#26 Other People's Houses
Making home in a house that isn't your own. Also: tips for selling clothes online, my current workout, and did you ever stamp a CD case to post?
⭕️ Can’t Believe it’s 2025 and I’m stressed about tariffs and measles, like am I a character in an American Girl book.1
⭕️ How to Sell (and Shop for) Pre-Loved Clothes
⭕️ Songs for Maggie I made this mix CD for my baby sister when I was away at college. It still holds up.3
⭕️ The Sculpt Society is a streaming platform with a huge library of pilates, dance cardio, and simple strength training workouts of varying lengths. One month in, and I really like it!4
The millennial dream of home
For the next couple of weeks, I’m writing about home: what it means, what it’s looked like for me and my family through the years, what it looks like now.
In the first five years of our relationship, Sebastian and I moved 12 times.
Ten of those moves were with babies/toddlers/young children, six of them were to new cities, and two of them were cross country.
And each of them was into someone else’s house.
I want to be clear that we are very happy to rent our current home. We’ve been here for ten years (almost 11!), we have a special relationship with our landlords and have been able to make this house the childhood home my kids will remember growing up in. This rental has provided rare stability in a tight market, and has given us the opportunity to invest our resources elsewhere, as we’ve been able to: in basics like food and utilities, clothes and school fees for the boys, a reliable car, and, eventually, an emergency savings account.
But we’ve always wanted to own a home.
The goalpost of home ownership is firmly planted in the American dream. Even if I hadn’t grown up with my dad working in real estate, the messaging was strong: to rent is to flush money down the drain, and the purchase of a home should be prioritized and achieved as quickly as possible once you’ve entered adulthood. Before then, even, if your parents have invested their own resources wisely: they might purchase a house that you can share with rent-paying roommates in college and young adulthood, allowing you to pocket the income for a down payment on your first purchase, or at least provide some cost-of-living breathing room to save some of those early entry-level paychecks.
The first time we explored purchasing a home was in Spokane, a few months after Orion was born. There was a house we were smitten with on South Hill, and I walked by with the stroller daily, planning a vegetable garden and laying out our meager furniture in the rooms based on pictures of the house’s layout I’d seen online. It wasn’t the nicest house; in comparison with the Arts and Crafts houses on the block — freshly painted in shades of rust and sage — it was quite meager. This made it seem, perhaps, within our reach.
Sebastian and I attended a first-time home buyers workshop at a local mortgage broker, and quickly discovered that purchasing a home (even one whose mortgage would be less than the rent we were paying) would not be a reality for us anytime soon.
It was an early moment of realization that hard work and determination alone would not get the thing I wanted — not with a pile of student loan debt, no job (and grim prospects in the 2010 market), and two babies under the age of two. I was 24; not a terrible time to learn this lesson.
I decided to go to grad school instead, and we moved to New York, where renting is the norm but also hard to secure without a guarantor unless you make 40x the monthly rent in annual income (our apartment in Harlem, which was $1700/mo, required we make $68,000/year — a number we didn’t touch until I was in my mid-30s). Despite this rule, and despite the general advice that renters should not spend more than 30% of their income on housing, at least half of all renters spend closer to 40-50%, and an increasing number of low-income households spend close to 80%. Because this is what it costs to have shelter in the cities that offer the most jobs, services, and opportunity.
My first job was in new homes, at the housing development my dad was selling, during the Parade of Homes in Kansas City. I was eleven and my job was to sit in a model home and ask people who toured if they’d like to enter a drawing for a prize (businesses have always been trying to get our contact details). The weekends I spent doing this job were long and dull, but I loved choosing which house I would station myself in, and filled time by imagining it was my own.
The model homes had been designed and styled in a way I’d never experienced in any of the homes my family or friends lived in. My mom kept a very clean house, but she eventually had seven children, and I wouldn’t say beauty was a priority. Spending time in these houses felt like being in a magazine, where objects were curated with care for their relationship to each other, and to the space. The houses were clutter free — because no one actually lived there.
It was the mid-90s, so faux paint detailing, dark mahogany kitchens, stenciled walls and floral sofas were all choices made. The decorators set out little bowls of potpourri and candy (sour chewy cherry balls I’d sneak throughout the day). The tables were ready to dine at, laid with all the place setting components we never used: placemats, chargers, cloth napkins, multiple forks, real glassware, fake floral arrangements.
