Tricksey Hobbitses

My house is best described as…well, you try. It has a turret, a cat-slide roof, ecclesiastical carved interior details, plaster walls scored like stone, and a Being John Malkovitch room. It has sixties parquet floors, forties tile work, eighties carpeting and, alas, seventies linoleum in the bathroom. The solemn formal door chimes introduce one to the tiny cottage/castle/rectory entry. We’ve got beautiful handmade chandeliers and unfinished closets, hardwood floors and plywood shelves, hand-carved mantel and two dollars worth of tile on the hearth. Is it French country, is it British cottage, or is it sixties moderne? Is it quality handiwork or cheap construction? Is it beautifully designed or awkwardly put together?As you can see, the answer is “yes.”

Normally reserved individuals walk into my house and start opening things. They can’t help it. They immediately start noticing a key strategy of the builder: He was a storage fanatic. Nooks and crannies, check; hidden storage, check; extraneous shelves, check; locked, lined, five-foot deep cupboard high in the bedroom?; check; room under the stairs, check; room under the turret, check; tie-racks, bolt jars, pants racks, check. Two activists lived in this house with a series of student boarders/groundskeepers upstairs and I am telling you the storage is not to be believed. When viewing the house I actually pulled a plank out of the paneling because I thought it was yet another secret panel. I was one plank over. The realtor didn’t even flinch. I have dismantled the 10 by 10 extra storage shed (with electricity!) because the backyard is 30 by 30 and if I fill up the house enough to get to the shed, I will be certifiable. If anyone is looking for a dismantled piano-I have most of one in the stand-up storage area over the office and garage. By the way, you know the answer to the question “But is there good kitchen storage?”Of course not. The linen closet is 5 inches deep. This house has miles of semi-convenient storage. But if the apocalypse comes 2 families easily can hide unnoticed. They just won’t be able to reach their dishes.

Every space was filled when I looked at the house, which is why I could afford it. People I brought with me to see the place would start out smiling and visibly sag inside the living room. The family had taken everything out of the storage spots and the other properties to be packed. It was amazing, as in: like a maze. Moving trucks and two dumpsters later, I continue to find scraps and details of the former family members. My family actually gets kind of competitive about excavation finds. Just when I think we can’t find anything else, we uncover 1968 “Buy Black” literature or a 40 year old stain removal chart. Old driver's license (before photos), old box of Soviet matches, two envelopes of parakeet feathers and a menu to a 1930s ocean liner, or a wretched chaise mattress- Well, the mattress was being used as insulation in the eaves. Those Depression era people did not mess around. Every item in the house was left with its original receipt, owners’ manual and warranty. Warranty? The garage door opener looks as if it opened the doors of Amelia Earhart’s house. This thing has been past warranty for 50 years. But it is just like this house to have an old mechanism which has been serviced and works fine.

Turning on a light switch is like playing a harpsichord or following a bee’s path. The man produced flawless plaster work and erratic/impressive electrical connections. For a house going into its sixties, it has the amount of outlets required in a new office building. Several of them are keyed to light switches-but which ones?After 2 years, I approach the many 4-plex switches with a 40% chance of hitting the correct one. I am improving a lot.

Casa Quirky is hobbit style. Everything is just a little smaller than one might think. But there are many small spaces. When wandering around the house looking for storage, people sometimes get disoriented. Guests regularly will call “Where am I?” and we’ll ask them to describe what it looks like there. Others will be confident until they try and figure out how the parts are connected: “When I was in the breezeway I was looking into a room-where is that?”At every meal, new guests will get up to double check how something is oriented. But if they want to know the temperature they are in luck. A person cannot walk 15 feet without a temperature update. I meditated on the two thermostats in the narrow hallway: they were technologically advanced; did they really think each wall would have a different reading? Then I realized one was Celsius and the other Fahrenheit. You may not know where you are or how to get to the other side but you will have a thermometer at the ready.

After seeing this place, I was ruined for other houses. This one retains the strong impression of its building family and yet invites new ideas. It is a house which inhabits while it is inhabited. Tricksey Hobbitses, indeed.