Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home Read Online Free PDF

They are, Stanley tells me, appraisals and listings of neighboring houses. “Lookit,” he says, “they put this house over on Browning at one-eighty-nine!” He backhands the paper as if it has told him a real boy-and-howdy of a joke. “This one on Emerson, one-seventy-five! And look here, they’re the same as this house. Two bedrooms—okay, so this one on Browning has got three—and one bath—well, the Browning place has another half bath downstairs—but it’s just a shitter on the main drain. I can add a half bath in a jiffy if it’s important to you, but I’m telling you, in the basement they’re no good for any real work a toilet needs to do. Gotta get whatever you put in it back up to street level. Anyway, beyond that, those properties are exactly like this one.”
    Even on the poor photocopies I can see that the other houses are far better tended—like bonsai trees managed by a fleet of the emperor’s gardeners compared to the haggard shrub of this house. But somehow Stanley has got me hooked. Hooked but hopeless. I feel I’m doing an advanced math problem, where
x
is the house now and the solution is a complete renovation, with shiny floors, cheerily painted walls, and a kitchen that could never be confused with the current one—but I have no idea how to solve for
y.
My homeowning ignorance at this point could not possibly be overstated, being, as it is, worse than my math metaphors.
    The state of the house and the urgency of the market have paralyzed me. I’ll mention this place to Jenae because, of course, we’ve had our eye on it, but she won’t have to go inside. She’ll be able to smell it from the curb—
cat piss! crack cocaine!
—and she’ll kick me out of the car and say something timeless like, “I don’t even know who you are anymore,” and that will be that. You simply cannot profoundly disagree about the single biggest investment of your life. Certainly not violently disagree, which is what I’m afraid is in store.
    Jenae has worked as, for, and with artists and designers. Her taste is as eclectic as it is impeccable, and her opinions are resolute in proportion to their individuality. You don’t get to be the first woman to go to graduate school from practically your whole college by simpering and acquiescing. She likes what she likes and she is who she is. She’s got Annie Hall’s spunk and singularity, Katharine Hepburn’s grit, grace, and determination, and, if pushed, Annie Oakley’s quick draw and deadeye. She is not a person who does what you expect. And while I so love that about her, it also scares me. About this house, I don’t rightly know what she’ll think.
    “I know it seems unbelievable,” Stanley says, “but this house is worth a lot more money than I’m asking for. And until I get what I know is fair, I’ll keep doing things myself that’ll make it look better to the womenfolk. The way I see it, you buy it like it is, you get to finish up things the way you want, let the wife feel like she’s in on it.”
    The air seems a little less putrid for a moment and I’m able to consider what he’s saying, condescension aside. There is a kind of truth to it, I know. I just don’t know what kind of truth, or whether it will have any purchase with Jenae.
    “Look, I’ll show you. You’ll see for yourself. I redone all the plumbing, all the ’lectrical, even put a new roof on—new sheathing and all.” He pauses to scratch his overly exposed, tapiocaed thigh. “Everything like that I done right. Pulled out all the old knob-and-tube wiring. Not just at the outlets, neither. All the way down the walls. Big pain in the keister, but I done it right.”
    The precious little I know about homeownership, picked up from friends and family, is that the things he just mentioned are the reasons people take out third mortgages and hire contractors who more or less end up moving in and selling the house themselves after they’ve bankrupted the owners.
    I glance