My dream house would be old.
I want to live somewhere with history. I love old bungalow style houses, downtown, with big green yards and old gnarled trees. I love houses with overgrown gardens that look like fairies might live there. I love old, ivy-covered gazebos and sun rooms with linoleum from the 70s and kitchens with big windows and old-fashioned wooden cabinets.
I would so much rather find an old fixer-upper and make it my dream home than build one from scratch. That's the beauty of old things - you're taking someone else's dream and making it your own. They store up a history. Someone built those cabinets exactly the way they wanted them, and it turns out its exactly the way you wanted them too. The garden is more beautiful because someone let it grow wild, someone saw the value in letting nature take over and seeing what happened. Even the cracks in the sidewalk are beautiful, because they were made by generations of friends and family walking the path to a loved one's door. The imperfections are testament to the fact that yeah, there were bad thunderstorms, and hard days, but look, it's still there and still whole, waiting for someone to make past dreams into dreams of the future.
I love all old things, but mostly old places, I think. They have a personality of their own. It reminds us that we have inherited the earth and everything in it; nothing is truly ours alone, but something that outdates us, outdates the previous "owners", that we have taken and refit to ourselves out of the countless personalities and dreams and ideas that inhabited it before.
Old homes are already "broken in", like new leather. The sanding down of sharp edges, the unavoidable scuffing of new wooden floors, have all already taken place. Where a newly built house is a shell waiting to be filled, an old home is already lived in, already comfortable, malleable to what you want it to be because it has run the gamut, it knows the drill. It's just waiting for your vision and hard work and it can be whatever you want it to be.
