Essay: The Dream House

Editor’s note: the following is a long essay (3790 words) about one family’s attempt to sell and buy a Davis home.

By Andy Jones

Part 1 – Upending Our Lives

“I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.” Bob Dylan

Finally, we told our friends, we had found the ideal home for our unusual family, and our offer was accepted! We couldn’t believe our luck.

Nestled on beautiful Olympic Drive near my son Truman’s junior high school, our new West Davis home promised enough room for each of us. Truman loved his room’s built-in desk, Jukie appreciated the view of the street from his full-length windows, and Geneva was amazed that she would have her own studio apartment over the garage, complete with a tiny bathroom and a kitchenette. Kate and I appreciated that our new bedroom, a sanctuary lit by two skylights with plantation shutters, would have enough room for both an exercise bike and a treadmill, and that, for the first time in our lives, we would have enough closet space and room for all our books!

Committed to prepare our south Davis home for what our realtor thought would be a quick sell, we culled through a household full of items like hurried pirates. We boxed up our lives, moving most of our possessions first to the garage, and eventually to a storage facility. Because the new home had so much built-in shelving, we sold a bunch of furniture, including Kate’s desk, the kitchen hutch, and other items that would look out of place in the new house.

I gave away a dozen or more boxes of books, the kids gave away clothing, and Kate gave away myriad household and kitchen goods that we had loved for years, but didn’t want to think about as we staged our home for potential buyers. On one trip to the thrift store All Things Right and Relevant, I unloaded 35 bags from the minivan. Eventually the staff just told me that they were at capacity, and asked me to please give someplace else.

Loathe to indiscriminately donate their favorite stuffed animals, Geneva and Truman hosted a special yard sale. By invitation only, kids we knew or barely knew were invited to pick over the furry friends, and take anything they coveted. No money was exchanged. Geneva felt like she was reliving the final scene of Toy Story III, when Andy gives away his favorites guys to Bonnie, knowing that they would go to a good home. Everyone dreams of going to a good home.

Before long, our south Davis home was all but emptied, thoroughly depersonalized, repaired, landscaped, deep-cleaned, and, finally, photographed. The photos made the place look like a museum of spacious designer minimalism. Neither Jukie nor Margot the French bulldog were briefed, so they wandered around the house wide-eyed, wondering where all the stuff had gone. The sounds of my Zoom meetings echoed upon empty walls and bare floors. By the end of the process, the showcase corner house on our cul-de-sac, sporting fresh flowers and a new breakfast nook in the back yard, weighed perhaps five tons less than it had a couple months before.

Then the visitors started making appointments, dozens in the coming weeks, each showing requiring two-hours’ notice for us to scrub surfaces, vacuum carpets, mop floors, and set out the designer comforters and pillows that we dare not display when Jukie and Margot were running about. The recurrent process made us feel as if we were preparing for a party, but one in which partygoers would clink their drinks in every inch of the house. I admit that the garage remained a bit frightening, the boxes, bookshelves and bicycles stacked like a huge and dangerous game of Jenga. Our realtor said he was amazed by how prepared and fancy the house looked. All credit goes to Kate and Truman, our energetic interior designers.

Never had this house looked better, but perhaps never before had a home-seller’s timing been worse. Over the next couple months, as the California Covid-19 infection rates rose, and as the likelihood of in-person classes in Davis public schools and at UC Davis classrooms diminished, substantive interest in our beloved home had stalled. The price first came down by $12,000, and then another $14,000, and then another $14,000. The scheduled visits continued, but no offers came. When the ash from Yolo County fires began to fall on our back yard, we finally approached a third-party, a corporation that buys and sells homes, and arranged for them to buy our home so that we could have a sufficient down payment to close the deal with the owner of the new house on Olympic Drive. The end of this process was in sight!

Part 2 – Convincing the Owner to Choose Us

“Children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.” George Eliot

At first, we knew almost nothing about the owner of our dream home.

Like us, he had bad timing when he listed his house for sale, choosing the first week of March, the advent of the Coronavirus Era. He also lowered his home’s price several times, probably despondently. And then, finally, we walked into his life.

