In January 2003, my now estranged husband and I bought our house. We hadn’t been planning on buying a house. Some time in the months after we got married we moved from our first apartment to a bigger one, and I honestly don’t remember why. Maybe the rent went up in that shoddy building or maybe I got sick of incidents like the time the landlord had someone take the tires off my car thinking my car belonged to a tenant who owed him money.

Darrell and I loved our first apartment. We could pass the groceries directly from the sidewalk through the kitchen window. We could sit outside with our cat who liked to play with the neighbor’s dog. And the guy who owed my landlord money– I think he owned ‘The Cat Who Came to Visit,’ the cat who used to sneak in our open windows and sit and watch our fish tank. Or was it our lizards?

Our second apartment was in a sorta-questionable neighborhood but it was only $100 more a month than our first apartment for a lot more space and essentially what was a two-story cottage attached to an apartment building. (This was circa 2000: $475 for our one bedroom in downtown Easton, $575 for our “two bedroom” on Easton’s South Side. Compare that to today. If you want to, do a real estate search on zip 18042.)

That particular landlord and his administrative partner kept putting the property on the market because the insurance assessor kept claiming the building was worth far more than the owners thought it was worth and to prove it, they would try to sell it for that price.

Finally, I had enough. We had a great landlord in that second apartment. And we didn’t want another landlord who would take the tires off of my car.

So we bought a house. At apparently the ideal time to buy a house. It was out of our price range at $95,000 but luckily the price dropped while we were talking to our real estate agent. It dropped to $89,9000. I have never felt so old as I do today writing that.

The next year, the other half of our twin sold for $120,000. The following year (or so) an almost identical home a couple doors down (but without a garage) sold for more than $150,000. And I’m not sure, but now some of these homes are selling for $200,000. I can’t even.

Anyway, the point of this post was not to comment on the insanity of the real estate market. I wanted to tell you my definition of a “starter home.” Our home is “half a double” in town with a nice school district and in an almost completely walkable neighborhood. We have three bedrooms. We had two full baths until I asked the plumber to rip out the rotted downstairs shower in favor of a stacked washer and dryer so I don’t have to worry about falling down the basement stairs.

But now I can say I have two washing machines.

We have an enclosed (heated) sun porch, a detached garage that’s got an entire workshop, and despite some issues and small or weirdly shaped rooms, it’s a solid brick house. And when we bought it, I thought about people who called it a starter house. They implied that some day we would buy something bigger and better.

But now I think I have a different definition of starter house. It’s the house you learn on, practice maintaining, and in so many ways, the house I have both cherished and failed.

I have learned– the hard way– that the starter house teaches you about plumbing, windows, drafts, electricity, floods, patching plaster, staining floors and painting walls, all on a regular timeline to keep the house functioning. My toilets exploded a year or so ago. The toilets were probably eighty years old and my daughter sat on one too hard and cracked the tank in the middle of the night. It ran and ran and flooded the house.

Which was our second bathroom related flood in this home.

I’ve learned a lot about deferred maintenance and things I should have done and things I need to do. And the costs of owning home. Which is still way less than the cost of renting in my area. So, I use my home as a learning tool for my daughter who has taken home repair and wood shop and pays attention to every person she meets who has skills.

Because her father and I do not.

So on Wednesday, I had a job interview and a business meeting and when I got home, The Teenager had successfully patched the concrete on the garage floor. She decided to tackle replacing our faucet. Because we have an external dishwasher, it puts pressure on the faucet and they have a shorter-than-usual shelf life. We found a new one that I could review for Amazon, saving us the expense.

But we found we didn’t have the strength to remove the old one– which was regularly flooding the counters and the floor. Apparently the plumber had used a power tool to install it. The Teenager emptied the trap and removed the pipe. Unfortunately when we disconnected everything, the one piece of old pipe disintegrated.

The next day we called the plumber. Since The Teenager did most of the work already, it took the plumber minimal effort to attach everything and we really like our new faucet. Now, we just need to find another way to use the dishwasher or hand wash dishes, which I haven’t done in 20 years (20 years almost exactly as I got the dishwasher in May 2004 right before The Teenager was born).