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Transcript

House Work · Letter to America

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: We decided to do it ourselves.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: The house needed a fresh lick of paint, and with only two of us left in this big old house in Istanbul, it seemed like we ought to be able to handle it ourselves.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: The existing paint was almost as old as the house my family moved into in 1995, the same year Mimi and I moved back to America from Asia, newlyweds building a life together in the States, while my parents and sister made a new house, a home, in Istanbul.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: My mother had insisted on buying the house as a shell.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: She had her own vision for every finish and didn't trust the developers' contractors to deliver it.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: So she became the contractor herself, finding and hiring the Ustas, the craftsmen she wanted.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: One of her main criteria was whether they could actually listen to a woman giving them instructions.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Did they already know best, or were they curious and creative enough to help her bring her vision to life?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: They moved in as soon as there was a place for a bed and running water, while she was still finishing the house around them.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Love it or hate it, we all treated that as part of living there.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Within a couple of months, we came to visit for our first anniversary and slept in the house for the first time.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: There were no doors, yes, even in the bathrooms.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Privacy sometimes required whistling while you worked, so people kept a polite distance.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: There were no banisters on the stairs or balcony over the two-story living room.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Utilities took turns working, water, electricity, and phone service.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: We usually got two out of three.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: When we turned off the forest road into our valley after dark, we all waited to see if the electricity was on.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was a work in progress for many years.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Just over thirty years later, I sit at my desk writing this, with the smell of fresh paint in the air, and my wife standing on a ladder with a brush and roller in hand.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Edges taped, damage plastered, primer applied, and a second coat of paint almost finished.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Her family would be proud.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Do it yourself was practically a family credo for her.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: On the morning of our wedding at their home, we woke to the sound of the table saw as final repairs were being completed only hours before the guests arrived.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: In that sense, our families were oddly similar.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Both houses were works in progress, and both families had an intense desire to do things their own way.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: The difference was that for my mother, a work in progress was a means to an end.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Contracting it herself let her live on site, keep control of the work and the workers, and save money while it was being finished.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: When it was done, it was largely done.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: She never stopped renovating, but after that it was mostly style rather than substance.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Mimi's folks were different.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Their house was always a work in progress.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: DIY wasn't simply a way of getting the house finished.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was part of how they lived and held things together, physically and emotionally.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'm not sure their house was ever as finished as it was when they were getting ready to sell.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Her dad owned a house on the water in Westchester and was the kind of homeowner who installed his own whole house vacuum cleaning system in the late 70s, working side by side with Mr.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Pepi, a man who could have single-handedly made every DIY video you could possibly imagine.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you could imagine the internet and YouTube 50 years ago.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier this week, we found our own version of Mr.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Pepi, two Turkmen brothers undaunted by a glass-thin room with years of water damage that felt a little beyond even Mimi's family's handiness.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I should probably have disclosed at the outset what you've probably gathered by now, that I'm writing an essay about do-it-yourself home improvement, and have done almost none of it myself.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: If I take my wife to the store and help her buy supplies and translate for her, are we doing it ourselves?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: If my sister in Toronto found the Turkmen brothers, made the first contact, negotiated the job, and arranged for them to tackle that room, did she help us do it?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: We split the costs and made the decisions together, but somehow the only Turkish citizen who actually ended up standing on a ladder was my wife, who only recently became one.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: To be fair, I am very adept at moral support and pep talks.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: We all contribute what we can.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Does occasionally helping when asked count?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Putting on some music to accompany the effort?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: I also helped Mimi Kerry and set up the four-meter folding ladder she's standing on, and strongly supported the paint color that we decided to go with.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: I recognize that saying I did it myself might be a stretch, since Home Depot spent years encouraging us with you can do it, we can help.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Even in Turkey, Bauhaus arrived in 1996 and helped establish Kindinyap, the concept of do-it-yourself.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the Dewalt Sander, Mimi has been wielding, was purchased from there a few months ago.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The language and tools of DIY may have traveled pretty well.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: The meaning?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not so much.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Growing up in Turkey, I don't remember there being quite the same moral premium on wielding tools yourself.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing a good Usta, hiring someone who knew what they were doing, and paying them fairly wasn't necessarily a lesser option.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: My mother certainly didn't think the fact that someone else's capable hands were doing the work made the house any less her creation.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, unlike my father-in-law, my relationship with DIY is inversely correlated to my cash flow in a way that makes it hard for me to claim any of the moral high ground my wife occupies atop that ladder with paint flex in her hair.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm honest, I don't really do it myself out of some responsible desire to save, but because sometimes I simply can't afford not to.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Possessive pronouns reveal another part of the story.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: My parents paid for this house as it was being built, two payments a year from the drawing board until they moved in.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: By the time they carried that first bed through the door, they owned it, outright.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: When they said our house, there was almost nothing figurative about the possessive.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't necessarily plan to stay forever.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: My mother regularly professed a desire to move back into the heart of the city.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: My father loved being out here near the forest in the Black Sea.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: From time to time they seriously talked about selling, even imagining at one point that they might move permanently to our house in Bodrum.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow the idea of leaving was always more appealing than actually leaving.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: They paid for the house, moved in, finished it, maintained it, and lived in it.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Staying wasn't their intention really.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was the accumulated effect of not leaving.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I remember the first house we bought in America.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was just turning 30, we had two kids in diapers, and thought we'd buy a cheap fixer upper, do it up, and use the profit to move ourselves up a rung on the real estate ladder.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Our financial advisor said, That's a great idea.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Remind me, do you have a lot of time or a lot of money?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: We put 5% down and gave the place a bit of a spit polish.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: We called it our house just as confidently, even though we had very little of our money in it.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: We did just enough ourselves to feel that we had somehow earned the six-figure profit we eventually made from the sale a few years later.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: We did it again, and then again.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Borrow, buy, improve, build equity, sell, repeat.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Until the global financial crisis knocked us off the ladder.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: We moved to San Francisco, rented out the house we owned, rented a place for ourselves, and eventually sold, at a loss.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: After that, we sat out the Bay Area housing boom, too gun shy, to climb back up.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: My mother had a related expression.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: She used to say that at some point you had to stop working for the house and get the house to work for you.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Ours ended up in a few ads and even TV shows as a shooting location, and we rented the place in Bodrum for short vacation stays.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: It paid for some of the home improvements over the years.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: More importantly, these houses have paid us handsomely in family memories, while quietly becoming valuable assets in the background.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: We've always said that for the right price the house was on the market.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think my mom always kept that number just high enough to keep the market at bay.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a house, a home, and home equity.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lot of house for the two of us, with our kids making their home in Brooklyn, and my dad, sister, and nephews in Toronto.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, it's a lot of equity to have tied up in one asset.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Which of those is driving the fresh coat of paint?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Good question.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, we're really happy we took on this project.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: We love the way something as straightforward as a paint job can make a familiar space feel fresh and new.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Mimi is putting our mark on it, our belongings in it, making this feel even more like our home.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: While also bringing us a little closer to the day when it may make sense to sell.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Someday soon this will be a house that someone else buys and hopes to make their home.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: We hope they like the color we chose.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know I'm still saying we, and Mimi's still standing on the ladder.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is Hondoline from Istumble.