppy and unsightly remodel job that shredded its historic heart and buried the pieces in discrete corners, where they would forever pump feebly, searching for that single vein that served them well but for reasons unknown has been severed. Oh dear, here come the metaphors. Well, perhaps I could have put up another warning: "Talking about old houses will cause me to inadvertently revert to complicated and rambling metaphors and pinnings. I realize the sentences can get long, and I'd like to think that I'm working on that, but the truth is I'm not." I'll just stop there, otherwise this blog post will be a series of warnings, instead of what I intended to talk about! Then again, do I really ever talk about what I really intended to? That would mean that I was in control of what goes on paper, and we all know that's not true. My fingers are merely mediums that are guided by my thought process. It's like sitting down at a type writer, poising your fingers over the keys when all of a sudden a rogue gust of wind billows through the open windows and beings typing frantically, leaving you just sitting there, watching the keys form on the paper at a rapid pace. Then all at once its gone, and you're left reading the words before you, wondering where to pick up, wondering where they came from.

The metaphor train has taken me away once again, but I'm back at the station, ready to board the train I intended to. I promise! While I was looking at all of those old houses on the real estate sites in Sheboygan, I couldn't help but think that just as parents sit down with their children before significant transitions in their lives and explain to them what it coming and prepare them for it, perhaps old house elders should sit down with younger old houses and explain to them the horrors they'll endure throughout the centuries.

You might be thinking, well, that's not odd at all. I mean, it's not like old houses are living people or anything. They're just a combination of wood, insulation, glass and nails. And you'd be right of course, but in my mind each and every old house is as alive as you and me. So the metaphor works. Imagine a sprawling Victorian perched atop a hill in a smallish town on a quiet street. It's one of the oldest in the neighborhood, built in 1860. Next to it is a smaller Victorian with only a two-story turret, versus the elder's three-story turret. The smaller Victorian was built in 1906, fairly new by my standards, but still intriguing nonetheless. Together they are surrounded by what is considered their town's historical neighborhood, with houses ranging in years from 1860 to the 1920's, whom all of the houses consider the youth around them and constantly snicker at their inexperience, but yet provide timeless wisdom nonetheless. After all, some of them were built by the same families and consider themselves as closely a knit family as the people who dwell within them. But anyway, more on the family history later.

Say the small Victorian and the big Victorian have been watching a new family move into a circa 1928 Bungalow, one of the youngest houses on the block. Despite its compact size everyone has always admired the traditional craftsman details like the broad, deep porch, inviting porch swing, the leaded mullions in the windows and the decorative details surrounding the original windows. Although personally the younger Victorian dislikes - like myself in a way - the sharpened corners and block designs of the bungalow, whereas it bears the sinuous curves and arches of the Victorian period. Within a few weeks of the bungalow being occupied again, the two Victorians begin to notice subtle changes within it.

Whereas once the pale morning sunlight would fall through those leaded diamond mullions and onto the richly hued staircase, highlighting the meticulously dusted craftsman-style staircase and the high wainscoting along the walls with its deep chair rail and dentil moulding...now the sun seems to shrink back at the white paint adorning the balusters and banister, as well as the wainscoting. Soon even the window frame itself is shrouded in white paint, leaving the sun no deeply textured wood grain to accentuate. The sun can no longer have any fun in that part of the house, the elder Victorian thinks with a scoff. The younger Victorian just shakes its head.

Just as the elder Victorian feared, carpet soon sprouts up on top of the polished wooden floorboards like some exotic form of fungi that is both beautiful and repelling to different eyes who gaze upon it. Any wallpaper bearing a hint of color is stripped from the plastered walls, and neutral paint colors are applied. Now the sun won't even have all those colors to fade some more, it won't have all those textures and filigree to caress. It will be met instead with a blank facade of insipid color. That house will become a stranger to the sun, soon enough, the elder Victorian thinks. I barely recognize it myself anymore. Once again it shakes its head.

"If those are the colors, textures and fabrics of this century," the younger Victorian tells the elder Victorian with a hint of a tremor as well as distaste in its voice, "then I don't ever want to feel such fungi on my floorboards, or watch my original wallpaper be stripped in favor of that bland paint slapped on my walls. Its like painting the ocean a dull white so you can't see any further than the surface, and that carpet is like blocking anyone from going deeper than the surface, never able to discover the history and inimitable beauty within it. They're erasing its character that was meticulously built into it, as well as built up by time, and the sun. The sun doesn't want anything to do with that house anymore, but yet it still lingers on the porch swing, and outside the windows, for there the house is still itself. But it's only a shell, and the sun knows that. Just like the painted ocean, if you keep that layer on long enough what time has lovingly caressed will fall away and all that will be left is the false wall erected by those who thought they were performing a favor. When really it only made the house the pity of the neighborhood, another brought to its knees at the bloodied hands of the 21st century, made to look like a thousand houses cut from the same mold. Some body should have warned it what it would go through."

