It took some doing to get my partner, Helge, to house hunt. We live in downstate Illinois. As someone who grew up in Austin, where $200,000 gets you a closet with an exposed lightbulb, I thought the prices here were insanely affordable.

But Helge’s last place was a basement room in Teterboro, where $200,000 gets you a toilet cubicle. With his expectations set below rock bottom, he was content to stay in our apartment even as rent was jacked up annually, because at least we had windows and a fridge.

In 2018, I showed him a listing for a particular house that I knew he’d love. He harrumphed and refused to consider it.

September 2019, we bought that exact house.

Helge ended up set on the house for the same reason it was on the market for over a year.

It was kind of a mess.

(All apologies to our poor realtor, who showed us a dozen other properties. Becky, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know he disdained everything that would normally be considered a selling point, like vaulted ceilings, kempt furnishings, and cared-for rooms.)

Helge’s dream house was built in 1979. The flooring? Showing its age. Wallpaper? Oh yes. Yard? Somewhere under all the weeds and fallen branches, probably. Mechanicals updated? Never. Not the AC or furnace, and especially not the water heater.

Everything about it made Helge feel at home.

I kind of thought we might be buying the house from The Money Pit. But anything’s an upgrade after sharing a one bedroom apartment with a guy who needs four screens running to relax. The stairs could collapse and the plumbing could rebel and the wallpaper could spiral down in giant floppy strips, and I’d still be able to sit in the middle of the floor in any of the empty rooms and write on my phone.

Helge swore it wouldn’t come to that. He said he’d fix the house up himself.

His ex-wife and I had a good laugh about his track record for home renovations. Helge’s a perfectionist. He gets paralyzed by worry that he’ll screw up something important.

So, I thought trying would build character, and told him to have at it. He decided we should start by ripping the Jimmy Carter-era carpet out.

The following are extremely flattering pictures taken by the selling agent, who worked some camera magic to make all these rooms seem huge.

One day I returned from work to find rolls of carpet flying out of an upstairs window and (mostly) into the dumpster below. It was all gone in short order. For the foreseeable future, we would be sleeping on mattresses in the downstairs closet.

Next, we painted. Many, many friends pitched in, and I’m extremely grateful to all of them. Because phew, it was a lot of work.

Over the next six months, we laid flooring. We went with engineered hardwood. Plank after plank was tapped into place and nailed down. As of March, only two rooms remained.

And then everyone was told to socially isolate at home and my workplace shut down.

So I used all my newfound free time to help finish my office and create this blog.

This is the first thing I’m writing from my desk since it moved out of the closet.

I haven’t emotionally processed this yet. I can’t believe all this space is mine. I could do jumping jacks. I have a door that shuts. For the first time in ages, my keyboard is cat hair free!

I wrote more than 300k words in 2019: on my phone, on my laptop, at a folding table in the dining room, at a desk on the wall opposite Helge’s gaming setup.

There’s still plenty of work to be done around the house. Some of it’s pretty urgent; our neighbors came by to warn us that our trees have never been trimmed, ever. I’ve been finding big broken branches on the lawn and I do NOT want to find any on the roof.

But there are so many obstacles to writing that are just gone now. I bet I can beat 300k this year.

And I’m going to start sharing what I’ve already done. That’s what this blog is for.