As I approach the one-year anniversary of living in this house (I closed on April 9, but the first night I spent here was on the 21st), I’m gradually coming to terms with some of its quirks and with some of the issues of having a house like this.

For one thing, I have a basement. This is the first time I’ve lived in a house with a basement since I was a kid living in Germany. There it was damp but cool. Here, it can get pretty humid, even when it’s hot. I learned last year that a dehumidifier is a good idea, especially during the times of year when it’s too warm for the heater but too cool for the air conditioner. Mine seems to pull about 3/4 of a gallon of water out of the air every other day or so, even when it’s not humid at all. This is essentially distilled water, so I’m using it to water plants. I can’t imagine what it will do when it actually gets humid, but by then I’ll be running the air conditioner. I learned during the past couple of summers that I have to adjust my idea of a good thermostat setting and can’t set it where I would have in Texas. Sometimes, I need to just put on a sweater and run the AC to get the humidity out so things don’t mildew.

The basement itself is kind of weird because it’s actually upstairs from my first floor. My house is built into the side of a hill. The front half of the downstairs is the ground floor, where the front door is. Then you go up a step into the basement, which is the back half of the downstairs and the part that’s mostly underground. It’s not a finished basement. The floor is concrete, and it looks like the walls were encapsulated and sprayed with foam insulation by the people who restored the house. I don’t know what it was like before. The utilities in there are new. They were still installing the connections for the laundry when I first looked at the house. Then the upstairs is the second story in front and the ground floor in back. The back door to the house is upstairs. This is the only house on the street like this. For the rest of them, they built them up on the hill, with retaining walls to hold in the hillside and stairs from the street level to the house. My neighbors’ ground floors are just about level with my upstairs.

I think there may once have been a back kitchen door, as well. When the house was restored/remodeled, they took out the wall that cut the downstairs room in half. There used to be a separate kitchen and living/dining room. The chimney for the coal or wood stove that was apparently used for cooking and heating is still there, though there’s nothing attached to it now, and they took out the wall that was there to open the space up, putting in a bar instead. There’s a bit of concrete slab on the side of the house by the kitchen that looks like a small porch, though there’s no door there. It’s behind the refrigerator, but there’s an electrical outlet that’s at the height for a refrigerator on the wall beside it, and the window for the kitchen is a different size from all the other windows in the house, without the wood framing that’s on all the other windows. My guess is that there used to be a back door behind where the fridge is now for bringing in coal or wood for the stove, the refrigerator went on the wall beside it, and there was a different window in a different place. The siding is relatively new (though not part of the remodel), so there’s no trace of the old door from the exterior, other than what looks like a side porch that has no door. The neighbors who saw the kitchen before the recent remodel said it was very different and it’s good that it’s totally new. That part of the house was gutted, so the kitchen is what you’d get with new construction. I’ve added an island because there was a lot of floor space that wasn’t very useful, and now I have more counter and storage space that I can reposition as needed because it’s on wheels. I’ve also bought a small chest freezer since, as a single person, I generally have to buy packages that are larger than I need at the moment, so I need to freeze a lot of stuff.

The living room isn’t of much use as a living room. It was definitely built before the age of television. I guess it would have worked as a kind of sitting room/parlor, and they might have put a kitchen table where I have the kitchen island, so they didn’t need to use the front room as a dining room. I have the chaise lounge that wouldn’t fit through the door of any other room in there, and that’s where I put the dining room. I use one of the upstairs rooms as a living room. It’s designated as a bedroom in the floor plan that went with the listing, but I don’t think it’s been used as a bedroom for a long time. The door to the room has been removed, there’s no clothes rail in the closet, and there’s a sliding glass door to the deck. I don’t know if the deck is original to the house or if it was added later, and I don’t know if there was always an exterior door in that room. It’s a little odd having the living room on a different floor from the kitchen, but I’m getting used to it. I put my old microwave (there’s one built into the kitchen) in the spare room so I can reheat tea or even make microwave popcorn without going downstairs. I love that living room and looking out at the yard from my seat on the sofa. It’s snug, but it works for me.

I’d thought the lack of closet space would be a problem, but it seems to be working out okay. Most of my tops are knits, so I can fold them instead of hang them, and I’ve turned a bookcase into a wardrobe with fabric bins that fit on the shelves. Since I am who I am, that bookcase does have some books on it, as well.

I think I’m eventually going to get different blinds for my bedroom windows. The window frames are a slightly odd size, so one size of blind was about half an inch too big. I thought I could make the smaller size work, since it covers the glass part of the window, but since it has to hang over the lower part of the window that you can raise and lower, it leaves a gap on the sides on the upper part of the window, and in the summer when it starts getting light around 5 in the morning, that’s annoying. I may go with something that fits over the window rather than inside the window, and I have some ideas. For now, I have some lined curtains that I can throw over the curtain rods that hold the lace curtains, and that deals with the worst of the light.

I had to get used to not having a landline phone. There isn’t even a phone jack. There’s a connection box from Bell Atlantic on the outside of the house, but it doesn’t lead to anything in the house (I think the phone jack must have been in the part of the kitchen that was gutted and remodeled, probably one of those old phones that hung on the wall). So I joined the 21st century and just use my cell phone. My old cordless phone system with two handsets connects to the cell phone via Bluetooth, and my house is small enough that my cell phone is always in range, so now I have handsets up and downstairs that ring when I get a call and I don’t have to find the cell phone or run up or down the stairs to answer. I have fiber optic Internet, so I have my phone set to run over the wi-fi so I don’t have to deal with cellular reception at home.

It took me a while to get my office the way I wanted it. I found a small desk that’s on wheels and that can raise and lower, but I found that I couldn’t get it to lower enough to be comfortable, and the keyboard drawer that was at the right level didn’t pull out enough to put my laptop on it. I also needed more desk space than it offered, so I found another desk that’s pretty much like a hospital tray table. I can lower it enough to type comfortably, and it raises if I ever want to do the standing desk thing. The other desk works as a “desk” for other work, and the keyboard shelf is good for keeping my planner and reference notebooks handy. I found a gaming chair that has good lumbar support that I can adjust, so now I can sit comfortably at my desk to type.

A lot of the windows don’t have screens, but I found some that you can slot in from the inside, and they work pretty well. I’ve got one of those magic mesh things for the door that leads to the deck, so I can go in and out with my hands full.

There’s still some fine-tuning to do to get the house exactly the way I want it, and I have a lot of work to do in the yard, but I’m getting closer to ideal in my cozy little cottage full of quirks. One thing I find amusing is that my house pretty much looks like what you get when a child draws a picture of a house. It’s got the pointy roof, two windows upstairs, two windows and a door downstairs, and a chimney sticking out of the middle of the roof. It’s like I was drawing pictures of my future home when I was a child drawing pictures of houses.