By Abbie Barker

There’s a lawnmower buried beneath our sunroom. Not buried, exactly, but resting on packed dirt, hidden behind mesh and painted lattice that wraps around the base of a faulty addition. In winter, the sunroom’s laminate floor feels cool through my socks. It’s uninsulated and, like everything else the previous owner constructed, of questionable craftsmanship. The windows warp with every passing summer. The fake weathered floorboards buckle and slope with increasing intensity. Surely, the whole room is sinking.

Still, it’s my favorite space in our house, with vaulted ceilings and skylights, angled sunlight bleaching my folders and books. My desk is shoved against a wall of unadorned windows overlooking a patch of woods. I’ve watched possums, wild turkeys, the squirrel with the lopped-off tail pass along a thin, forested line that separates our backyard from the neighbor’s. The room is small, my chair three feet from the wood stove. During the New Hampshire winter, I’m always too cold or too hot, vacillating between extremes. This is where I write – directly above that abandoned push-mower.

I’ve heard people liken buying a house to finding a spouse. They ask, “Have you found the one?” Or they shrug and say, “When you know, you know.” I imagined an inexplicable thrill gripping me in the front foyer. I would catch glimpses of my future self, watching TV shows on my computer in the living room, serving Cheerios at the breakfast bar. But how does anyone feel at home, brushing against a stranger’s staged belongings, confronting the odor of someone else’s life?

Our last home, a 1912 bungalow in Portland, Oregon, came close. Yet, when we first walked through the spacious, open rooms on a wet February night, I remember feeling underwhelmed and dismissive. The bedrooms were drafty. There were too many doors.

My husband was ready to make an offer. I countered by listing every flaw, every necessary and costly fix, forcing us to comb through more inventory — homes that were farther out and lacking in character, split levels reeking of cat piss and sugar cookie candles. Weeks passed. It became increasingly clear there was nothing better on the market. Lucky for us, in 2012 houses were sitting, even in Portland. I suggested we give that flawed bungalow another look. I’m not sure I felt anything dramatic during that second tour. Maybe I was just ready to settle.

It wasn’t until we furnished the rooms, painted the walls, shared beers with the neighbors, that I imagined living there forever. Forever lasted two years.

My husband accepted a job in New Hampshire. He needed to start in two weeks. The kids and I lingered in Oregon, tying up loose ends, swaddling stemware in bubble wrap. My husband visited vacant houses with our new real estate agent — a young woman with big hair and bigger teeth, a hatchback stamped with the vanity plate Legs. From three thousand miles away, I swiped through listings, Google-mapped entire neighborhoods, Facebook-stalked “Legs.”

Together, they found the one. Even in the photos it looked dingy and small. It was a single-level home with white ceramic tile and glowing orange pendants straight out of a late-nineties Starbucks. But it was in the right neighborhood for the right price, so I tried to see the potential. I asked if the unfinished attic above the garage was connected to the main house.

“Yes,” my husband said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Just checking.” I e-signed the offer without stepping inside.

I first pulled up to our gray-green ranch in late June. It was sunny and humid, the lawn lush, but inside the rooms were dark and cramped, a smoky fuzz coating the doors and window treatments. The basement was outfitted with deteriorating acoustic ceiling tiles and thin gray carpet glued to the cement. “This will be the playroom,” I said. I imagined rodents dropping from the exposed insulation, leaving turds in the folds of my daughter’s Calico Critters. My kids clung to me, staring up at the gaping ceiling holes.

I turned to the other rooms, searching for the potential. Maybe we could finish the space above the garage. I walked through the entire house, retracing my steps, but I couldn’t find any stairs. The unfinished attic was only accessible through the garage.

Settling is the gradual sink of a home into the shifting soil. Over time, windows and doors stick, floors buckle and slant. Cracks form in the cement and walls. Mostly this process is natural, a sign of aging, similar to my deepening smile lines. These shifts can also be sudden or dramatic, the fractures problematic. Home inspectors use the term to explain imperfections, pointing at the rifts and crevices worth noting. But they guess and assume, unable to confirm what’s buried beneath your sunroom or hiding in your walls.

Somehow, more than five years later, we’re still in this same single-level home, settling. We’ve replaced the furnace, the dryer, the microwave, a toilet. We’ve ripped up the floors and painted every primary-colored wall an inoffensive gray. We transformed the basement into a bright, livable space. But I never stopped swiping through listings. We placed offers on two other homes, both rejected.

Last summer we hired a carpenter to replace a section of rotting trim. We thought the problem was simple, contained, but within a week, he had peeled the siding off half the garage and demolished our mudroom. There were mice living above an electrical box, thousands of ants chewing holes in our breezeway. Every day on the job, the carpenter arrived shaking his head. The back of our house was threaded together by a series of poorly executed DIY projects. Each swing of the hammer uncovered something new and baffling.

One afternoon, I crouched on our brick pavers, watching him army-crawl his way under our slanting side deck. He peeled away a section of lattice and screen, investigating the adjacent room’s foundation. He slithered back out, wiping debris off of his dirt-smeared jeans.

“You’re never going to believe what’s down there.”

I grimaced. “A body?”

“A lawnmower.”

“Like part of one?”

“An entire push-mower and a car battery. That’s just what I can see.”

“This room was built on garbage.”

He nodded. “And the only way to get it out is to tear it all down.”

In buying a house, we inherit the previous owner’s poor judgment and bad decisions, the junk never hauled away. Before the lawnmower, we had already found trash buried along our rear property line – the remains of a collapsed shed, rusty metal fragments, a truck tire. When renovating our basement, an unmarked VHS tape fell out of the ceiling. (We still don’t know what’s on that tape.)

When the carpenter told me about that hidden, hulking machine, I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t scream or cry or smash a sledgehammer through the siding. I laughed. “Of course, there’s a lawnmower buried beneath our sunroom. Why wouldn’t there be?”

Abbie Barker earned her MA in Literature from Fordham University in 2006. She teaches English courses for SNHU and is a graduate of the Mountainview MFA program.