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Right Before My Eyes

I married very young and my husband and I haven't had disposable income that would allow us the freedom to purchase such extravagances as original art, designer wardrobes or beautiful homes. In order to wear, sit on, live in or gaze at beauty, we dug down deep and deliberated how we might go about creating a standard of living for ourselves on a limited budget. It is solely out of a combination of creative vision, and the fact that we were both instilled with a tremendous work ethic growing up, that Don and I have been able to live a lifestyle that belies our income level. We purchased houses in dire need of repair and design and personally tore down the old and hammered in the new. When I reflect on our first home purchase, I literally shudder in disbelief at the magnitude of the physical and emotional challenge we undertook. Our resolution sprang from excitement to see a dream realized, combined with utter ignorance and an inability to fathom the hardships we were about to face. It was, indeed, a mountain to climb.

We purchased our first house in the Bernal Heights district of San Francisco on the side of a hill facing directly north to the high rises of the city. We could watch the fog roll in from the west near the Golden Gate Bridge, lazily cover the city in a gauzy film and disperse once it approached the Bay Bridge at the far right of our view. We bought a panorama, not a home. Ours was one in a line of row houses built to house the homeless after The Great Earthquake of 1906. None of these original houses had indoor plumbing; the entire row of structures had tacked-on back porches that ultimately accommodated tiny kitchens and bathrooms. By the time we purchased our house, the porch was sagging so badly down the hill that our bathtub wouldn't drain. All the water pooled at the wrong end.

But the state of the plumbing, or any of the house's systems, weren't of consequence. We gutted all 600 square feet of the house leaving only the beautifully aged fir floors, the front and side walls, a partial roof and the brick flue, once utilitarian and hidden inside interior walls but now standing alone in the downstairs as a single, inspiring objet d'art. We were living in a "Hollywood" false-fronted house! The wall that faced north to San Francisco and its ferocious wind and fog was gone, replaced by rolls of plastic sheeting stapled to the exterior of the structure. These enormous sheets were sucked in and out by the tremendous gusts to the sound of "kawomp, tickety, tickety, tickety" twenty-four hours a day. We tore the roof off during a warm winter week, after which San Francisco saw its first snowfall in fifty years. And this was our residence. Early in the remodel, we literally shoveled plaster out of the way to accommodate our mattress so that we had a place to lay our weary bodies at the end of an exhausting day.

In retrospect, Don and I inherently understood how to undertake a major creative challenge without folding under the weight. We broke down our project into small steps, freeing us from feeling encumbered and overwhelmed at the enormity of the work ahead. Upon completion of each step, we gained a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction and confidence and our goal became more defined, injecting us with renewed energy and vision to tackle the next step. Before we knew it, the end was within our grasp.