First-person America
By Carrie Lukas
WASHINGTON, D.C.—When my husband suggested we buy and fix up a dilapidated townhouse in Washington D.C.’s historic Mount Pleasant neighborhood, it sounded terribly romantic.
We didn’t purchase your average fixer-upper, with out-of-date shag carpeting and cracked bathroom tiles. Our once-grand three-level townhouse had been tortured by its previous owners. They hid leaky pipes behind drywall, and boarded up broken windows.
A back door no longer on its hinges was braced shut with a metal pole. Our “as is” purchase included a houseful of rusty light fixtures, several soggy rolls of rotting carpet in the basement, and a still-filled, but unplugged, refrigerator.
Like a student who enters college thinking of caps and gowns and instead discovers the reality of all-night study sessions, I quickly learned that painting trim and dusting walls comes only after months of grueling and filthy preparatory labor. For every hour swinging a paintbrush I put in 20 more scrubbing and scraping. Demolition and cleanup occupied more of my time than I would ever have imagined. Hauling bags of broken tile and plaster to the dump became our weekend “dates.”
Though home improvement is harder than I’d imagined, pride of ownership is far more powerful. Sure, the place was a dump…but it was our dump. Not just because we hold the deed, but because we’ve “mixed” our labor with the place.
Small victories came to loom large. In our second week in the house, my husband and a friend decided to dedicate a Saturday afternoon to replacing a back window that had been boarded up. They started work around noon. By midnight, a gaping hole still opened into the back alley and a torrential downpour was well under way. Yet another few hours
into Sunday morning, the window was successfully installed. I still marvel each time it opens and closes.
There are things you would never do except to your own home. The barbed-wire-topped fence in our back alley enclosed years’ worth of garbage—and had clearly been used by neighborhood homeless as both bed and bathroom. As much as I wanted to ignore that ungodly mess, I knew that no one else was going to clean it up. It was my property and
therefore my responsibility. So on went nuclear-waste-grade boots and gloves and out went soaked newspapers, beer cans—and far, far worse.
D.C. city officials, alas, see homeowners as little more than a revenue source. A labyrinth of regulations and permit requirements drives up the cost of doing even minor work, and ends up turning many District homeowners into criminals. Last year, we splurged on
professionals to replace our dysfunctional vinyl window frames with new energy-efficient ones. Two days later, a historic-preservation inspector had tacked a violation notice on the front door threatening stratospheric fines. Though vinyl frames are the norm
on every block in our neighborhood, the city said that our house required expensive wooden ones. So our windows were once again ripped out and replaced, wasting time, energy, and resources to no one’s benefit—except perhaps to the D.C. bureaucrats drunk on enforcing useless rules.
But if the bureaucrats don’t appreciate the motive force of property ownership, our neighbors do. They often stop by to congratulate us on hard-won gains. The ghostly outline of old graffiti still adorns some front bricks, but people focus on the progress and stop by to compliment the house’s continued improvement. A neighborhood homeless man informed me that, “I used to sleep on that front porch. I don’t do it any more. Your place looks real nice.”
I thanked him. It does look nice, relatively speaking. The porch roof still sags, and the cornices are rusty, but I see a lovely home in the making. And that keeps me running to the dump on weekends.
Carrie Lukas is director of policy at the Independent Women’s Forum.
