Cottage Life

When I got engaged in 1994, I was living with a couple of buddies in New Bedford. It was good times there — video games, boozy get-togethers, camaraderie aplenty.

But I don’t know of too many married men who live with their wife and their friends, so as the date neared it was clear that I needed to find someplace to live.

Enter my mom. She was living on West Island in Fairhaven and commuting to her job in Boston — a long haul, five days a week. So, she got an apartment up there and let Laurie and me live in the house and pay a generously small part of the rent.

That wasn’t the end of the parental assistance. In the months leading up to the wedding, Laurie’s dad helped to turn my mom’s bachelorette pad into a cottage built for young love. When we returned from our honeymoon we had a fully furnished house ready to live in.

It was a starter house, with two bedrooms, a small kitchen and a cramped bathroom, but it was perfect for two. It was like moving into a suite at a reasonably priced, extended-stay hotel chain.

Maybe it was all made too simple for me, because for the first 10 years of our marriage, the house remained basically untouched — Laurie would add to the décor here and there, sub out a couple of pieces of furniture, but generally we settled into a nice, homey rut and stayed there.

Throughout that decade, Laurie always wanted to upgrade our living space. I held strong to my unshakable principle that unless something was broken, it was fine. Fine! It’s fine!

I still believe I was mostly right. If something is functioning at somewhere near its original capacity, replacing it is just a waste of money (financial logic I certainly didn’t apply when speeding down I-95 toward Foxwoods).

Then Laurie got pregnant. And all of a sudden, those little imperfections I didn’t care a whit about seemed to grow in importance. The idea of spending a few bucks on a new computer desk or a new book shelf or a new kitchen table didn’t seem so silly anymore — after all, our son is going to have to live here one day soon, and he deserves the best.

And, surprise of surprises, fixing up your home is quite fun! We’ve moved the entire contents of my office into the laundry room, and my new writing home feels like a well-worn baseball glove. My God, why were we wasting all this space back here? Let’s put a shelf up on the wall for storage while we’re at it.

The office is getting a makeover into a baby room: tan walls and white sills to accommodate the alphabet theme. The room had previously been a kind of nasty off-white, with unseemly paint bumps and one poorly spackled hole in the wall.

Of course, the baby won’t have any idea that the new paint is any better than the old paint, but it matters to me now. I only wish I’d been able to see the merits of a refreshed space sooner — it feels like a new house now, and in a sense I guess it is.

My little love cottage is growing up to meet us, just in time. And when we leave it behind in two or three or five years, I can only hope its new owners enjoy it as much as we did.

Enjoy those shiny new walls! And don’t forget to jiggle the handle on the toilet seat. We never did get around to that.

By Jonathan Comey of The Standard-Times.