katie allison granju

would i do it over? December 10, 2007

Jon and I bought our first house together last September. It’s a 3,000 sq foot 1908 Queen Anne with craftsman influences. It’s about 50% restored, which means we have years of work ahead of us.

I love, love, love huge, old house, but sometimes I am impatient with how slowly time and money will allow us to progress in renovating it. It’s an exercise in zen acceptance to live with a pretty crummy old bathroom in exchange for beautiful woodwork and original windows we couldn’t have afforded in a newer house or more finished old one. It’s literally going to take years to get it where we want it to be. And speaking of what we could afford, we needed a big house - big enough for the large family we already had and one we knew we wanted to expand. We needed a lot of space, and had a relatively limited budget. We were thrilled to find a house we could swing that would accomodate the whole brood. The fact that it needs quite a bit of work was the tradeoff we decided to make.

We live in one of the less finished sections (read: still lots of rundown houses all around us, but more being renovated all the time) of one of Knoxville’s MOST INTERESTING HISTORIC NEIGHBORHOODS. Our neighborhood has sidewalks & wonderful, progressive neighbors. We have a real creek in our backyard separating us from what should be a perfectly lovely greenway park. These things, along with the beauty and character of the house we fell in love with were the reason Jon and I took the plunge and bought our creaky, giant house.

And today I had an interesting discussion with two other mothers of young children who have also moved to our street in the past year about whether if they had known then what they know now about the “issues” on our street, whether they –or we — would have bought houses here.

The answer is a resounding maybe.

We all adore our wonderful old houses, the sidewalks and the proximity to downtown. We don’t ever battle traffic to get where we need to go - shopping, restaurants, movies and more are all close at hand. We like the neighbors we know, the active neighborhood assoiciation, and basking in the glow of some of the most gorgeous architecture in the city. Lots to love about our neighborhood. Plus, I live only a few blocks from my office, and less than 5 miles from my sister and Jon’s parents.

But the reality is that this neighborhood is still struggling. We have a terrible speeding problem that the police say doesn’t exist. The beautiful park behind us is too often littered with beer cans and supine homeless people. The creek, which has a biological hazard problem, fills up with shopping carts and there are more transients walking our block than I’m comfortable with. I try as hard as I can to be totally relaxed about the kids playing outside - and I do let them because I think it’s important for kids to learn and know their own physical environments - but I’ll admit to twinges of worry. The twinges get worse and my doubt is fueled when friends visit and express concern about their own kids playing unsupervised in our yard.

We are urban pioneers, I guess. And I knew that would be the case when we bought the house, but to be honest, it’s a little more wild west here on our block than I imagined it would be when we bought the house. We will need to spend at least 4K to fence the yard before C. needs her first swingset and even then, I’ll probably worry a little.

Lest I make it sound too terrible, you should know that we’ve had no crime problems since moving in (well, unless you count that one drunk guy passed out in the backyard that one time). I never feel unsafe walking anywhere and I have never met anyone - including the homeless and near-homeless people I see regularly who wasn’t very, very friendly. Last weekend, 1300 people bought tickets to tour the houses in the neighborhood, including our NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR’S. Property values continue to rise, and I love sitting on our big front porch and waving to passersby.

But sometimes I allow myself to ask whether we picked the wrong place to be. I don’t think we did, because this feels like home now. I love the idea of living here for the next 40 years, slowly restoring the house and enjoying watching the neighborhood continue to revive. I like walking to the produce market at the end of the street and buying tomatoes in the summer and our Christmas tree in the winter. I like knowing that my children, who have been moved too many times already, will now have lifetime roots in a special old house with character, big enough to return to with their own families for holidays and even weddings.

But the neighborhood - our section anyway - is still teetering between two possibilities. And I do think the city could do more to help with forward progress. We are grateful for the traffic calming circle they gave us, even though so far it doesn’t seem to slow anyone down much except for the people who crash into it. Maybe after it gets a tree and flowers it will be more effective and attractive. But the speeding problem down our street is terrible, and it amazes me how uninterested the city seems in getting the greenway park cleaned up and under control. Small efforts are made, and we do have a very good city councilmember representing us, but there are still too many days I walk through the park (like today) and have to stroll the baby around a sleeping man with no shoes, while averting my eyes from the latest bit of obscene, spray painted graffiti. It’s a shame Knoxville has allowed a mission district to be built out in one single area of town — not far from our neighborhood and other historic neighborhoods — instead of spreading the hard work of being neighborly to the homeless across different neighborhoods around town.

It’s a hard question to answer - would we do it again if we knew what we now know? Take on both the challenge of a house that needs what will likely eventually amount to $100,000 in renovations over the next 20 years, plus the challenges of a “transitional” urban neighborhood?

Maybe. Probably.

Like I said, this is home now.