The Perfect House

The split-level half-length staircases stir a memory from my earliest childhood in which I would crawl up the stairs and slide back down. The woodwork is lovingly handmade from locally-sourced trees — some from my parents’ yard that I milled myself. The interior doors are made of solid wood giving them a character of both beauty and substance. The view of the river reminds me of every vacation I’ve ever taken or dreamed of taking. I’ve worked over half of the house by hand, sweating and striving to make it perfect. I redid the whole plumbing system with end-run PEX and a multi-stage filtration system. The heating and cooling is an extremely efficient multi-stage direct vent 17 SEER system in which I take great pride. The attic houses twelve inches of open-cell spray foam that help us tread lightly on the earth’s resources.

I view working on the house in the same way as practicing a kata or a piano piece. You know that it will never be perfect, but that’s not really the point. You make it better by trying, and in some hard-to-pin-down way the process makes you better. It makes you more knowledgeable, of course. It makes you more skilled, sure. But at some base level, work of this kind makes you a better person. The striving helps us grow to be more than we were. The fact that the house, kata, or piano piece is better is almost incidental.

And so we are now selling the perfect house. But at some level that is no more significant than moving on to work on a new kata or piece of music. As we move on, we know that we are somehow better for having owned, worked on, and developed this house.

A family could be very happy here. I know, because we have been.

Chris Santillo
Five Backpacks Family