I came up with this decision-making system.
Let’s say you’re buying a house.
First step, you brainstorm all the things you want. Neighborhood, schools, bedrooms, fireplace, porch, whatever. Then you rank what you want and you assign a number in reverse order of the ranking. So, if you have 10 items on your list and neighborhood is most important, well then neighborhood is worth 10 points. You list those items in ranked order along the left side of a lined sheet of paper.
Next you list your house choices across the top. Let’s say you have narrowed it down to five candidates. You rank each house, one to five, on each of your 10 criteria, with the highest number going to the best house on that particular criteria.
Then you do some simple math. So if house number two has your most desired neighborhood and the neighborhood is the most important of your 10 items then that’s worth five times 10 or 50 points. You go through the rest of the list like that and (bango!) you come out with five simple numbers that reduce a bewildering life decision to an obvious answer. I should patent this or write a book about it.
Two decades ago I applied this brilliant system to our own house purchase. The house on Eton Ridge came in dead last. So, of course, we bought it.
Here’s the big flaw in rational decision-making systems. Life’s most important decisions don’t yield themselves to cold analysis. Who you marry, what school you go to, what house you buy, these things are more affairs of the heart. One of the big criteria on our house list was condition. We did not want a fixer-upper. So, what did we do? We bought the mother of all fixer-uppers. Exterior paint was peeling, walls were cracked, floors were a mess, no first floor bathroom or closet. Oh, yeah, and the front porch was kind of like falling off.
But the place just felt right. It had, as they say in real estate, good bones. And — no small consideration — we could afford it mostly because it was a wreck. So we plunged in and after awhile we had exactly the house we wanted. All it took was 15 years and our entire life savings.
The house got us through some tough times. Like in early fall 2010, when we decided we could afford to put on a major addition. I had a good job, no credible opposition for a third four-year term in that good job and a 70 percent approval rating. Six months later, just as the project was being wrapped up, a funny thing happened. At the insistence of the voters I became suddenly unemployed. I wasn’t sure we could keep the house, but we did.
But now, almost eight years later, with a lake place up north and my desire to pursue the gently compensated field of freelance writing, it was time to downsize.
So this spring we purged a good part of 20 years of accumulated stuff. (If you wanted my massive hinge collection, I’m sorry but it’s gone.) We sold the house to a nice young couple with two little kids who can make full use of the entire place. It was a good feeling to get rid of all that stuff and to know that room taken up by stuff will now be lived in by a family.
Here’s the surprising thing for me. We loved our house. But when we walked through it for the last time last Tuesday evening, neither of us got very sentimental about it. For one thing, we were really tired from the move that day. But when we closed the door for the last time, Dianne said, “Goodbye, house.” And that was it. We were gone.
When it came down to it, it was just a house. You can take a home anywhere, even a one-bedroom condo. What we’ll really miss is our neighbors. And their dogs, who freely walked into our house and expected treats. We didn’t move that far away, but we’ll miss running into our neighbors on the sidewalk, impromptu cocktail hours, spur-of-the-moment inspections on the progress of never-ending remodeling projects, and updates on their kids, some of whom grew up with us next door. When it comes to stuff, that’s the stuff that takes up no room but that you can’t take with you. We’ll still see our old neighbors but it won’t be quite the same.
Goodbye, house. It turns out that’s not so hard. Goodbye, neighbors. That, it turns out, is very hard.
