When I live in a house, a house that is an old, good house — that is, one built to last lifetimes, one that has done just that and continues to stand the tests of time — you accept a role in a living history that is larger than the sum of its parts. Beyond the notion of home, a house can come to embody a certain spirit. And a good house, over time, is nothing if not also a testament to faith. Studs twist. Rafters bow. Paint peels, plaster cracks, and, eventually, even the best roof and plumbing begin to leak. Yet the narrative of an old house seems enlivened less by its crises and problems than by the fanciful needs of a long cast of nameless, faceless characters who refashion it. The labor involved must reflect a pronounced, passionate expression of love.

My wife and I bought our house on Fire Mountain in Oceanside during the heat of the most recent real-estate frenzy. Today, some three years later, we couldn’t possibly afford the down payment, much less the mortgage. It’s a little house, set directly on dirt. Around 1100 square feet in all, with a big detached garage. It was once a farm shed for an adjacent five-acre avocado grove, long since divided into suburban lots. If we are to believe the previous owners, the main room of the house was originally a one-room schoolhouse, dating back to the past century. Since then there have been at least three major remodels or room additions, evidenced by subtle variations in exterior siding, fascia boards, and roof lines. Now the house offers a tall, steep-roofed, and charmingly “country” profile, the sort found rarely in Southern California. It’s loaded with curbside appeal and, inside, it has some of the obtuse, fundamental flaws to which most houses built in separate stages are prone.

But it is a good house. And without so much as consulting my wife, I made a full-price offer on it at noon the day it went on the market. The owners had already received two lesser offers. From experience, I wasn’t about to let something like this slip away. I knew there was more in this house than could be found in other coastal properties within our very limited price range — the hard- wood floors; big wooden windows; the high ceilings and pronounced, simple moldings; paneled doors; a cedar-trimmed dining area; the service porch with its own separate entrance; and, outside, a spacious covered patio and long, wide driveway. The driveway was truly a one-of-a- kind affair, composed of variously sized and colored cinderblocks laid flat and grouted with exposed aggregate, the final effect being something between nouveau Santa Fe and Art Deco at its finest. As much as anything else, though, I was convinced to jump at this place because of its generous third-of-an-acre corner lot, outlined in front by a stand of 40-foot-tall Canary Island date palms, punctuated in back by citrus and deciduous fruit trees. Between them was just enough space to accommodate a garden.

Fortunately, my wife agreed with this impulsive choice of real estate, but not on merit alone. We’d been married just short of a year, living in a tiny granny flat near La Jolla Shores, with our first child already three months on its way. I think my wife was merely relieved that we were to have a place to call our own.

So we had a house, our first, and a good one. After a couple of trips in the pickup, we had all our possessions moved and set in place, with plenty of room to spare. That evening, I carried a drink outside and squatted down on the lawn in the lee of the big bottlebrush, an ancient beast gone from shrub to tree with a trunk as broad as my waist, and I thought some about the frightening new notion of home ownership. Was this really what life comes down to? There were cars passing loudly just beyond the dark, overgrown hedge of oleanders, and in the distance I could hear the muted wail of the neighborhood freeway. We all like to think we are somehow different.

Yet there are few of us who can justify that private, fatuous belief. I watched my shadow disappear as my wife turned off lights in the house, our house. And I pictured her climbing under the covers in our new, old bedroom, carefully positioning herself to accommodate the recent swelling of her belly. Another car passed, rap music resounding painfully through the yard. We owned a house and now this was home. Then the tears came in waves.

Over a year passed before we did any serious work on the house. In the meantime, I’d puttered with the doors, getting their typically neglected bugs out so that they swung and opened and closed properly. And I’d redone most of the closet shelving, replacing the hodgepodge of unfinished materials with standard three- quarter-inch plywood, trimmed out in routed pine and painted with oil-based enamel. Adding a nursery entailed a simple refurnishing of the back room. Generally, though, I’d been free to spend my spare time outdoors, transforming the yard into a garden, since the house was proving to be as sound as I’d originally thought. Then my wife nearly burned it down.

It was Fourth of July weekend, and we’d been doing some canning, making jelly out of apricots off the old tree in back. Tidying up after dinner, my wife set the saucepan of paraffin directly on a burner of the electric stove...and then the phone rang. I was outside watering, and when the smoke alarm went off, it registered only as some sort of random suburban noise — perhaps a neighbor’s car alarm. Even after my wife called me and I had pinpointed the loud beeping to our own house, I figured she just wanted me to come in and shut the damn thing off. Then she called again.

