Owning a house

SOMEBODY said that one can easily recognize that the house Raymund Fernandez built for his family belongs to an artist. Because I haven’t seen the house myself, I can only surmise that the design and structure of the house may have manifested a pronounced uniqueness identifiable to its occupants.

But since life is not fair, we know that not all homeowners have the ability or the means to put their signature on their house. For persons with sufficient funds, the limiting factor may be aesthetic, or the absence of personal style.

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This type of homeowner usually refers to photos of houses he finds in magazines or in his trips abroad and instructs the architect to make a replica. He may hire a professional to do the interiors but more often than not, may impose his will on the choice of the furniture, the bathroom fixtures and the bedroom accessories.

One look at the house and you know a fortune was spent on it. But wait! Some things look jarring. Is it the choice of tiles? Or the dimension of the stairs? Or the over-the-top curtains? Or the cheap generic painting?

For salaried personnel, the option to personalize their house is admittedly narrower. Some daring souls build a house with no sketch plan, depending solely on the “abilidad” of an aging carpenter recruited from the province. The more rational ones avail themselves of low-cost housing payable on a long-term basis.

The developer handles the site development and the construction of rows of houses that all look the same. One night, a drunk homeowner spent several hours wandering around the subdivision, unable to locate which of the many similar-looking house was his house.

But homeowners, rejoice! Your house may not be featured on TV by Daphne Oseña but you are a class apart from the millions who don’t own the houses they live in.

A good friend of mine changed residences seven times in a span of 26 years.

He first rented a house in Carlock St.; then moved to Talisay to stay with his in-laws when the kids started coming; took an apartment in the Colon area when the kids were of school age; transferred to a Guadalupe apartment, just a stone’s throw from a nursery school; moved again when the apartment burned down, this time to a single detached house on Jakosalem St. because the children are now in their teens; looked for a smaller apartment unit in Banawa when the family budget shrank; but managed to rent a slightly bigger apartment back in Guadalupe when finances improved.

You bet there are more sob stories from urban dwellers of lesser means, but let’s stop here.

I don’t think you’d want to read about the travails of those living in squatter’s colonies, or in stilt-houses on riverbanks, or in huts perched precariously on denuded sitio highlands.