Scenes were arranged to inspire prospective buyers to imagine themselves and I stepped right into that fantasy.
Sometimes I pretended to be the daughter of the house, and chose the soft pink bedroom clearly designed for me. Sometimes I was the mother, responsible for all order and beauty. I imagined the family who lived there with me, and the life of comfort and ease we’d have in a house where everything was sparkling new and functional — and tucked safely into a HOA-run community.
I’m not ungrateful for the homes we’ve lived in. The first one we moved into right after Pan was born we got in exchange for some transcription work I did for the owner. The next one we rented from Sebastian’s brother. Orion was born in the third-floor attic bedroom of an old house on South Hill in Spokane. We’ve stayed, for free, with family members for periods of time, Sebastian’s mom and my parents. A friend let us camp out in their yurt while we were looking for a rental when we first moved to Portland.
There was really only one brief moment when I thought maybe we wouldn’t have shelter, when our time in the yurt was running out and neither of us had enough work yet to qualify for our own rental. In that moment, I researched shelters for women and children.
Despite the stability we’ve built so slowly through the past decade, I’ve never not believed we were just one stroke of bad luck away from houselessness.
But that could still be true if we were paying a mortgage instead of rent.
Owning a home is still something we want. And, in many ways, we’re better positioned to purchase now than we were 15 years ago. But it doesn’t feel urgent.
We’ve been able to make each house we’ve lived in truly feel like home, in the ways we can. We’ve figured out systems to make small spaces functional and collected pieces that can follow us wherever home is. Each move has been an opportunity to try on an identity of sorts, to see who we could be in a new space. And the home we’ve been in for the past decade has given us the most, in terms of opportunity to try things out, determine our taste, create lived-in layers.
That’s what I want to talk about next — how my taste has evolved over time, where I find inspiration, how big of a role patience has played in making this house feel right…
Til then,
As a kid, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d do if I found myself in the situations I read about in historical fiction. I’m no longer interested in that fantasy, please stop.
I have two IKEA bags full of clothes waiting to be posted on Poshmark & Noihsaf Bazaar. 🫣 This is partially intentional, as I do like to hold onto things for a few months after a closet clear-out to see if maybe I change my mind after not looking at them for awhile (it’s worked before), but I also very much need to deal with this to make room in the mere crevices of space we have available for baby…
And speaking of baby: Goodwill doesn’t sell baby clothes / gear anymore?? Most thrift stores have almost nothing baby on the racks. I did a light dig on this, and I guess it’s because they’re worried about keeping up with product recall, so they don’t accept these kinds of donations anymore? Which is frustrating, because this is how I clothed P + O, and how I was planning on kitting out this one. Online resale is obviously an option, but it’s pricier when you cost in a higher price-per listing and shipping rates. And I’ve been tracking Facebook Marketplace, but can’t bring myself to 1. do the work of communicating about and driving to get onesies-twosies, and 2. spend $20 on a lot of clothes where I only like two things.
There’s an almost 15-year age difference between Maggie and I; she was only four when I went away to college. But we have a special relationship, close in a different way than I am to my siblings who are closer in age — she even moved to Portland a couple of years ago! This gives me a lot of hope for the dynamic the boys might develop with a brother 15-16 years younger than them.
The pregnancy program specifically was recommended by a friend, and I love how it’s divided into 40 weeks, with multiple workouts and stretches and pelvic floor training options appropriate for where you’re at in your pregnancy (and how much time you have). The trainers (who are a little chipper, but whatever) are also pregnant, and offer plenty of modifications — I love a seated cat/cow! I haven’t done anything non-prenatal yet, but I anticipate doing the postpartum program when I get there. My body feels so much better now that my energy is back and I’m moving it again.
I loved reading this <3 And I love seeing all of the different homes you've lived in and how they have shaped you. There's something special about being able to make a house a home, no matter how long you stay.
I've also moved a ton - our current house in North Portland is the longest I've lived anywhere since I was a kid - but always invest lots of energy into decorating and curating and making even the most temporary spot into a home. Can't wait to keep reading your perspective! (Also I have a few very cute baby clothes I've been hanging onto if you want them!)