The parts of the home that would have seemed quirky to the more than 35 March and April visiting potential buyers seemed dreamy to us. Ornately-crafted tile adorned the kitchen and all the bathrooms. It had no great room, but instead a number of smaller first-floor rooms, some with unclear functions. The laundry room was too small, seeming to accommodate only dorm-sized washers and dryers. Despite these potential concerns, we loved it. The home included what Kate called a “dream kitchen,” the modern staircase accented the hardwood ceilings, incredible detail work was found in every room, and the home had four unexpected Murphy beds, perfect for welcoming future visitors. Not only could we make this home work – we felt that we had fallen in love.

We saw the home on a Wednesday, showed it to the kids on a Thursday (they were so excited), and had our offer, raised by $10,000 to fend off another bidder, accepted on a Friday. We sealed the deal with a letter we wrote to introduce the owner to our atypical family, impressing upon him why we so loved this home:

“Dear [Name Redacted] Family,

We are grateful for the opportunity to tell you about our family, and our appreciation for your beautiful home at XXXX Olympic Drive in west Davis.

I chose UC Davis for my graduate program in English because of my love of the town, and even after I earned my PhD here, I never left the area. I have taught for the university since 1990, and have served the city as poet laureate. My wife Kate is a social worker who supports and counsels new moms in Davis, and who volunteers for an organization that supports families of children with disabilities. While we have loved living in south Davis for the past 15 years, we have outgrown our current home, and thus for years we have been looking for just the right house. Difficult to impress, my wife fell in love with your house the moment she walked in the door, loving the front porch, the first floor rooms that are perfect for entertaining friends, and the bright and inviting kitchen. We admire the care you put into all of the many lovely details, and we ardently hope to make your house our home.

We have three kids, aged 14, 19, and 22. A student at Patwin Elementary and now Emerson Junior High school, our youngest (Truman) has always lived on the other side of town from his favorite classmates. He’s thrilled about the prospect of living within three blocks of his two best friends.

Our middle child (nicknamed Jukie) was born with a rare genetic syndrome; he will always need full-time care. We thought the bedroom with the glass door would be perfect for him, as we could supervise him while he enjoys a quiet space all his own.

Our oldest (Geneva) has just graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin. While she hopes to attend graduate school at UC Davis to become a teacher (pandemic-willing), these days she helps us with her brother Jukie. Inhabiting the independent space in that beautiful room over the garage would be a dream come true for her: she could live with mom and dad, but sample the autonomy a young adult needs. We imagine that someday Geneva’s brother Truman may benefit from that same Olympic apartment when he’s old enough to have one foot in adulthood. And we have always talked about needing a separate space for the eventual caregivers who would help with our perpetual boarder, Jukie. That elevated studio apartment would be ideal.

As our family is different from most, we can’t always do the things other families take for granted. Having a child with autism isn’t easy. Still, Jukie is the heart and soul of our family, and we’ve needed to structure our activities and lives with his needs in mind. As we’ve made our home a sanctuary for him, and for all of us, when we behold the results of the investment of time and energy that you have made in XXXX Olympic Drive, we would love to continue raising our kids in your special home.

We thank you for considering this request that you sell us your home, and thus help us begin the next chapter in our lives on Olympic Drive.

With hope in our hearts, Andy, Kate, Geneva, Jukie, and Truman”

We felt so honored and grateful that our family was chosen to live in such a place, with so many friends from work and our decades in Davis living nearby. All we had to do was sell our home, remind the bank who we are, and sign the paperwork.

Part 3 – Sealing the Deal

“He who matures early lives in anticipation.” Theodor W. Adorno

A company called HomeLight would buy our home, give us 90% of its value, restage it, sell it, and give us whatever is left over, minus some pretty significant fees. The new home’s monthly mortgage payment would stretch to 30 years, rather than the eight years that we had left on our current mortgage, but we knew that we would be investing in our future.

After meeting with the HomeLight folks for the final time on Tuesday, August 25^th, they said they would email us the paperwork in the morning, and that we would close escrow in 23 days. We had a green light to move into our dream house!

That evening we told the kids the good news: the long wait was over. It was time for us to start packing up the last of our belongings, take the artwork and the framed letter from Barack Obama off the wall, and decide how we would say goodbye to Charlie, the neighborhood cat who had all but adopted our family, sleeping many nights at our front door, waiting for one of us, especially Truman, to come out to say good morning. Love matters more than “ownership,” Charlie seemed to tell us.

