My husband and I bought a 242-year-old house during the pandemic.
Which is, for a middle-age couple, perhaps insane.
Paul, my husband, watches the series to scold the contestants.
William, youre an accountant.
You know s- - - about pumpkins.
This is a terrible idea.
I watch to swoon over the properties.
Those thatched roofed cottages, the Georgian parsonages with their stone-walled gardens, the oak-beamed barn conversions.
At the end, theres always a Mystery House, usually a repurposed chapel or mill.
Oh look, a water wheel!
They still thresh grain!
Paul observes that a mill is probably damp and drafty.
We agree that British sofas are inexplicably ugly.
The credits roll past verdant English hillsides dotted with sheep.
Where it grew and grew to the size of a show pumpkin.
Between us, Paul and I have owned five historic fixer-uppers.
The aberration was spending six years empty nesting in a modern apartment.
It wasnt the best place to endure a pandemic.
We missed extra rooms, gardening and slobbering dogs.
Finally, one dreary February day, I broke.
Lets drive out to the country and look at some houses, I said.
And thats where we found it.
A stately colonial built by Quakers in 1780 in the village of Waterford, Virginia.
It backed up to 140 acres of preserved farmland, and there were sheep.
My heart melted at the sight of livestock.
Did I consider the practicalities of aging in a 242-year-old house?
If my knees really needed four flights of stairs?
The risks of traversing warped antique floorboards at night?
Shouldnt I have given some thought to the energy efficiency of Revolutionary War-era windows?
Those are the sensible thoughts of a modern home buyer.
You probably enjoy water pressure and closet space, too.
We listed the apartment.
We bought the Waterford house.
