There’s one thing I should emphasize, right from the start: We never really planned to create our dream house. Nicole, my wife, is an arts administrator who favors white walls, clean lines, modern furniture, and work by emerging artists. I’m a journalist with a fetish for industrial machinery and found objects. Owning a home just wasn’t one of our priorities. Almost by accident, however, we became homeowners, and in lieu of a master plan, we found ourselves improvising our way through a top-to-bottom renovation that took two incredibly stressful years to complete.

We were renters in San Francisco, living cheaply in a comfortable Victorian, when we heard about a fixer-upper for sale a few blocks away that was owned by a friend of a friend. The cramped 1,300-square-foot place was built in 1906. Sometime during the 1940s it had been “modernized”—a process that apparently involved removing any trace of woodwork, detail, character, and charm. A family had been living there since 1986, but I estimate they’d stopped cleaning sometime around 1992. The house was dimly lit and poorly maintained. It smelled like stale dog food. But it was located in our friendly neighborhood with a nearby park, the yard was sunny and large, and as a fixer-upper, it was all we could realistically expect to afford in overpriced San Francisco. We decided to buy.

Before we’d set foot inside, however, we wanted to give the place a serious makeover. With help from a neighborhood architect, we made plans to rebuild the house almost from scratch, replacing the crumbling foundation, tearing out the walls to upgrade the plumbing and electrical, opening up the first fl oor to create a larger living room, and putting an addition in the rear that would serve as our kitchen and dining room. The blueprints defined the basic layout: The older portion of the house would retain a traditional floor plan, but the 700-square-foot addition would have an industrial vibe, with concrete floors and a wall of aluminum and glass overlooking the back yard.

That’s where the plans ended. The rest of the design details—from the shape of the sinks to the style of the moldings—were left to me and Nicole to figure out as we went along. When our architect described our kitchen as “galley-style,” we ran with the nautical metaphor. Riffing off some photos I’d taken of an abandoned U.S. Navy shipyard in San Francisco, we designed the room to evoke the feel of a Cold War naval laboratory. We began with Ikea cabinets that came finished in glossy battleship gray. For countertops, we went with a commercial material
called Fireslate that’s often used in research labs. Throughout the addition, we installed waterproof light switches from Home Depot labelled with engraved control-panel placards from a local boating supply store (to turn on the pantry lights, you flip the switch marked “Bilge Pump”). Nicole designed ceiling light fixtures built out of metal pipe, and for fun we installed an explosion-proof red light above an adjacent bathroom door.

As our contractors toiled away, we spent our days and nights obsessively searching for the materials they needed to finish the house at a price we could aff ord. While wandering the aisles of Urban Ore, an architectural salvage yard in Berkeley, Nicole found a half-glass door that had been removed from a hospital; the lettering on the pane read “Autopsy: Authorized Personnel Only.” We left the lettering intact, added a fresh coat of gray paint, and hung the door on a sliding track outside our new laundry room.

After a photography excursion to a Southern California aircraft scrapyard, I returned home with a retired ’70s-era Scandinavian Airlines food-service cart. Once I cleaned off its decades of dust at a self-serve car wash, I built interior shelves from acrylic plastic and put the cart back into service as a compact but high-capacity bar. While visiting another scrap yard in Tucson, Arizona, I found a section of a Boeing 707 jetliner with the aircraft’s distinctive oval windows. For $500, I arranged to have it cut down to size and shipped back to San Francisco. It took a weekend of paint stripping to reveal its shiny aluminum skin, but now my jet-set souvenir hangs on our living room wall, backlit by rope lights.

Construction problems and unforeseen obstacles were a daily fact of life; whenever possible, we tried to turn them into creative opportunities. When we realized that installing a gas fireplace in the living room would be too pricey, we instead snatched up a professional audiovisual equipment rack that a friend offloaded for $150. In the wall reserved for the fireplace, we created a cutaway to accommodate the rack, and on an adjacent wall we added a flat-screen TV mounted on a swing arm that pivots to face the couch. It turned out to be an ideal solution: The rack is a tidy and flexible way to house a stereo and DVD player, while the flat-screen TV does double duty as a digital picture frame. Best of all, we still got our fireplace—in the form of a $20 “yule log” DVD that looks awfully cozy flickering on the screen.

We began with low expectations, but the renovation process proved far more stressful than we ever could have anticipated. Financing was a constant source of worry, as we begged from family, borrowed from banks, and maxed out our credit cards to scrape together the funds to get the job done. On top of that, keeping errant contractors in line and meddlesome city bureaucrats off our backs was a daily struggle.

So was it all worth it? Almost a year after we finally moved in, Nicole and I sit quietly on the couch, blinking our eyes at the freshly painted walls. It still seems impossible. Then we take it all in, absorbing the familiarity of everything in the room. The question always answers itself. More than any place we’ve ever lived, this house feels like home.