All of us reviewed our mental pictures of our new house. We talked anew about how Truman would arrange his desk, where Jukie’s bunk bed would go in his sun-filled room, and how Geneva would get to move our heirloom dining table, built in the 19^th century by Kate’s great-great-grandfather, into her studio apartment.

Like children on Christmas Eve, we could barely sleep that Wednesday night.

Part 4 – The Reversal

“Life is a comedy when watching and a tragedy when experiencing.” Eric Idle

Thursday morning, we received a text from our realtor: “I have some unfortunate news. Please call me.”

The owner of our dream home had grown impatient with how long it had taken us to sell our house. He decided to sell it to another buyer.

Part 5 – The Phone Calls

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” George Bernard Shaw

I found the seller’s cell phone number online, and gave him a call.

I asked him to reconsider. I thanked him for his patience during this unprecedented process. We had faced three national emergencies – COVID-19, the resulting crash to the economy, and now one of the worst fire seasons in California history – but finally we had come through the process, having discovered a way, at great expense to us, to secure the large down-payment necessary to make this transaction work. I told him that we were at the finish line. I told him that we were ready to sign, that our house would be sold within three weeks, and that we could move into the home on Olympic within the month.

Having learned that the seller wanted to pull out of our deal at the absolute last minute, our (amazing) realtor said that he would forego $10,000 of his commission to make this deal work, effectively offering to put even more money in the seller’s pocket. The man said that he had “holding costs” for the unoccupied home, so I told him that I would pay his holding costs until we closed escrow. I reminded him that this other buyer was actually offering less for the home than what we were offering, an offer that he had already agreed to accept.

My wife Kate told him that we had sold our furniture, that almost all our possessions were in storage, waiting to be moved into our new house. She told him that we had done everything we could to sell our home, turning it into a showcase, foregoing any summer vacation or even an overnight trip away from Davis, and lowering the price, repeatedly. She reminded him that later that very morning we were selling our home to HomeLight just so we can have the cash necessary to seal the deal.

He said he had to think about it, that he would call me, and that I could call him back if I didn’t hear from him in a few hours. We learned that he had his realtor contact HomeLight to confirm that our paperwork with them was complete, and that we were ready to take ownership of our dream home, the one we had pictured our family inhabiting for the rest of our lives.

Rather than calling, he sent me a text. It read, in part, “I am sorry but I do not wish to further delay my exchange closing. The other deal will be closing on Monday, August 31st. All cash, no loan.  No risk of delays.” He had agreed to our offer, stuck with us for a difficult several weeks, waited until we had secured all the necessary funding, and then told us, at the last possible minute, that he would take a lesser offer by more than $10,000 in order to save several days in September. It didn’t make sense. I couldn’t believe our (bad) luck.

We called him back. Kate reminded him that we are a family, rather than wealthy businesspeople, that our lives and the expectations of our children were wrapped up in our dream home, that Truman had told his school friends that he would finally be moving into the neighborhood. She told him that we had struggled, that our unique family knew difficulties unimagined by other families. She told him that we had moved heaven and earth to sell our home, and that we had completed that process with HomeLight in order to keep up our end of the bargain. She told him that we are individuals with individual lives, and that our hearts and the hearts of our children were set on moving into a home that would be perfect for our (significant) needs.

At one point the seller said, “You are breaking my heart, Kate.” Maybe that was the first time he considered how we felt.

And then he said that it was too stressful for him to hear about what he was doing to us. And then he said that he wasn’t hanging up on us. And then he hung up on us.

He then told his realtor to tell our realtor to tell us to never to call him again.

Part 6 – The Aftermath

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” Virginia Woolf

Certainly we wish that the seller had reneged on our deal a few days earlier, before we told our children that the process was done.

All the work we had done to prepare our home, and to repeatedly, repeatedly spruce it up for multiple showings was a drain on our exhausted family’s summer. The necessary intrusiveness of those showings was almost debilitating, making us feel as if we were living someone else’s life on a movie set. We had spent significant funds on our house, and we had given away and sold so many things that we needed, not least of which was the furniture that had been perfectly chosen for a home we thought we were vacating.

