Tag Archives: roommates

An Unmatched Life

Posted on by under Mess & Place

At 15, I read in a home décor magazine that you were only supposed to fill things two-thirds full in order for it to look neat and orderly. So when I got my new bedroom at 16, a room I helped build on to the house, I intentionally left some of the walls and closet shelf space empty to try and create that feel.

Once the room was finished, I picked a blue-floral bedspread and curtains from the J.C. Penney catalog and took a pillowcase to Home Depot to have the color matched. I sponged the gray-blue paint onto the baseboard and molding before we nailed it to the walls.

I was trying to keep it all together, I think. Trying to make it right. I am the child of a parent with chronic mental and physical illnesses. As a child, that meant taking on the responsibility of taking care. I wanted things stable and orderly and, above all, correct.

For a few years before I moved to college my junior year, those empty spaces and coordinating color scheme were a retreat. The aesthetics calmed and centered me.

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bedroom

My first apartment

After landing a full-time job after college, I moved into my first all-my-own apartment. I dove into decorating it just the way I wanted. Things matched less, but they still coordinated. I bought sofas and curtains, lamps and end tables brand-new from the store. I wanted it decorated and soon. I bought fabric and made my own upholstered headboard and hunted down antique picture frames for the walls of my bedroom.  I took a page from an interior design magazine and recreated a wall collage behind my dining room table.

When Christmas came, I bought new decorations that sparkled and shone in perfect complement to my décor.

It was common for me to lock myself in my apartment from the time I got home from work on Friday until I left for work on Monday. “Introvert re-charge,” I would say. And sometimes that is needed. But in truth, it was easier to just stay in, not interact with anyone, and piddle away on some new home décor project. I even started a short-lived blog full of recipes and decorating tips.

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When I was 29, I moved into graduate on-campus housing, complete with an R.A. and roommates. The apartments were built in the 1930s and, aside from the random rules that come with campus housing, I rather enjoyed the cozy wood floors and the old bathroom mirror with the flower scroll etched across the glass.

Perhaps the thing I was most nervous about as I prepared to move to grad school was that my home would feel like a dorm. That I would feel like a kid. I was afraid of ugly furniture and plastic storage bins and cramped spaces. I was afraid it was all going to feel like a mess.

And things didn’t match—except for the industrial, boxy, bedroom furniture. My bedspread was black and white, my roommate’s was bright neon colors. The bathroom linen closet was stocked with a haphazard collection of multi-colored towels in various states of wear. The empty wall of the small galley kitchen was a jigsaw puzzle of mismatched shelves holding extra dishes and cookbooks and pantry staples. Every third of the bedroom walls were lined with furniture. Desk, dresser, bed, repeat. Shelves were stuffed full of textbooks and binders and picture frames of family and friends in other states. There was no money to spend on new, matching furniture. There was too little space for all of my things.

Yet, that apartment was home to one of my most well-lived years. There was nothing more satisfying than to find the sink full of mismatched coffee mugs, evidence of another night of friends studying together or talking.

Mismatched Dinner Table

An Easter table

On Sunday evenings, friends and neighbors gathered and we made dinner. One person would cook, filling the small sink of the small kitchen with pans and cutting boards and wooden spoons.Then we’d eat—mismatched chairs crowded around a table with mismatched glasses in front of matching plates, the thin blue and white Corelle dishes I had inherited from my grandmother.  

As the year went on, dining together just became a habit, no matter the meal.  We had a French toast feast as the snow piled deep outside. On the days it never stopped raining, there was a crock pot of soup ready and warm.  We decided JFK’s Birthday needed celebrating, so we researched and recreated his favorite meal.  One warm night, we picked up a few “gourmet” ingredients from the grocery store, put on a record of classical music, opened all the windows, and laughed and talked and ate as the cross breeze drifted through our impromptu dinner party in that mismatched, unrefined, no-color-palette home.  

That year, we managed to live life together instead of just being roommates or neighbors. It happened with overcrowded shelves and walls and it never once felt like a mess.

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Nicole bio YAH

The Royal Hotel

Posted on by under Home & Place

If your home is your castle, my husband and I have been living with the drawbridge down for about ten years. In that time, fifteen housemates have come and gone, and eight of these have lived with us for two years or more. In our four-bedroom Victorian house, community is our way of life.

Sometimes, when I describe all this to someone I’ve just met, they look at me with wonder and admiration. “Oh that’s so beautiful to share your home with other people,” they sometimes say, “but I just couldn’t do it.” And at these times I wish that I kept a cheat sheet of former and current housemates’ phone numbers in my pocket.

Talking with them would certainly temper any idealistic notions.

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For both my husband and I, the desire to live in community was born in college. When he showed up as a freshman at the University of Southern California, two seniors helped him move in. He soon discovered that these seniors lived next door in a cramped dorm room, choosing to forgo apartment life as a part of their Christian commitment to hospitality. That year my husband watched them model kindness, patience, truth-telling and forgiveness in the nitty-gritty of daily life, and his vision was forever altered.