I ran inside, into the kitchen, where two feet of blue flame danced atop the stove. I grabbed the saucepan by the handle and swung the works, fire and all, into the sink, flipping the pan over to smother it. Then I started in on my wife. She knew better than to melt wax that way; we’d been doing it for two days — putting the one pan into another with water, then turning on the stove. “And just who the hell were you talking to, anyway?”

“Your mother.”

She had the baby, our son, in her arms. Smoke was everywhere. I stormed off to the dining room, climbed on a chair, and pulled the battery out of the smoke alarm. I didn’t need that yelling at me. Then I returned to the kitchen, and I saw the mass of glowing, sizzling embers in the mouth of the exhaust vent above the stove, molten grease falling in crisp, loud hisses.

“Call 911,” I said to my wife, trying now for my calmest voice. “And go next door and find a fire extinguisher.”

Grabbing a knife, I managed to pry loose the dripping, red-hot filter, and I stabbed at it until I was able to flip it into the sink. Then, peering up into flames, I realized the entire exhaust duct, built of plywood, was now on fire. For a long moment, all I could think of was the old, dry redwood framing in the attic, the ceiling joists and roof rafters that had served this good house for who knows how many decades, the bare cedar shingles over the airy skip-sheathing, and just how fast this place we now called home was going to come down should just one flicker of flame escape this half-assed, jerrybuilt, so-called smoke duct. It also occurred to me, as I stared into the fire, that perhaps I should grab some valuables. But the thought vanished when I pictured myself standing in the street, watching our house disintegrate before my very eyes, while I held an armload of — what? — my baseball glove and favorite shoes and photos of our latest camping trip? This sort of manic thinking finally crystallized into one awful thought: “We’re going to lose this place.” I said it out loud, picking up the kitchen rug and hurling it at the swelling fire. “We’re going to lose this place!” I said again, almost in wonder, as I beat at the flames with the fury of the dispossessed.

I don’t know if I could have done it on my own. But I do know that the house wouldn’t be standing today if the fire had not been put out before the arrival of the fire department. Later, even the captain agreed. “Good you got it,” he said. “Seems like we never get here in time for this kind of thing.”

While I was ruining the kitchen rug and throwing water at the flames with pans filled at the sink, a neighbor showed up with a little household fire extinguisher. That was really all it took. He shot up into the duct, dousing the fire there, and then we ran out to the service porch, where I yanked off the old squirrel-cage blower at the end of the vent. Another blast from the extinguisher, and we had things pretty much under control. Heading for the garage to grab a ladder, I saw smoke pouring through the shingles along the full length of the roof. I climbed through the attic access in the bedroom closet, entering a viscous haze, worse than the worst tule fog, that immediately set me coughing. But nothing there was on fire. About the time I returned to check the kitchen, to make sure we finally had this thing licked, a cop showed up. He casually began opening windows, which, considering the affinity of fire for air, was a stupid move. And then the fire trucks arrived. I left the boys to their business.

Out on the driveway, I stood with my wife and child, begging off from detailed discourse with the concerned neighbors, and realizing, as if for the first time, just how tenuous these things we call homes really are. I turned to my wife, taking the baby from her arms, and I started to tell her I was sorry, that I had no right to bark at her about how to melt some lousy wax. I wanted to say I didn’t blame her for the fire, that the house was fine, and we were lucky to still have it, and she was a hell of a wife and mother and person, and none of this even mattered. I wanted to say I loved her. But our son kept interrupting, gesturing wildly in the direction of the fire trucks, goo-goo-gaa-gaa-ing all the while.

“Well,” I finally was able to say, “I guess we can start remodeling now.”

There is something about old houses that is always worth preserving, if they were built with any love at all. I say that as an owner of a small, antiquated home set on a lot that, according to the bank and government appraisers, has a value over ten times that of the structure itself. This means that anything done to improve the appearance, structural soundness, or livability of this house eventually will be for naught. Someone, don’t you see, will someday order the property razed. The land is worth just too damn much.

A two-story house on this lot would afford views from the Mexican Coronados to Santa Catalina Island. As it stands, this little old house my family and I now call home will never be more than an interlude preceding the arrival of a bulldozer. But until that time, and at its best, it could very well be an exquisite sort of coastal cottage, ideal for the childless yuppie couple, Beemers in the driveway, Smith and Hawken furniture out- side, and the best of the best Nature Company artwork punctuating the airy, sun-filled rooms upper kitchen cabinets, plus a stainless-steel exhaust hood and second-hand gas range. While the cabinets were being built — with panelless doors for glass inserts to give the six-by-seven-foot cooking area not quite such a cramped feeling — I hung new drywall on the walls and ceiling, added a lightwell for overhead fluorescent lighting, tiled the tiny floor, stripped and refurbished the gummy rope-and-counterweight sash window, and had an electrician come by to tune up all of the wiring. Then I got into the woodwork.

