Build Yourself Like A Home

A story about constructing your life

directing the show

I make my living as a custom homebuilder. That phrase, making a living, seems appropriate when you consider how much time we spend working—but, more importantly, how our work shapes the way we see life. So, on that note, let me run through a few things that building houses has taught me about building a life.

Let’s start with the construction itself.

#1 SURVEY: The first step of every home means staking claim on some plot of earth. For a new house that means buying a piece of property; but as individuals we have no choice in where we’re originally built—can’t pick your parents—same goes for much of this early construction, but we’ll get to that.

#2 EXCAVATION. Shovels in the ground. This is about embedding into the earth. For a house, of course, that means staying put; for us, I believe the most important part of building a life isn’t in the actual construction at all, but being tuned into something greater than ourselves. It’s about staying humble. This is the basis for all the work to come.

#3 FOUNDATION. Now the building begins. If the foundation is flawed, everything else is compromised. What’s a personal foundation? Our sense of self: self-worth, self-love, desire, values. Our whole life bears on this. And if it’s weak, well, I’d find it hard to trust that structure.

#4 FRAMING. The bones of the house. The body. Strong timbers require good nutrients, as do healthy bodies. We must nourish ourselves, because everything else is affixed to the framing.

#5 ELECTRICAL / PLUMBING / HVAC. We have the wires, the pipes, the ducts, analogous to our various internal systems: but I think of it as the importance of fresh air, clean water, ample energy, this is the lifeforce.

#6 FINISHES. Finally, there are finishes. What other people invariably notice first, the superficial beauty which obscures all that lies beneath, the façade. As the cliché goes, it’s the beauty on the inside that matters, and these finishes ultimately mean little—they’ll get remodeled, eventually. Let me tell you: if you don’t already have it within, fancy tile will not bring you happiness.

Before this metaphor gets tiresome, though, let’s get away from this idea of new construction because that’s not what we’re working with here. We’re hardly agents in the personal home given to us by our parents. They build it for us: in the way they raise us, the situations in which we’re placed, the expectations and prejudices we’re exposed to. This is the structure we’re handed when we gain our own consciousness. For those of us with kids, it’s something with which we must take great care in remembering.

Gaining independence, then, has little to do with leaving the actual family home and everything to do with realizing you are the sole owner of the personal home you’ve been given. Subsequently, this often requires some renovation.

For one, the home we’re handed doesn’t always suit our taste. And two, times change. Design is an evolutionary process. What was once in style is out, our tastes evolve, what we then wanted, we no longer desire . . . so we remodel.

I received a beautiful take on this in conversation recently, when someone told me they were tearing their life down to the studs, so they could rebuild. That, in part, inspired this essay. It’s what we have to do sometimes, isn’t it?

You roll up your sleeves, grab the sledgehammer, get into some fucking demolition. And once the space is emptied, the dust settled, a vision of what and how to rebuild becomes clear. Design never ends. It continues in real time, in an evolutionary process of decision-making that can only be understood as each prior phase falls into place.

But that’s where this metaphor ends, because we are dynamic creatures, not stuck in place like a house. We move, we shift, we see new places every day. And we carry that sense of home within us. Yet we all know there’s a difference between a house and home.

There is a feeling when you walk into a home, a true home, which can only be described as comfort. You feel this sense of comfort, too, when you meet certain people. This is when you know someone has built a real home inside themselves. The question we must ask ourselves is whether the home inside of us is the home in which we’d like to live?

In the end, homebuilder is not the right name for what I do. I build houses. Building a home is a personal affair. I’m still working on it myself.

-Martin

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