From house of horrors to family home
Erica Bauermeister鈥檚 latest book is a thoughtful, entertaining memoir of the time she and her family spent renovating the mother of all fixer-uppers.
鈥淗ouse Lessons: Renovating a Life鈥� by Erica Bauermeister, Sasquatch Books, 225 pp.
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
What makes a house a home? For Erica Bauermeister, who had fallen in love with a wreck of a building on Washington鈥檚 Olympic Peninsula, the answer came through the final item on a long checklist of inspection concerns: 鈥淒oes it feel right?鈥澛�
In 鈥淗ouse Lessons: Renovating a Life,鈥� Bauermeister tells how she and her family came to fix up a 1909 house on a hilltop in Port Townsend, 鈥渁 small Victorian seaport that clings to the northeast corner of the peninsula like some exquisite limpet.鈥澛�
The four-bedroom property could have served as a horror movie prop, with its live electrical wires and a ghastly decaying area dubbed 鈥渢he yuck room鈥� that required respirators to enter. While clearing out junk, the family started tallying the number of bowling balls they unearthed versus the number of both live and dead rats. (Rats won out.)聽
Bauermeister is probably best known for 鈥淭he Scent Keeper,鈥� a recent pick from Reese Witherspoon鈥檚 book club, and for 鈥淭he School of Essential Ingredients,鈥� about a restaurateur鈥檚 cooking school. In this book, the house is as much a character as Bauermeister, her husband, and their two children, who are 10 and 13 when the book begins.聽
As the couple prepares to walk inside the building鈥檚 front entrance for the first time, she writes, 鈥淭he key turned with a simple click, but the door resisted our polite and then increasingly forthright pressure against it. The ancient Romans said even doors have a spirit. This one seemed to be warning us 鈥� or snarling. I couldn鈥檛 tell which. I put my hand against the worn paint of the doorframe and felt it peeling beneath my touch. 鈥楲et us in,鈥� I said under my breath.鈥�
Bauermeister has a Ph.D. in literature and is a former college writing teacher. Unsurprisingly, it doesn鈥檛 take long before she goes beyond her personal story, branching into history, architecture, and the nature of community. References range from classic children鈥檚 picture books to聽Thoreau, from Marie Kondo鈥檚 tidying up to geographer Jay Appleton鈥檚 theory of prospect and refuge.聽
A through-line is the method that the Roman engineer Vitruvius used to determine a good building, requiring that it possess 鈥渇irmitas, utilitas, and venustas,鈥� Bauermeister writes. 鈥淭hese Latin words have been translated in different ways, but I like this version best: stability, utility, and beauty.鈥�
The transformative project arises after Bauermeister鈥檚 family has returned to their home in Seattle after two years living in the walled town of Bergamo, Italy, 鈥渁 fairy tale of cobblestones and bell towers鈥� with a sense of history, and where their apartment had a sun-drenched living room that was 鈥渁n invitation to gather, a domestic equivalent of the piazza that lay in the center of the old town.鈥� Seattle鈥檚 busy, tech-fueled lifestyle no longer seemed to fit their needs.聽
Leading the house renovation in Port Townsend became a way for Bauermeister to reexamine her role as a wife, a mother, and a wage earner.聽
The house 鈥渉ad shown up like a big asbestos-covered marriage counselor鈥� just when needed, she writes. Revelations about letting adolescents find their way in the world fit seamlessly into her account, along with instructions about feng shui, and Bauermeister is wise enough not to overextend her use of metaphors to illuminate her points.聽
The book is clearly set in the modern era, but throughout most of the narrative there鈥檚 a sense of timelessness. It鈥檚 surprising near the end, when the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, intrude, to realize that everything we鈥檝e heard so far is set nearly 20 years in the past.
The intervening two decades gave Bauermeister some valuable perspective. It took years, in fact, for her to live permanently in the house even after the renovation; in the interim she became a real estate agent and then a novelist. Those experiences are described so quickly that they feel off-kilter. But that鈥檚 a minor complaint. Bauermeister has given us a skeleton key to unlock ideas about self and space and place, about encouragements that say to us, as she writes, 鈥淭his is who you can be.鈥