House dreaming in a foreign land

It has been a weekend of trying to renovate our new house—even if only in our minds. After the frustration with the architects, we got clear that the thing for us to do was settle in our minds exactly what we want the layout to be. This task, as it turns out, is WAY easier said than done. Michael and the kids and I have spent hours at the new house this weekend, weighing options, pacing and measuring rooms, building and knocking down walls and windows in our minds. Yesterday we brought Naomi’s friend J along; this afternoon our friends J and P. Still I don’t seem to have the flash of lightning that I keep expecting that I’ll have when the right idea comes along. Where’s the flash?

We are coming up with ideas about where the rooms go, what it’ll be like to head upstairs and develop the second floor, what on earth to do about an entry. I have been back and forth on the question of how much we should try to recover the bungalow, 1920s sense of the house or how much we should take it as a box and make it a modern box of an open-plan house.

I am struck by several things as I puzzle this through. I realise that this underscores my foreignness in a bunch of different ways. One is a matter of taste: What is the New Zealand bungalow aesthetic? How important is it that it be rescued? In the US, the bungalow is a key—and cherished—architectural form. Here, it’s another US import (much like, er, myself). So the fact that the house has lost all of its bungalow charm over the years, is that a shame, or is that a US form becoming more native? Do I attempt to restore bungalow-esque pieces of it or do I scrub them off and make the house more Paekakariki? (And what on earth would that be?)

I’m also struck by how far away we are from people whose opinions we have valued over the long haul. It was a delight to have J and P at the house today because they’re just about the only ones we know who have even seen the place. We tend to talk this through with one another, running in endless cycles of drawing boxes on post-its as we try to come up with a different layout—the one that will make things look perfect. My mother would have Serious Opinions about this. Dad would shrug his shoulders and suggest that we run the less expensive plan (but even that would be a help!). MH would suggest moving a wall or window and things would begin to fall into place. And ah, how we miss living in the same country as BI, who would use his years of experience renovating old houses to help us with this old house.

And there’s the way that I also don’t really understand the real estate market here enough to make good decisions about how much to invest in the house. Things go on the market without prices and they sell and I never know how much things sold for. And there is no such thing as a comparable house in a village that is all hills and valleys with beach shacks and lovely renovated villas in the same block, with a house with sea views worth so much more than its next door neighbour without them. Who knows what is a safe investment in this house?

Of course, there are some wonders about the foreignness of this experience that make me smile with delight, too. Pulling on a loose piece of wallpaper yesterday, we discovered layer of wallpaper on layer of wallpaper—nothing unusual there. Only under the wallpaper layers was a layer of burlap. That’s odd. And under the burlap, where in any circa 1920s house I’ve ever been in would have plaster over lathe walls, here the walls are made of…wood. Just wooden boards, roughly-hewn 1 by 4s that march up the walls over the studs. Who has ever heard of this?? Other delightful oddities? This is a house with lovely views on 100% of the sides. For three sides of the house, the view of the sea is the main attraction—today a wild and wintery surging silver. For the back of the house, it’s the hidden garden and the hill/mountain in the distance with its scattering of sheep. This protecting of the view is as foreign to me as the wooden walls.

I realise that this unsettled feeling about this decision is mirrored in other unsettled parts of my life—the work life and social life aspects. And that I want it all settled, want it all to be crystal clear with some lovely poof of insight. I can hear Patsy (once back from her holiday) counselling me to enjoy the view and not rush so fast to make decisions. But if we can’t trust the architect who’s on the job, we either need to give clear instructions or else begin the process of finding a new architect. And each setback costs us months of owning two houses rather than one, months of double mortgages. So making the decision sounds important.

Here, just for the record, are our choices:

We either go upstairs or not.

If we go upstairs, we’ll have oodles of common living space on the first floor and three wee bedrooms on the second floor—each with lovely views. We’ll have views in the lounge area from the south island to Kapiti, and get sun every second it’s in the sky. We can find some (heretofore undetermined) brilliant way to deal with the entrance issues. We can find a way to have closets. We can put the books somewhere. Pros: open sweeping views from the lounge, sun all day, lots of areas for us to work and play in. Cons: most expensive, most intrusive, and do we trust ourselves enough as designers to use a plan I first drew on the back of a used post-it?

If we don’t go upstairs, we’ll have a house just barely the right size—no extra (other than a small guest bedroom, which feels like a necessity rather than an option). Other than the lounge/dining room/kitchen at the heart of the house, the bedrooms will be smallish, and the views will be segmented—this piece of the view in this room, another piece of the view in another room. Storage is an issue (because the rooms are small) but because there are lots of divisions, bookshelf space is readily available. Pros: less expensive, less intrusive, simpler to begin and complete. Cons: for years living in Cambridge I dreamt of finding new rooms because the condo was too small—this one makes me worry that I’ll begin those dreams again.

So, as I fall asleep at the keyboard and the children call for me to tuck them in, those are the big decisions on our plate. I neither know what to do nor have a plan for beginning to know what to do. One assumes that I will come to a decision at some point. One wonders that that might be. If any of you have ideas, I’m delighted to hear them.