For my part, I liked undergraduate life so much that I extended it for six years, working as a campus minister at a small women’s college. During that time I lived in a household of 35 for a summer, led spring break trips in tight quarters, and attended overnight training events, as well as an annual two-week “camp” for campus ministers. Though all of this intentional togetherness was uncomfortable, and at times painful, for an insecure introvert like me, it was also strangely life-giving.

And so, by the time we met and married in July of 2005, my husband and I were both committed to some form of intentional, extended community in our home. We, of course, had no idea what a roller coaster this would be.

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To begin with the obvious: life after college is not like life in college. There are property taxes, for one, and many other bills that you never imagined. Remember the four-bedroom Victorian house I mentioned in the introduction? Victorian=more than a hundred years old. More than a hundred years old=constantly falling apart. Now add full-time jobs, graduate school, and two babies to the mix of bills and renovation, and  you have two very distracted people who barely have time for each other, much less a parade of housemates.

We have not always done well.

With one housemate it took us over a year to discover he didn’t feel comfortable on the first-floor of the house because of its perpetual untidiness. Another housemate hid in her room the whole time she lived with us because that summer we filled every bedroom and the living room with beds and people. When we began living with another family with two young children, I used to hide on the porch and cry during dinner because I couldn’t stand so much chaos so late in the day.

Sometimes it amazes me that we kept this up so long. But then again, there is something about life together.

Just a few nights ago, the five grown-ups were sitting together in the kitchen, having “adult dinner” while the kids bounced off the walls in the living room. Someone had brought a bottle of red wine up from the basement, and we were talking about this and that, telling stories and laughing about the ridiculous things that had happened to us that day. This scene is not unusual. It’s just a natural, spontaneous outgrowth of living in close quarters.  Like college for grown-ups.

And as I looked around the table I knew. I knew that I was blessed. Sitting there I was surrounded by a rich network of people-these current housemates and all the others who have stayed for a while-and these were people I knew and loved.

Over the years we had annoyed one another, confronted one another, and watched one another (with front row seats!) make all the mistakes of marriage, parenting and singleness. But all of this grit and dirt makes the forgiveness, encouragement, and laughter over a bottle of red wine that much more sweet.

Isn’t this the essence of any community, large or small, tied by blood, or marriage, or an old Victorian house?: We are known and (somehow, miraculously) we are loved.

I am beginning to suspect that it is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference.

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Photo by Nell Howard on Creative Commons

Hole in the Wall

Posted on by under Guest, Home & Place

I’ve shared room 205 with the same roommate for three years now. Early on, the two of us forged a haphazard sort of system to keep the room habitable. But we’ve never been neat about it. We’re close friends with the girls in the dorm room next door, and the four of us are constantly spreading ourselves out between the two spaces. The unique transiency of college has permeated our way of living, almost subconsciously, and we never seem to be all the way settled in.

I never imagined I would live in a place this messy. The closets in our room perpetually overflow. Empty Capri Sun juice pouches sit on the windowsill. There is a hole in the concrete block wall that we duct tape every year on move-in day, afraid of what would crawl through otherwise. Recently, my roommate’s birthday cake sat out on a plate for over a week, becoming crunchy before it occurred to us that we should throw it away.

My room at home, though, has become even more pristine since my absence. The walls are white and the closet is bare and the trash can is empty. At home, I wake up and am completely alone. But always, after I drive the four hours home and I sleep and wake in my own bed, I am more reminiscent for the noise than appreciative of the quiet. I miss has become the mantra of college breaks.

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Home, for the first time in my life, is a fluid concept, always seeming to be where I am not. Family is even more ambiguous . My family, of course, includes my mom and dad, my brothers and sister, all of whom I deeply love. But if a family consists of the people who know where you are and love you despite it, then my family is also a cobbling of young adults, mere semesters away from dispersal. I still have close ties to the place in which I grew up, but each year they are changing. We are selling the house with the pristine bedroom, and I find myself largely apathetic. It is only a place to sleep.

The place in which I live from August to May is different. It is where life together is made rich and loud and colorful. After we move out, our beloved room with the hole in the wall and the small closets and the overenthusiastic heater will be exposed for what it is. There was nothing intrinsically special about those concrete blocks or the bedframes or the thin carpet; they were only bare spaces for us to learn to fill. They will be passed on to new freshmen, who will peel our duct tape off of the hole in the wall and solve the problem in their own way.

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Next year, instead of sharing a dorm room, we will get an apartment, and we will decorate for our climactic last year together. We will hang colorful shower curtains. We will carry oversized couches up the stairs. We will string twinkle lights and maybe even make our beds for once. We’ll have roommate pasta dinners and Waffle Tuesdays. I’m just as excited as I am apprehensive for this brief, beautiful time together. The more I come to love where I am, the more I believe that it is home, the more it will hurt when the time comes to leave.

And yet, in this moment, this is my family, and this is my home.

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juniors_christmas_banquet“Hole in the Wall” was written by Veronica Toth. Veronica is a junior English major at Taylor University (located in approximately the middle of nowhere, Indiana). She’s grown to love cornfield country and especially the people who live there. She enjoys occasionally writing poetry and always using sarcasm. Veronica is pictured on the far left with three close college friends; they do not keep dorm rooms clean, but they do love each other. She blogs at Tasting Twice.