Excerpt:
I purchased many homes during the several decades my family and I moved around the United States. One of them was ground-up construction and I made hundreds of agonizing choices. I spent months sweating over the details – the style of roof, paint colors, faucets and fireplace brick.
A few years later as a single woman I became the hardy owner of an “old house”. It was a post-Civil War home perched on a mill pond in a picturesque New Hampshire town. There I battled frost-heaved brick staircases. weather-beaten paint and crooked wall and floors.
Surviving that experience I thought that I had become an expert on finding contractors and navigating electrical and plumbing vocabulary. When I moved from New Hampshire to Massachusetts I bravely purchased a forlorn and neglected Victorian home. I laughed the pundits off. Of course I hadn’t made a mistake!
The joke, it seemed, was on me.
