excerpt from “Dream Home” by Tom McAllister

My wife, LauraBeth, and I bought our first house in 2006, in the New Jersey suburbs. I was twenty-four and she was twenty-three. We had money for a down payment because her mother had died and left behind some insurance money. We purchased the house for $175,000, at what I later learned was an obscene interest rate of 6.9 percent. Our realtor assured us the price was a good one; houses were moving quickly, and you had to be decisive. Houses always went up in value, and it was the safest investment you could make. After all, the previous owner had bought it for only $69,000 in 1999. We weren’t ready to own a home, but we bought one because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You go to school, get engaged, buy a house, then get married. Maybe you have a couple kids. In eight to ten years, you sell the house for a healthy profit and use that money to upgrade to a bigger house.

We handed over a $20,000 cashier’s check as a down payment. I’d spent the previous two years working as a teaching assistant at a large state university, making about half that amount annually. I hadn’t even heard of cashier’s checks.

You know what happens next. You know about housing bubbles and subprime mortgages and recessions and too big to fail. Within two years, the real-estate website Zillow’s “zestimate” for our house had dropped by $30,000. Three years later, it had fallen $50,000 more.

After moving in, we were featured on a short-lived home-renovation show called Moving Up, hosted by Doug Wilson, a C-list celebrity designer better known from his stint on the show Trading Spaces. The conceit was this: Family A sold a house to Family B, and Family B sold a house to Family C, after which the buyers would renovate, and then the sellers would return to their old homes to critique all the changes. Families A and B were already signed on, and they needed us to complete the chain. My wife hated the idea, but I talked her into it. I thought it sounded like fun.

Our neighbors lived in what was once a one-room schoolhouse. From the street, it looked like a church, with its steeple and large windows. Rich and Doris were in their fifties, both on second marriages and both heavy smokers in different stages of alcoholism. On our second day in the house, they brought us two bags of tomatoes from their garden, plus a loaf of fresh zucchini bread. “I love making shit,” Doris said. I never saw her without a cigarette. When she poured a glass of wine, she always seemed to be emptying the bottle. Some days she sang along to Tom Jones loudly enough that I could hear her from my bedroom.

A few weeks later, I heard Doris howling in her driveway and saw neighbors rushing across the street. I stood outside on my top step with my arms crossed over my chest, in the universal pose of the concerned neighbor. A siren screamed in our direction. I learned that Doris had an adult son and that he was dead in the driveway. He’d overdosed on heroin.

We sent them a card and some cookies. We never talked about it.

Moving Up was a dumb show, predicated on manufacturing conflict where there was none. Watching strangers paint their walls is inherently uninteresting. Mimi, the producer, stood beside the cameraman and exhorted us to keep talking, to never, ever stop talking. The more words we produced, the more likely we were to say something inflammatory.

The show’s formula demanded we have easily identifiable home-decorating styles, so LauraBeth was told to say “French country,” and I was told to say “college dorm.” As we walked into the house, our job was to express disgust at the previous owner’s choices. The goal was not to tell an interesting story; it was to check specific boxes and move on. When we later learned that the seller had cut our phone lines out of spite, we couldn’t talk about that, because it was too messy a topic. They wanted conflict that could be summarized quickly after each commercial break and then resolved by a few choice words from Doug about compromise and growth.

You open the episode by introducing yourself and saying what your job is, and then your wife introduces herself and says what her job is, and then you give a two-sentence summary of your relationship. You explain how owning the right home is key to achieving your shared dreams. You give the broadest possible description of those dreams. You begin the performance of shopping for a home, of rebuilding and renovating, of reinforcing sagging supports. You try to prove to the audience that you deserve this.

I can’t remember the first thing that broke. Things were always breaking. From the street, most houses look relatively stable, but on the inside, ours often felt like the walls were crumbling around us. During the first six weeks, I began learning, on camera, how incapable I was of making basic home repairs. My father was not a handy man, and he’d never taught me how to fix things. My father-in-law had worked for most of his life in facilities management, and so he and I spent many hours together as he coached me through how to spackle a hole in the wall, how to use a socket wrench, how to stain wood. Owning a home emphasizes your powerlessness more than any other financial decision. Suddenly, you are in a thirty-year battle against entropy, and if you look at the amortization schedule for your mortgage, it is easy to despair. The house wants to collapse, and you have to hold it up long enough to sell it at a profit.

During filming, we overhauled four rooms. Every job took several hours, or even days, longer than we expected. When contractors were involved, they invariably would reach their hand into some dark space in the walls and grunt and say, “Weird.” Pause. “Oh shit.”

Inside every wall there is a secret, and every time you expose one, there’s no putting it back.

. . .