The perfect first home

Our first home had been on the market for two years for a good reason. Every time it rained, water poured through the sieve of a roof over the ancient kitchen. A great chunk of plaster and wall paper was missing from the wall beside the kitchen table. The appliances were a tiny ancient refrigerator with a minuscule aluminum freezer, an oversized white enamel, gas stove and a stained sink. Other young couples said the two-story, 100-year-old house needed too much work to make it livable. We bought it.
My fiancee and I started to remove the layers of ancient wallpaper in the dining room to freshen it up before our wedding. The paper peeled off easily – accompanied by an avalanche of crumbling plaster. “We will have to patch that,” my soon-to-be noted. He said the same thing after the next strip. The third time he decided we had to remove the plaster and put up dry wall. It was easy to see why the plaster had fallen from the kitchen wall.
My mother and sister flew in to help me before our wedding. They deserve all the credit for preparing the house for my instant family. I was too busy with other things to help much. They cleaned, scrubbed walls, knocked dirt and dehydrated insect carcasses out of the cupboards, filled the few kitchen cupboards with new equipment and made up the beds.
When I stopped by to chat between errands my mom would ask, “Is this OK? Do you want this cleaned?”
Caught up with wedding plans and my instant family of two sons, I waved her questions aside, “As long as it is sanitary, I don’t care what it looks like.”
“Well I don’t know about sanitary,” she said, “But it will be clean.”
Mom studied the hole in the kitchen wall beside the table. She greeted me one afternoon proudly showing off a homemade bulletin board of cardboard covered with heavy cloth that she had tacked up over the hole. It covered a major flaw in the room and was perfect for displaying the boys’ drawings and school work.
I thought we would have it for years. When my husband-to-be initially listed the necessary repairs to the house, he said, “You won’t be able to have a new kitchen for five y ears. Kitchens cost a lot of money and we won’t have enough for a while.”
I wasn’t worried. I liked the freshly cleaned old kitchen. With the homemade bulletin board it felt homey.
On our first anniversary, I pulled down the bulletin board and the remaining plaster around it. My husband put up dry wall and had a phone installed so I could reach him when I needed to go to the hospital to have our first child.
The night I said, “It’s time to go,” he asked me to wait while he finished connecting the hot water to our new sink resting on the cupboards he was building. Before that baby turned one the kitchen was finished with modern appliances including a stack washer and dryer.
Nine years later we sold the house to the first and only couple who viewed it. They thought it made the perfect first home.