How did we get here?

“This is a case of Chekhov’s nail gun,” I said to my partner as we decided, more or less on the spot, to make an offer to purchase an antique farmhouse barely a day after we had agreed to start shopping.

“That’s the third time you have made that joke,” he said, “and I still don’t get it.”

I’m paraphrasing here but Chekhov famously said that an unbreakable rule of storytelling is that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must be fired by the third. The corollary, it follows, is that if you purchase a fancy nail gun while living in a rented apartment, your narrative arc will require that you find some walls of your own to put nails in.

In this case, I thought it would be at least another year before I talked Boyfriend around to the idea of becoming homeowners again; we had a difficult experience with our last house, and had been enjoying being renters for a while: no plumbing crises; no discovering that previous owners had skimped on critical materials or steps, leading to costly and unsatisfying repairs; no desperate fights against flood water in the middle of the night, cursing at sump pumps while trying not to draw the notice of the neighbors. The last time I brought up the idea of moving, he changed the subject before I got the sentence all the way out. So I was prepared to give it time.

But our rent is exorbitant and my commute is hellacious and we recently had a weird thing with an idiot neighbor and his stupid dog, and this time when I brought up the idea of moving (“it doesn’t have to be our forever house,” I wheedled, “but maybe we should think about NOT continuing to throw money down the drain when our lease comes up”). Boyfriend agreed to go to a few open houses, then immediately began having panic attacks. I let it drop but somehow during the course of the following week, he had made a plan to spend a day with a realtor friend looking at a few houses in our agreed upon target area (criteria: near the relevant train line; not built or flipped for profit; one could be naked in the back yard if one chose). We were just looking, we said. Just going to get a sense of whether this was where we wanted to be.

***

We’re in the car on the way to the third stop of the day, which I’m not all that excited about based on listing pictures that make it look cramped and dark and stuffy.  Boyfriend is rehearsing our game plan: “Keep a poker face; don’t say anything if you like it or if you hate it; just be polite but don’t ENTHUSE about it; we’ll just look around and talk about it later. Don’t give them the upper hand”

“Okay,” I say, “whatever.”

Then we pull up at the house, and it’s lovely: an antique but not run-down looking; it’s tall and red and even though it’s a faintly soggy day in April, the light is just lovely and I can tell the gardens are delightful. There is a gloriously  large yard and woods and a skating pond and it’s all so peaceful and private. The pictures had got it all wrong. Boyfriend immediately starts gushing to the listing agent.

We hear that there is another offer in, but that the seller is stalling. By dinnertime, we’ve decided to go for it.  Boyfriend embarks on a days-long fantasia about what kind of tractor we’re going to need, whether the barn we’ll build will be timber frame or stick built, whether there will be time to get a vegetable garden going in the first year. Two days later, our offer is accepted, and it’s game on. I send a group text: “I think I just impulse-bought a house.”

“Sounds about right,” is the more or less universal reply.

***

For years we have been talking about our next house. We were probably going to build it ourselves, with sustainable materials and a passive-solar design. It was going to be compact. Ultra-efficient. Low maintenance. But between the two of us we have never once done the straightforward or easy thing, so we’re a week away from being the proud owners of a 280-year-old homestead with some cosmetic issues.

There are going to be a lot of projects. Chekhov’s nail gun is ready to go. Stay tuned.