Change your life. Dump your couch.
“I wanted to quit watching so much T.V, but that was too hard, so I decided to get rid of my couch and replaced it with a metal folding chair. That way, I could keep watching all the shows I wanted, but it forced me to really decide whether it was worth doing it on a cold, hard chair.”
This is the point in the story where my wife gets triggered and chimes in.
“That’s not how the story happened, you always tell it wrong!”
She doesn’t hate it because the lesson I learned isn’t true but because I’m casting myself as a modern-day Pavlov with feng shui insights and techniques to alter negative human behavior.
The real story goes something like this:
It took me twenty years to realize that both plants and humans thrive in specific environments depending on their species. By changing our space, I could change my and my family’s lives.
Years ago, I flipped houses for a living, where I met a woman named Lyla. For Lyla, ‘flippers’ stood slightly above homo habilis and used car salesmen on the evolution of man chart. “Remuddlers!” she’d mutter, summoning all her energy not to spit at the very mention of our name.
My first encounter with Lyla was during a roof replacement on an abandoned home in her neighborhood. For years, water had poured under a blue tarp and through an 8-foot hole in the home of an old Vietnam war vet, necessitating a complete tear-off, reinforcement of the rafters and sheathing.
While I stood staring up at our contractor installing new roof vents, up walked Lyla, her white hair pulled back in a bun, bangs cut straight as if on a ruler. An old, faded denim shirt, splattered with wood stain, hung loosely over her petite frame.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she growled. Her cigarette jumped up and down like a toddler tugging at your pant leg as she spoke.
“We are installing a new roof. You should have seen the giant hole that was there before!” I answered cheerfully.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Lyla waved her hand to the side dismissively. “What the hell are those things?” her head nodded upward to the new vents.
“Oh, those? Those are roof vents to aid in airflow,” I began to sense this might not be a friendly neighborhood pop-in.
“Come with me,” said Lyla. She grabbed me by the shirtsleeve and led me around the side of the house. “Look up there!” One slight, thin finger pointed to a louvered vent just beneath the roofline. “What do you see?”
Once my parochial school flashbacks subsided, I sheepishly responded, “Little windows… in the cross gables?”
“Yes, little…windows…in…the…cross gables.” She paused a second between each word to let them fully sink in. “Do you know how long those ‘little windows’ have been there?”
Her voice accelerated its pace, increasing in volume.
“Nineteen-goddamned-fourteen! And do you know why? To provide airflow to the attic without any god-awful unsightly plastic bumps to the roofline! Do you even have any idea what the fuck a National Historic District is? We have rules here!” By now, Lyla was fuming.
My first reaction was to recoil. Who did this woman think she was? Where did she get off chastising me? Did she not see the shape the house was in before we started? Didn’t she care that we were trying to comply with all necessary modern building codes? We were taking a shithole and turning it into a home for low-income families? Did that not count for something?
It took everything I had not to snap back at her. Ignoring my natural instinct to defend my bruised ego, I decided, for some reason, to diffuse the situation and attempt to learn something.
“So, what would you do if you were managing the restoration?” I offered.
The answer to that one little question planted a seed that changed my life and led to my love of all things Craftsman and ultimately winning an award for Best Historic Restoration in Des Moines.
Lyla walked me through the home piece by piece. As we picked through the ‘trash,’ I learned that what looked like junk was actually cut and carnival glassware. That dusty plant stand? Stickley Brothers furniture.
Distinct circular patterns in the wood revealed the process by which quarter-sawn white oak was milled. We removed old windows exposing frayed ropes in the counterweight system which Lyla promptly mended. Exposed ceiling beams regained their original glory, and rotting screens in the basement were restretched and hung on the patio with a final touch of hammered copper pulls.
Lyla taught me the philosophy behind the Craftsman movement. She explained how before the Arts and Craft movement (and its companion, the Prairie style), the High Victorian, with its elaborate rococo, ornate spires and compartmentalized living quarters, ruled the day.
The Arts and Crafts Movement sought to reconnect people to their humanity. A new focus emerged, placing an emphasis on the handmade, standing in stark contrast to the Industrial Age and its mass-manufacturing processes, which Arts and Crafts adherents felt were dehumanizing and disconnected people from the natural world.
Unlike Victorian homes with their compartmentalized parlors, sitting rooms, and dining areas, the Craftsman home removed barriers that kept families apart. Architects imbued their designs with the type of world they aspired to create. Inglenooks replaced formal parlors to provide respites for reading and family games while mimicking nature’s openness and natural flow.
The exteriors of the homes were transformed from gaudy, vertical Victorian anachronisms to expansive, horizontal rooflines that fit naturally against the Midwestern sky.
“A Craftsman,” Lyla explained, “should feel as though it sprouted organically from the surrounding environment. The stone foundation mirror the rocks you would find in a creek bed. Simple corbels support the beadboard overhangs, subtly hinting at the branches of a tree. Even the color palette of the paint with its browns, slate grays and natural woods are patterned after a more grounded, earthy aesthetic.”
Perhaps it was because we had grown up somewhat lower-middle-class, or maybe our family merely had a more utilitarian view of housing, but for the first time, I could see the practical outworking of the philosophy I studied in college through alterations to your physical surroundings.
Lyla’s ideas were grounded in something substantial and real. They connected to something in my soul. I felt more proud of that house than any other home we revitalized. It had taken time, energy, research, and knowledge, and we’d saved a piece of history. It also required tons of money to find craftsmen capable of restoring it to the original (given I lacked the knowledge to do it myself). The easy money lay in making little houses out of ticky-tacky that all looked just the same.
Back to dumping your couch. When we were first married, I’d got a great deal on a house, did some quick paint and carpet, and called it a day. I bought my wife a pretentious little purebred lapdog who I called Fuji (after Chief’s linebacker Scott Fujita), although, on her official pedigree papers, she went by Lady Fujita Honeybrook.
Running a business, golfing, playing basketball, poker & business trips, I was ‘all go, no whoa”. Fuji absorbed my frenetic energy and acted out by “spite peeing” on our carpet whenever her royal highness was put-out at my ignoring her (see: not getting home in time to let her out).
One day my wife was tired of the nasty carpet and took scissors to it. Together we hauled it out to the curb for large-item pickup. The basement carpet was even worse due to a nagging water problem I’d not fixed– opting instead to crash on the couch with a beer after work. The equally nasty couch soon joined the carpet and was replaced by some folding chairs in front of the TV.
These are the “details” my wife thinks are potentially relevant to my story. After a certain amount of trips to the basement, I realized, that without a comfy couch the World Series of Poker didn’t quite have the same draw on a metal chair. I started to search out other places to sit. I’d grab a cigar and sit out on the back porch and read a book, like the Power of Habit. Eventually, neither of us was watching much T.V. and we decided to dump cable altogether. But, I still didn’t fix the basement or the leak in my roof.
It wasn’t until I lost four businesses and everything I’d worked for that the seed Lyla planted years ago began to germinate in the ashes of my personal forest fire. A friend asked me one day, “What do you really want most of all?” I told him I wanted my wife to be able to breathe. I wanted to give her the life she deserved. I thought that meant becoming a multi-millionaire and us to achieve financial freedom– to give her something massively big. She would have settled for me, in a dry house, with lots of light where friends gathered under lights strung from our tree in a nice neighborhood in the middle of Iowa.
“Then, do that.” my friend said.
Doing that has taken me almost two years of nights and weekends. There were no shortcuts. It required asking the questions, “What type of life do we want to have as a family?” And listening to feedback when I asked, “How do we build a house that makes that happen?” I didn’t have a huge budget, because I’d lost it all. I had to learn the skills myself. Turns out there’s not much you can’t learn on YouTube. I stripped down doors, learn to tile, level floors, built my wife a lab, my kids a trampoline pad, etc. All the things I used to hire out I gained a newfound appreciation for. Our family has been repotted. Our roots can now stretch, the light can reach us and together we’ll watch new shoots & blossoms appear.
And, as close as I can gather, that’s how the story actually happened.
