House Lessons Quotes

“Caretaking in a relationship is not flowers or date night—necessary as these are, they are the equivalent of a new color painted on your walls. Delightful, but not structural. Structural is unloading the dishwasher when it’s your partner’s turn, or making sure whoever gets home last from work is greeted with dinner. It’s learning about mushroom hunting or musical theater or rugby because your spouse loves it. It is talking about the best of your partner in public, not the worst. It’s listening to stories we have heard a hundred times before as if they are new. Often, it is just listening, period. My father always washed the car by hand before he took my mother out on a date, even after they were married. He would say he wanted it clean “for his girl.” That is the part she remembered, not where they went or what they did. As psychologist John Gottman, who has studied countless married couples, will tell you, it is the presence of respect and an abiding willingness to support each other, more than romance, that indicates whether a marriage will last. Couples that exhibit these qualities tend to stay together, creating the marital equivalent of firmitas.”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life

“Ever since the year we’d cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for Italians in Bergamo—spreading the table with turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and creamed onions and cranberry sauce, and then watching their eyes fill with politely disguised horror at the cacophony of so many dishes coming out all at once”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life

“We’d brought with us the small closet door on which we’d measured our children as they grew, and now we hung it on the wall just inside our back door, so the kids would greet us every time we walked in.”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life

“the commonly used term housekeeper morphed into housewife. The shift was subtle, but the change in connotation was profound: a woman no longer managed her home; she was married to it.”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life

“Many of us had eldest children in middle school, and after years in the tunnel of raising young offspring, for the first time we were having a chance to look up and around. The partner many saw across the dinner table was not always the person they remembered falling in love with. Or perhaps it was their own needs that had changed.”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life

“The structure did not fail in any technical sense, but its excessive utility at the expense of beauty created its demise.”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life

“it is the presence of respect and an abiding willingness to support each other, more than romance, that indicates whether a marriage will last. Couples that exhibit these qualities tend to stay together, creating the marital equivalent of firmitas.”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life

“According to Appleton, humans are most comfortable in situations where they can observe (prospect) and feel safe (refuge) at the same time. A window seat is a classic example—enclosed and part of the house, but with a view of what is outside—an architectural re-creation of the experience of being held in a mother’s arms.”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life

“We had come without knowing it to our inevitable place. —Robinson Jeffers”
― Erica Bauermeister, House Lessons: Renovating a Life