But worst of all is the deep disappointment of our children. One could hear actual wailing in our home all day that Wednesday. Shocked, confused, and inconsolable, the children felt adrift.

I myself faced this bad news somewhat stoically. My therapist would probably say that my “strength” comes from my having become desensitized by the emotional toil of raising a young man who has not spoken a word to me in the last 16 years. I believed that my hardship had made me strong.

But no amount of stoic self-discipline will diminish the pain and heartache of one’s children or spouse. As a family, we had kept our new home as a sustaining goal throughout the summer of 2020. When that goal evaporated before our eyes, despite our intense efforts, all the overwhelm of 2020 collapsed upon us like a precarious load that is too heavy to be carried.

Part 7 – Cruelty and Love

“Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.” Paul Tillich

I am still having trouble understanding the attitude or the decision of the seller. He accepted our offer on his home in part because he was introduced to our family. He knew that the home was perfect for us, that this house on Olympic Drive would make Jukie’s life of dependence and isolation that much easier. Jukie will need caretakers perpetually, and finally we had found a place that could accommodate those needs.

What leads a person to treat others so callously? What benefit does one gain from acts of cruelty? One wonders what old trauma or grievance this man is still working through. This businessman would have made more money if he had just stuck with his original agreement. He was patient with us for so long, and then suddenly impatient just when we had the money to pay him. For us, the results of his impatience are devastating.

Were the grievances that compelled him to act so capriciously only personal, or did they reflect the social anxiety of this dark time in American history? Did he associate our unusual family of five with the frustrations that we all feel at this time? Most of us are stuck at home, unable to travel, concerned about the economy, concerned about the huge death toll from COVID-19, and concerned about the ongoing history of racial intolerance and violence that continues to play out on the streets of American cities. Now Californians are losing their homes and their lives to raging wildfires that have filled our California valley with smoke. How do we respond to such uncertainty and loss? A recent New York Times headline asked, “Is Covid Scaring us Away From our Humanity?” Some of us feel fearful, some of us feel powerless, some of us feel impatient, and some of us, I suppose, feel angry. As the historian James Anthony Froude said, “Fear is the parent of cruelty.”

If the information easily discoverable online is to be believed, this seller, a man in his late 70s, owns or has recently owned 45 properties, including four in Davis and two in El Macero. Even the winner of a game of Monopoly doesn’t own 45 properties. I guess soon it will be 44 properties. Such a man buys and sells homes all the time, so perhaps unsurprisingly he came to treat his agreement with us as just another transaction that could be voided in order to realize some incidental advantage, to ensure greater profit. Maybe he doesn’t think about the lives of the families he affects with the decisions he makes. Maybe Covid has scared him away from his humanity.

My only interactions with him have been two phone calls and a text, so I don’t know if he regularly sows melancholy wherever he goes. For his sake, I hope with the time that he has left, he can choose a different path. I hope that he may find peace.

No one wants to be remembered for his cruelty. “Do no harm,” said Hippocrates. “Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true,” said Elvis. I keep these sentiments in mind in my interactions with friends and strangers alike. I hope that at the end of my life, I can reflect on ample evidence that I have helped people, rather than harming them; that I have uplifted those around me, rather than demoralizing them; and that I kept true to my promises, rather than breaking them.

Soon after we told our bookend kids the sad news, I stopped by Jukie’s room to see how he was doing. He was watching the “Baby Mine” scene from Dumbo, a favorite film of his. It is the only Disney film in which the protagonist doesn’t speak. Always able to tell when I am upset, Jukie stood up from his chair, pulled my forehead down to touch his, and then for about five seconds he just stood there with me, his hand on the back of my neck. Then he lifted my hand to give it a kiss, and gently ushered me out the door, closing it behind me.

Jukie has lessons to teach us all. In this time of polarization, hardship, and anguish, we must determine what principles shape how we treat our fellow humans. Although my family and I have been shaken by this profoundly disappointing experience (perhaps a minor one in light of the losses we see in the news every day), we will follow Jukie’s lead and continue to choose love. Darkness waits for those of us who are compelled by internal or external forces to choose otherwise. As St. Paul tells us when speaking of faith, hope, and love, the greatest of these is love.

Andy Jones is a continuing lecturer who has taught writing classes at UC Davis since 1990.  He is also a past Poet Laureate for Davis.

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