"I've suffered many indignities in my day," answers the elder Victorian. Looking up, the young Victorian shields its eyes against the sun which has momentarily turned its back on the bungalow and focused upon the two of them. "I've lived through the roaring twenties, the ugly patterns and colors of the sixties, the impersonal modernity of the eighties and now here I stand, more or less intact. On all three floors I might add. I've been divided into apartments in the fifties, when a suitable owner couldn't be found that would accept my sprawling labyrinth of rooms and floors with open arms. I've had my woodwork painted more than once, my bathrooms tiled and tiled again with a horror of different colors. My kitchen, oh my kitchen has taken the brunt of it. First it was the budget cabinets with their smooth white fronts and plastic handles, then it was the pathetic attempt at modernity in the seventies, as well as the influx of flamboyantly colored furniture. Most of these people had complete disregard for my history, let me tell you. They saw me as a blank slate that they could paint anything they wanted onto, both meticulously and carelessly, rather than see it as a chance for me to make an impression upon them."

"Does every old house learn of such incidents before them?" The young Victorian asks. The elder Victorian chuckles, its sagging floorboards creaking and its wavy windowpanes in original windows distorting the world in glorious ripples. Like ripples of wrinkled skin, the younger Victorian thinks, catching a glimpse of its freshly painted siding in the reflections of the windowpanes. "No," the elder Victorian answers, "some of them don't. But they all should. Just look at the bungalow over there. It had no idea it would be the next on the block to fall into the mold so many owners are forcing their old houses into these days. They shove, they hack, they cut, they paint, they layer, they do anything they can to shove them into that mold. It seems they'll stop at nothing and yet they still insist the history, the character of the house is there. Well I say if you tear out the beginning and end of a story without reading the entire thing, and then attempt to rewrite both and expect them to comply with the story in its entirety, there's no way the story will be anything remotely similar to the original. Yet that's what these owners expect, and the sad part is, most people believe it."

"There's one thing I don't understand though," the young Victorian says. "I've had an outdated kitchen since the 1940's, and my linoleum is an unsightly burnt orange and yellow that's bubbling in some places. My baseboards, treads and banisters are all worn in spots from centuries of dirty shoes and hands upon them. My windows barely contain winter's chill, my past owners are always grumbling about the drafts coming through and the high heating bills. Every one of my floorboards creak and none of my walls are plumb...yet none of these has been corrected, and all of my owners have celebrated these imperfections. Why are houses like the bungalow, who are much younger than me, stripped so abruptly of their history and coated with a thick layer of perfection while I...remain as I was?"

"You're one of the lucky ones kid," the elder Victorian answers, chuckling again. "There are a precious few people who embrace such imperfections as yours...and mine." It have been the sun still hovering above them, but the younger Victorian thought it saw the elder wink from its third-story Palladian windows. "They love the creaky floorboards, the scarred woodwork that's a darker shade than the preferred lighter shade of most houses. They delight at the blatant lack of cabinet space and the bubbly linoleum that's a kaleidoscope of colors that if you look hard enough will take you straight back to the 1940's, when it was all the rage. Both you and I, kid, have been lucky to have such people living within us, and preserving our history, rather than hack away at it like the poor bungalow across the street. Let us hope that for the rest of the centuries we're permitted to sit quietly on this lovely street and enjoy small town life, that we continue to attract such owners. Because I'm telling you, when I see more and more houses along this street get turned, it cuts me deep, deeper than my sinking field stone foundation below me. I don't remember the day I was built, but I do know from talk in the 1920's that I was at one time the most elegant and large Victorian in this town, you were built in my image, did you know that?"

The young Victorian looks up at the elder Victorian soaring a story above it, and smiles. "I do know, yes. And I am honored, for I too bear the testament of my years proudly, and like a limping ship coming into the harbor have a hard-won battle, I am celebrated for my tenacity against time and my embracing of at the same time. That's the true balance at the heart of every old isn't it? Finding that balance between warding off the damages of time, yet embracing it the same, for to stop fighting it would spell disaster like the abandoned Federal home five houses down, but to embrace it too much would mean a lethal crossing over of the threshold...and I'd end up like the bungalow."

"You are wise for your young age," The elder Victorian praises. "I have taught you well. And yes, you are correct. That is the balance all old houses must face when they reach a certain age. You and I, we've been blessed with owners who have made that balance easier for us. Let's hope we'll find such people once again."

"And soon," the younger Victorian adds with a smile, glancing at the 'for sale' sign planted deep into its sprawling yard, the sign swinging back and forth in the slight summer breeze. It couldn't help but notice how the sign swung in tandem with the porch swing hanging from the bungalow's porch. Its smile broadened when it noticed a tentative ray of sun stretched out on the swing, casting finger-like shadows upon the paint-peeling floorboards of the porch. You'll go back inside one day, it thinks, watching the sun a moment longer before closing its eyes contentedly against its warmth. The bungalow will find that balance. We all will.