This is My House, This is My Home

Seems like every time I turn around these days, there's a milestone happening. Part of getting older, I guess. This milestone isn't too shocking: We're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of buying this house. We actually officially moved into the house in late September 2000, but we spent much of the previous month finalizing the sale and signing reams of paperwork and moving boxes and boxes of stuff in. Funny thing is, before moving in here, I was practically a vagabond.

I've moved around a lot my whole life. As a small child in Toronto, I lived in three different high-rise apartment buildings before I turned 7. In January 1975, we bought a house in the 'burbs, where we lived for nearly seven years before we followed my dad to Washington state. We lived in three more homes there in the 19 months we were in Richland, and then it was off to Kingston, NH in June 1983. We were in that house until the summer of 1989, when my parents sold it and moved to Brentwood. I had already moved down to Massachusetts to start my career, but I still had to spend many hours helping pack up all the crap that had accumulated in the Kingston house.

The subsequent decade was a whirlwind of schlepping around the North Shore of Boston:

• Magnolia, June-September 1989: As I documented in the most recent installment of Mixology, I rented a room in a boarding house in Magnolia. It was a great spot located near the beach and a nice way to spend the summer. The Cher movie Mermaids was filmed not far from where I lived.
• Wenham, September 1989-July 1990: One of the editors at the paper took his family on a mission trip to China for a year and entrusted his Wenham home to my fellow reporter and buddy Eric. One of the guys who was living there moved out after a few months, so Eric offered me the room. It was a lot closer to the office and a pretty sweet house, although we had to deal with the wacky lady who was renting the basement apartment. We threw some absolute kickass parties in that place. Another friend and fellow reporter moved in a few months after I did. The family returned and we had to find another place to live.
• Beverly, July 1990-July 1991: My buddy Bryan and I found an apartment on Butman Street in Beverly, right across from a cemetery. It was a converted attic and pretty tiny, but for two single guys in their early 20s, it was good enough.
  
• Beverly, July 1991-April 1992: My girlfriend Kelley and I decided to move in together. She had been renting a nice studio apartment in Hamilton above the garage of an MIT professor, but it wasn't really big enough for two people. We found an apartment in an old Victorian on Essex Street in Beverly. It was pretty roomy, but not very well insulated. A lot of little things started getting on our nerves, so we started looking for another place.
• Beverly, April 1992-June 1993: After checking out a few places, we found a nice apartment on Roosevelt Avenue in Beverly. And if you know me at all, you already know that it's the downstairs apartment in the very house I own now. Everything was hunky dory at first, but by March 1993, things between Kelly and me weren't going so well. We were working completely opposite shifts at the paper and just sort of drifting apart. We agreed to split up, but she let me stay here until I could find a new place. It was a struggle, especially considering I didn't have ton of dough to pony up for a nice place. Eventually, I found one. Not that nice, but it was an apartment.
• Middleton, June 1993-February 1994: I rented a room in a house in Middleton, which meant my commute would be a little longer (25 minutes). This also coincided with my taking a design editor position at the paper that required me to be at the office at 5 a.m. It was a lonely time out there. The house was owed by a guy in his late 20s who also lived there, but he wasn't around much. The house was in the middle of a big field, fairly isolated. There was another house near the road, but we were essentially on our own. Our house had two floors and four bedrooms; we shared a kitchen and bathroom. Another young guy, Chris, lived above me. He was pretty cool. We hung out a bit. After a few months, a divorced guy in his 60s moved in. Nice enough, but I didn't need to see him walking around in his boxers all damn day. I spent a lot of time in my room; it was like being in high school again in some respects. Plus I was in the mopey stages of being out of a relationship after four years. Not a lot of fun to be around.
  
• Beverly, March 1994-March 1996: I was pretty depressed while I was in Middleton and I think my early morning gig was giving me an ulcer. I was swilling antacid like was going out of style. But things turned around when I ended up renting a room in the apartment shared by my co-workers Sue and Gail and Sue's friend Deb. I'd known all of them for years, especially Sue, with whom I went to high school and college. The place was on Essex Street in Beverly, but the other end from where I'd lived before, near the downtown. The joke behind the whole thing was I was moving with three cute girls, but there were all engaged or about to be. But they were all really cool and I had a blast living in that apartment, even though we would freeze in the winters and bake in the summers. Man, I really had some crappy landlords. Anyway, we actually had two more roommates that first summer when Deb's sister and friend moved in for a few months; the rent was super-cheap ($165 a month). By the spring of '95, however, the girls had all gotten married and moved out. My buddy Eric moved in and later my co-worker John joined us. He was a neat freak in the office, not so much at home. But it was all good.
  
• Salem, April 1996-April 1997: I really liked living in that Beverly apartment, but by the spring of '97, I was getting annoyed by my roomies and was plotting to get my own place. A friend of mine told me there was a open apartment in the Salem house where she was renting; it was a basement apartment, but it was 10 minutes from my new gig in Marblehead. Plus, early '96 was a tough time. I had gotten dumped by my girlfriend and then my dad died, literally on the day I was moving out of the Beverly place. I was ready for some alone time. The Salem place was kinda cave-like, with only a few tiny windows. Ultimately, I had a lot of fun that summer, but by the following spring, it was getting a little expensive having to foot all the bills on my own.
  
• Beverly, May 1997-October 1999: I had been hanging out with my buddy Mike a lot over the past few years, playing softball, golf and just going out drinking. I had been bitching about my apartment when he mentioned that one of his roommates was about to move out. He and his brother had been renting half a house on Sturtevant Street in Beverly in a pretty nice neighborhood. It was cheaper than the Salem place, a lot nicer and back in Beverly, where I preferred living. We had a lot of fun in that house, including some major blowout parties like the one for my 30th birthday. Not long after moving in, I started dating Deb.
• Beverly, October 1999-September 2000: Things were growing progressively more serious between Deb and I and in July 1999, I finally proposed. We agreed to get married the following summer and decided to get an apartment together. We found a nice place on Lovett Street in Beverly, right upstairs from the place my friends Eric and Bryan lived for a while earlier in the decade. It was near the ocean and an easy walk to the train, which was good because I had started working at Webnoize that same month. The company moved from Stoneham to Cambridge in early 2000, so I began taking the commuter rail into the city. This also worked out well because my car was totaled by a giant tree branch during a storm in June 2000. We had planned to stay in that apartment for a while and save some money to get a house eventually, but things changed when Deb's mom was looking for a place and proposed getting a two-family house together. So Deb and her mom started looking at houses and one day Deb called me to say that the house I lived in on Roosevelt Avenue was on the market. It was a little weird at first, especially when we first took a tour of the house, but that was fleeting. We got it for a good price and Deb and I took the upstairs apartment, which I'd never been in before.
  

We don't have any plans on moving any time soon. Both Deb and I moved around a fair amount as kids and we don't want to do that to the girls. Besides, all that moving is enough to take the wanderlust out of your system.

House a Home:


Moving in Stereo: