It used to be that a woman needed either divorce papers or a husband`s death certificate to get a house of her own.
To a large extent that`s still true, housing experts say. But in recent years a small number of women have been challenging the conventional wisdom that a single-family house is off limits to any female who isn`t a veteran of marriage.
Looking for privacy (often after years of apartment living), real estate investments with a more dependable resale value and the kind of ”nest” that they knew as children, these single women turn up their noses at condos, co-ops and townhouses. They say that a house seems to be the best fit with their personality, which they describe with words like ”independent” and
”self-reliant.”
”People always thought I marched to a different drummer,” says one single woman with a house.
On the lookout
Realtors don`t view them as that different, however. ”Security may be a little more important,” says Linda Maguire, principal broker for Maguire & Associates in South Shore. She adds that women tend to be more concerned with living somewhere that has a real sense of community, where neighbors look out for one another.
A woman in the market for a house, says Susan Cooney of Coldwell Banker in Evanston, ”looks at the size of the rooms, but she doesn`t want a lot of them. Maintenance can`t be overwhelming, but she still wants to have a garage and she still wants to have a yard.”
Is it possible to find happiness as a single woman in a single-family home? What follows are the stories of three such house dwellers, all in their 30s.
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When Ellen Douglass discovered that the deed to her new house listed her as a ”spinster” (a legal term still used to indicate the owner`s marital status), she says she was so mad she almost refused to close. After talking to her for even a short time, a visitor comes to understand just how angry Ellen had to have been to let anything possibly come between her and her house. It`s an almost spiritual relationship that she eloquently describes.
”A home is a nest, a world unto itself, a place you can crawl up and be alone,” says Douglass. She describes walking into her circa 1928 house for the first time and ”sensing that people who had good lives lived here.” She remembers coming over one night after buying it and just sitting in the empty house, ”getting to know it.”
Later she adds: ”Everyone should own a piece of the Earth. When you plant tulip bulbs, that`s your dirt. It feels good.”
Needless to say, feelings this strong ruled out the possibility of a condo. ”It`s a legal fiction that some lawyer came up with, a glorified apartment,” says Douglass, who is also a lawyer. ”I grew up knowing what it was like and what a privilege it was to live in a house. It wasn`t something I had to be married to do.”
`Just a neighbor`
Having never married makes Douglass an anomaly among the many families that share her South Side Beverly neighborhood, where she has lived for four years. ”But when you`re out there cutting the grass or shoveling the snow, your marital status doesn`t matter,” she says. ”You`re just a neighbor.”
Cutting grass is something she does a lot-her modified Tudor home sits on a corner lot. But it doesn`t faze her. ”I cut all the grass, shovel all the snow and rake all the leaves,” she says. In fact, she looks at house chores as ”sort of like therapy-to get up on a Saturday and just putz around.”
Every homeowner views her sweat equity as increasing the value of her investment. What Douglass didn`t anticipate was how a home would pay off for her socially. ”Your marketability escalates,” she says, laughing.
Still, old attitudes die hard. ”It also intimidates some men,” she says. ”They`ve been brought up to believe they`re supposed to give a woman a house. And they realize you don`t need them for that.”
The phantom husband
When it appears that having a man around the house will come in handy, Douglass` solution is to make one up. Some workmen, she finds, are ”more cooperative when there`s a man to please,” so she creates a ”mysterious”
husband who always leaves for work early in the morning.
”You learn to pick your battles,” she says. Other than having to depend on the occasional phantom husband, Douglass says being in a house ”gives you self-reliance pretty quickly.” To take care of jobs she can`t or won`t do herself, she has developed a network of reliable contractors, electricians and plumbers.
She advises that other women looking to form a spiritual bond with their homes do a little soul-searching first: ”If you`re a person who doesn`t want to have to worry about fixing something, don`t buy a house.” She urges a woman homeowner to ”really go with the inspector, climb into the attic and crawl around in the eaves.”
And once the purchase is made, she warns, hardware stores may offer the only opportunity for shopping. ”I can`t think of when I last bought a suit,” she says.
As for herself, she says she has never regretted her decision to buy a house. ”I wouldn`t want a single woman to be discouraged by the naysayers,” she says. ”There`s never been a point when I think it`s too much.” She calls it ”true ownership, with all the responsibilities, obligations, privileges and joys. I wouldn`t trade it for anything.”
The wisdom of her choice literally hits home when Douglass` family gathers at her house. ”At Christmas,” she says, gesturing around her living room, ”the tree was there, the fireplace was going, and we decked the halls!”
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”Women really are nesters,” says another woman, a graphic designer who asked to remain anonymous. ”They make wherever they are a home.”
This is why she sometimes wonders why she ever gave up her life as a tenant to buy a house in Bucktown a little more than a year ago.
”I had fun until I ran out of money,” she says. ”I had fun until I had to start taking care of things that weren`t fun-like the plumbing, and the heating, and the catch drains-I`m still not sure what they do, but I know you have to clean them out.”
She is anything but a walking endorsement for home ownership. But she says her disappointments have little, if anything, to do with her status as a single woman. In fact, she wonders if her house-related travails would be any different if she did cohabit. ”Even if I was living with someone, I`d have to coordinate it all-that`s what women do anyway,” she says.
Dreams vs. reality
What happened to her could happen to any homeowner, single or married:
She got caught in the middle when her rehabbing dreams collided with economic realities. ”You don`t really know what it`s like until you`re in it,” she says. ”You don`t realize how much it costs.”
Her 50-year-old frame house had been divided into two apartments at some point in its history. ”I wanted the whole place to myself,” she says, ”a place where I could design my own space.”
Things started out well enough. ”I stripped the wallpaper, pulled up carpeting, painted, did designer things like that-all the fun, creative stuff,” she says. A pine floor she had sanded and sealed turned ”flaming red,” and workmen called her ”dear” and ”honey,” but she took it all in stride.
Her new-found privacy was-and still is-positively exhilarating. She recalls the night she was doing some repair work when she accidentally dropped the hammer. She instinctively cringed, wondering if she had awakened her neighbors below.
Then she realized that after 10 years of living in apartments, she was in her own house. There wasn`t anybody downstairs.
”At that moment,” she says, ”you realize you`re free.”
But lack of money soon put her rehabbing plans on hold. She says she finds that ”all my money seems to be going into keeping the house just like it was when I bought it. I figured it out. With the loan, electric, heating, all that stuff, I pay $400 more than I did when I rented in Lincoln Park.”
She has also finally admitted to herself that she isn`t really willing to invest that much sweat equity. ”I thought maybe I could be handy,” she says. ”But it takes time to be handy, and a certain amount of practice.”
As for yard work, ”I have a teeny-tiny yard and I hate it,” she says.
”I`m learning to grow weeds really well-they`re easier.”
Security also remains a worry, even after she put in an alarm system. She says she never considered Lincoln Park to be a safe haven from urban crime, but she finds the ongoing vandalism and graffiti by Bucktown gangs unsettling. But what is most galling is that the house she bought primarily as a financial shelter has failed to keep its end of the bargain. ”I don`t see any benefits,” she says. ”It doesn`t buy you anything, really. It`s a great American myth from the 1950s.”
She tempers her anger and resignation with humor. But she minces no words in her advice to anyone-man or woman-who is considering buying a house:
”Great. Have fun. But you won`t.”
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Her mother, says Bev, ”thought I was nuts.” For once, perhaps, a mother`s fears were not unreasonable. After all, Bev had never even lived away from home before, and here she was planning to become the owner of a real house with a real yard.
But a condo just didn`t fit with Bev`s idea of what a home should be.
”My family has always had the yard, the flowers, the vegetables, an animal,” she says. Now, Bev has all of them, too, including Brutus, a very big black Labrador, who also serves as her home security system.
In the know
Bev, a pharmacist, says a house also made sense because she never found the prospect of maintenance daunting. Having helped her late father around the family home-they once remodeled a bathroom together-she discovered that, ”I`m handy. I like to putz around. If you have a house you better know what you`re doing.”
So three years ago, Bev bought a two-story, red-brick Georgian house in a quiet neighborhood on the Northwest Side. Along with Brutus, she accumulated a snowblower (”I`m not going to get out there and shovel the driveway,” she says), a lawn mower and a set of tools that she claims is the envy of her male relatives.
”I was a nervous wreck for the first five months,” she says, but she soon settled into home ownership. She clipped articles on hedge pruning, bought how-to books and faithfully watched ”This Old House.” She enclosed her back porch, doing all the wood preparation and carpeting herself. She did the yard work, too-and loved every minute of it.
She also became a habitue of hardware stores. ”(They`re) the neatest places,” she says. ”You can walk in and buy something for 23 cents!” But looking back on it, Bev now realizes that she might have taken to home ownership too well.
”I think I lost perspective for a while,” she says. ”You can get obsessed because it can never end. I turned down vacation for the first 2 1/2 years. In my first year, when I got a week off, I thought, `Great, I can do the garage.` ”
”This year,” she adds, ”I told myself that my whole life can`t be this house.”
Getting her perspective and social life back in balance hasn`t meant abandoning the house altogether. She is getting her bathroom remodeled, and she`s contracting the job herself. The only hitch so far has been an encounter with a fixtures salesman who suggested that Bev consult her husband before buying some higher-end items.
”I said it was my decision,” she recalls. ”And he said, `Oh, you`re one of those.` ”
Being ”one of those” hasn`t been a problem for Bev as far as her mostly retired neighbors are concerned. She laughs trying to imagine what went through their minds when they found out a single woman was moving in. ”They were probably crossing their fingers, afraid I was going to have wild parties. Boy, did I surprise them.”
Indeed, Bev has become a sort of model for the community. She has noticed that several of the husbands in the neighborhood have been so inspired by her devotion to her yard work that they`re now teaching their wives how to use the lawn mower.
”I`m on Cloud 9,” Bev says. ”The house is in good shape, I have great neighbors. There`s a lot invested here-and it`s mine.”
