Are You Building a Vacation or a Life?
The Saturday in July is a different animal from the Tuesday in February
What the Tuesday in February Tells You
The couple from California stood in the kitchen with their coats still on.
It was a Tuesday. Gray, low sky, the kind of winter light that doesn’t so much as illuminate as just sit there, leaden and vaguely ominous. The driveway had a skin of ice over old mud. Nobody had swept the porch. There was no fire in the woodstove, no bread in the oven, no golden hour coming through the windows to make the case for itself. There wasn’t anything staged or hallmark-y about any of the showings we went to togehther that afternoon.
And M. looked across the kitchen at S., who gave a slight nod. He turned to me and, coat on, said, “We could live here.”
Not I love it. Not this is amazing. Just the quiet, unglamorous math of a person checking his own reaction against a house that wasn’t trying to seduce him, or his partner.
That’s the moment I actually trust.
I don’t have to tell anyone how magical this place is in July.
But it’s funny because just this morning I was talking with a friend and colleague and we were both secretly admitting that July isn’t our favorite time up here. I mean, it’s demonstrably great. Golden light on the water. Sunsets that make you pause what you’re doing to stare every single night. The particular music of frogs and bugs and birds that are a soundtrack that city people download on an app and that you get for free outside your window.
And if you’re house hunting, chances are someone’s turned on every lamp and opened the windows to capture the breeze from whatever water or woods are nearest. Maybe there’s coffee brewing, or a candle going, or the listing agent has timed the whole thing so you arrive right when the lake is doing its best impression of a postcard. None of that is dishonest, of course. It’s just theater, and theater has a job: to make you feel something big, fast.
The problem is that fast feeling doesn’t tell you what you actually need to know. It tells you the house shows well. It doesn’t tell you whether you can live there on a day when its just you, in your sweats, on the couch, watching tv and drinking tea.
The real test happens on the boring day
Here’s what I mean, concretely. Not metaphor. An actual Tuesday, which if you’re a long time reader is apparently the day of the week that I think nothing out of the ordinary ever happens.
Imagine its February instead of July for a minute.
The road to the house is private, and it hasn’t been plowed yet, and you’re doing the math in your head about who plows it and what that costs and whether you trust that math. You notice the grade of the driveway and you find yourself picturing it in February, ice under snow, and asking whether you’d feel confident backing out of it in the dark before work. Nobody staged that driveway for you. It’s just there, being itself, and your body is already rehearsing a version of your life on it.
Or you’re in town on a winter weekday afternoon and you find out what’s actually open. Not what’s open for the farmers market or the summer concert series. What’s open on a plain Tuesday in February, when the tourists are gone and the town is just being a town. The coffee counter, or the transfer station, or the hardware store where somebody might ask if you’re new around here. You either want to be the kind of person who talks to that person, or you don’t. That’s not a small thing. That’s most of what daily life here is actually made of.
And increasingly, some of this test happens before you’ve set foot on the property at all. I’ve walked buyers through houses over video, camera panning slowly past a woodstove and a mudroom and a driveway they’ll never have seen in person until the day they move in. It’s a strange kind of decision-making, trusting your gut, and someone you’ve never met, through a screen. But in fact it isolates the same question a live showing muddies with light and lemonade: does something in you settle, or does it leave you with more questions than before.
This is a test of you, not the house
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying today. I’m not saying (today) visit in the off season to see the “real” version of a town, and I’m not saying (today) winter reveals the truth about a property’s bones. Those are worthwhile exercises, and I’ve made the arguments for why both of them are good things to do or think about elsewhere.
This is a narrower and, I think, more critical test. It’s not what the ordinary day reveals about the house or the town. It’s what the ordinary day reveals about you. Whether you’re the kind of person who can find something steadying in a gray Tuesday with wet leaves stuck to the steps, or whether you need the golden hour to feel sure. Neither answer is wrong. But only one of them tells you the truth before you’ve signed anything.
Most people go looking for the right house. Some go looking for the right lake, or the town that feels like them. Fewer people go looking for the truth about their own reaction to an unremarkable day. But its precisely that search that actually saves you from a bad decision, because a house, or a lake, or a town that only works in July is a one that’s only telling you part of what your life there will be.
So if you’re starting to look, or thinking about starting to look, here’s the only homework I’d give you: picture the most ordinary version of a day there. Not the vacation version. The version with the ice on the steps and the grocery run and and the dog needing to go out. Sit with what your gut does with that image before you sit with what the listing photos do.
If something in you settles, that’s information. If something in you resists, that’s information too.
Either way, you’ll know more than most people do before they ever make an offer.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