By trade, I’m a carpenter, and one thing that irks me to no end is any part of a house that is not properly finished or trimmed out. First, of course, a house should work: the roof should keep out rain, doors and windows should open and close without effort, toilets should shut off after flushing, there should be power at all outlets, etcetera. This can be a tall order in a house as old as ours, though I’ve seen my share of new homes with doors that drag on the carpeting; frozen, half-cocked windows; drooling plumbing fixtures; heating registers that don’t throw out enough air to warm a titmouse. Tracts mostly, but custom homes, too. Besides functioning correctly, though, the sign of a good house is how well it’s finished — how well its countless disparate parts and materials come together, a look that goes far beyond a decent paint job, although that’s part of it, too.

I’m not talking about an expensive look — marble floors, granite countertops, oak moldings, or open-beam ceilings. Rather, my notion of a good, well-finished house is one in which the pieces fit, with no loose ends, and a minimum of stretching or squeezing, be it a Fairbanks Ranch mansion or an Oceanside split-lot cottage.

Take, for example, something that was definitely wrong with this house, something that bothered me every day, until the fire afforded me the opportunity to fix it. Along the window wall, we’ve a one-piece stainless-steel sink and countertop, much out of fashion in today’s homes, although perfectly suited to what goes on in a kitchen and not at all aesthetically displeasing. It seems that whoever remodeled this kitchen before us, or maybe the one who built it in the first place, couldn’t figure out a way to finish the edge of the sink and countertop backsplash cleanly at the point where they meet the drywall, beneath the windowsill. Perhaps the person with the tools was the homeowner, and once he had a kitchen sink that worked, he said to hell with making it perfect. But you have to finish the job right; cotton rope and a big bead of latex caulking is not the way to deal with a half-inch gap between metal and painted drywall. To trim out that sink and countertop, all it took was some quarter-round wood molding, plus a pine apron under the new windowsill. Of course, then we needed baseboard where the new tile floor met the cabinet toe-kicks; there were a number of places where those lower cabinets had never quite been made to jell with the walls. Then I ran a wood jamb and casing around the opening into the dining area, because passageways should have something more than drywall to protect them from heavy traffic.

Finally, with the walls and ceiling painted a semi-gloss “Oriental Ivory,” the old cabinets and drawers and my recent handiwork painted in an enamel of the same color, and the new cabinets installed and painted, too, it was time to call in a real tile man I know my limitations. I called an old German fellow who lives up the street from us and with whom I’ve worked since I was nothing more than a job site gofer. He did the work in two easy days, first squaring things up with a bed of mortar to hide some serious sins in the kitchen’s original framing, then running the tile in a graceful curve from the kitchen coun- tertop to the little dining room cabinet we’d had built. And he added a full backsplash on the wall up to the new upper cabinets. His bill seemed cheap, considering the quality of the craftsmanship and what a mess an amateur like me could have made of the job.

Now nearly done, our tiny new kitchen looked awfully good. On the other hand, if you hadn’t seen it before, it didn’t look like much had been done to it at all. To me, this is the test of a well-executed remodel. Rather than shooting for all sorts of special effects that can end up looking as absurd as, say, chrome-spoked wheels on a midpriced Chevy sedan, a good remodel should fit the character of a house. One’s immediate reaction to the finished product should be the sense that this is what was here when the house was built. We were finishing up just in time. Any remodel is tough enough on a marriage, what with the strain on the family budget and the countless design decisions to be hashed out. It’s especially difficult when you continue to live in the house, wading through debris and attempting to maintain an even keel in the face of chaos. The worst, of course, is the kitchen remodel — and by now my wife had just about had enough. Dinners cooked on the patio hibachi. Groceries stacked on the dining room floor. Thrice- weekly ice runs to replenish the Coleman cooler. As my wife returned home each evening from work, I could see the strain in her eyes.

Then the refrigerator went on the blink. It was an old Gibson model that I felt had been cleverly installed. It was set flush into the back wall, so that all but the door hung out into the adjacent service porch, taking up almost none of the very limited kitchen floor space. Still, it too was never properly trimmed out, so I had fit lengths of routed one-by-four tight to all sides. But for some time, my wife had been complaining about receiving occasional shocks when touching the handle (she likes to go bare- foot). Without going into details, I’ll just say the electrician found a much deeper and hidden problem. The next day, the refrigerator was up to room temperature, not operating at all.

We went back to the Coleman cooler, ice runs and all. My wife was ready to scream. And none of the new refrigerators we saw would fit exactly within the confines of my recent handiwork.

