My husband, Dan, is the kind of guy people listen to. This is because he is quiet most of the time, right most of the time, and six foot four all of the time. He chooses his words carefully and usually waits until he has something meaningful to contribute to the conversation before jumping in. I love that he always raises the level of discourse, not with heavy-handed opinions but with good questions. Even when he knows the answer, he prefers to wait until asked to share his thoughts.
It’s a well-known fact that Dan can fix just about anything — cars, computers, toilets, TVs, websites, wireless adapters, busted RC planes, beat-up trucks, broken jewelry, you name it. Smart, resourceful, and attentive to detail, Dan’s a born troubleshooter. So when he decided to take a stab at the real estate market by flipping a foreclosed 1930s fixer-upper in downtown Dayton, I knew he could do it.
We loved that little Craftsman bungalow, regardless of the fact that the paint was peeling, the columns sagging, and it looked like it was getting eaten by a nearby tree. An uprooted sidewalk led to a crumbling porch, which led to a squeaky door, which led to a complete disaster inside. Original hardwood floors lay beneath a layer of dust and an old carpet that smelled of cat urine and mildew. Dozens of windows needed to be replaced. The bathrooms were unusable, as water had rotted through the floors and left murky brown puddles in the bathtubs and the toilets. Someone had started painting the walls a seaweed green but stopped right in the middle of a stroke.
Despite its first impression, the house felt solid and had a great floor plan, and we got it at a good price. Dan jumped right in, ripping into the floors, reframing walls, and replacing the porch. He spent hours in a dark crawl space under the house, with just an inch or two between his nose and the floor joists. Once, he punched a hole in a wall, and cockroach feces poured out like sand from an hourglass. He bumped into weird reminders of the home’s previous owners: a naked Barbie in the laundry room, old pictures in a bedroom, a prescription suppository box behind the toilet. He came home smelling of plaster, dirt, and sweat.
There were times when I worried he wasn’t moving fast enough. I didn’t see my meticulously chosen paint colors on the walls or my bargain-store mirrors over the sinks. On the outside, things looked like they actually were getting worse, not better. Tools, debris, and pieces of two-by-fours lay scattered on the floor, and you could taste the gypsum dust in the air. But Dan had it all planned out: demo, repairs, finishing. I had to “respect the process” and hold off on the aesthetics until later. Essentials first. The whole thing reminded me of something my mother used to say during spring cleaning, when we reorganized our closets and pulled all the stuff out from under our beds. “Sometimes it has to get messy before it can be cleaned.”
We thought the whole process would take about six months, which in house-flipping time means it took about a year. However, we managed to sell it for a profit during the worst realestate market of our lifetimes. By the time Dan was done, it was the prettiest house on the street, with clean, slate-colored siding, light blue accents, new windows, a freshly reconstructed porch, and shiny black house numbers on one of the columns. I took before and after pictures as if we were on HGTV.
One of the greatest gifts Dan has ever given me was to respond to my struggle with doubt with the same “respect for the process” that he brought to the flip. It was natural for people to want to fix me on the outside, to quiet or scold me or to warn me to stop asking so many questions. But Dan seemed to understand better than anyone that this was a necessary path on my journey of faith. Through my petulance and insecurity, my tears and my rage, through my longest nights and darkest days, he listened, asked questions, offered his shoulder, and patiently saw me through. I guess he just knew that sometimes it has to get messy before it can be cleaned.