You hate to go backwards. But we bought the model closest to the dimensions we wanted, and I resized the rough opening and got the damn thing installed. I trimmed out the new refrigerator, priming wood to make the final brushwork easier, caulking and puttying one night, sanding the next, and finishing with the oil-based enamel.

With the kitchen complete, we celebrated. I don’t remember what we cooked or how it tasted or how our infant son responded to the overriding atmosphere of glee that evening. But I do know there was ample wine consumed. We got the baby in bed, and then we sat at the dining room table and enjoyed the final look of the kitchen. Migrating to our bedroom, my wife and I agreed that there was nothing much better than to have this sort of experience behind us. We climbed under the sheets, cool despite the late-summer heat, and snuggled up in a way we rarely had since the onset of that fiery Independence Day weekend.

“What do you think about another one?” asked my wife.

“Sounds good to me,” I said, not sure at all whether she meant a second child, further remodeling, or the purchase of some other old, good house, far away from this one and the madness along the Southern California seacoast.

The water in the master bedroom closet showed up about the same time we found out we had a second child on the way. My cowboy boots were covered with mildew.

And when I pulled up the saturated carpet, I discovered water oozing out the bottom of the wall shared by our shower. The showerhead too, had been dripping for some time now. Mustering courage, I went into the bathroom for a look at things. And it was pretty much a dream come true.

I knew we weren’t up for it. The kitchen remodel was still a touchy memory, and with another baby on the horizon, we were more concerned with whether to sit tight and try to make the house work as is, add on, or cash in and pack up and get the hell out of Dodge.

I emptied the closet and set up a fan to dry out the wood floor. Then I called a plumber. He showed me how to get into the guts of the shower valve, where to swap out washers, and how I should repack the valve stems. The necessary paraphernalia cost $1.63. By dinner the next evening, I had everything back working good as new, not a drop of water falling from the showerhead when I reopened the main to the house.

I admit I take pleasure in completing this sort of simple, do-it- yourself home repair, and not just for the money saved. I’ve a notion, somewhere along the way, of a house for my family and me in a place very different from here, a place where you cannot expect a plumber or electrician or even a mechanic to be always available. What do you do, for example, if your furnace goes out during the worst snowstorm in 20 years in Billings, Montana? And beyond that, it seems reasonable to ask that each of us know as much as possible about the workings of our day-to- day surroundings, if only because we are so many of us in the same boat together; keeping that boat afloat is everybody’s business. And anyway, there is so much else in the world that we can’t ever hope to understand.

All of which did nothing to solve the problem of water leaking from our shower into the bedroom closet. I knew what that was going to take. In the meantime, I ran caulking along all of the grout joints in the tile, a stopgap measure that actually did curb the visible flow, although who knows what was still happening to the subfloor beneath the shower pan. And since the master closet was now empty and we had gotten used to wading around through clothing and shoes, I decided to redo the shelves and poles there. And shortly thereafter, I got into the master bedroom itself.

After prepping the usual cracks in old plaster, I got a painter friend in one day to roll the walls and ceiling, the color a subtle off-white rose from a formula he had on record at the local paint store. Then I ran new baseboard and a big, handsome crown mould, stripped and repainted the door into the living room, and refinished the windows inside and out, using oil-based “White Shadow” for the lot.

That took about a month. Come her birthday, I bought my wife a new bed for us. She bought the necessaries to complete the picture: a flower-patterned, black-background throw rug; a solid charcoal comforter; and pastel-pink and black accent pillows, plus a little extra one done up in silky hand-embroidery. The one bedroom finished, we immediately began plans to revamp the other, the nursery. I wrote out a list of things I wanted to do to make the room just right. Like the kitchen and our bedroom, I wanted our kids’ room to have nothing in it that, each time I entered it, would catch my eye and bug me. I wanted it to be a complete cohesive picture.... I wanted it to reflect a family bent on love. I wanted it to be nice.

Then we lost the baby.

In the wake of such personal tragedies, you are always left to wonder what went wrong. Was it something you did, something you didn’t do? Was it some- thing you ate, something you didn’t eat? Was it that long, tiresome vacation you took, working too hard to have fun? Was it karma, or was it God’s will? Was it that extra hour you spent digging in the garden? Or was it the house, the damned house, and everything you were trying to do to make it such a wonderful place for both you and your family?

In time, both my wife and I were able to convince ourselves that we lost the child because, quite simply, it wasn’t meant to be. We went ahead and finished the nursery, completing half of the remodel of our old, good house. We’ve waited three months, as prescribed by my wife’s physician, and now we are attempting the conception of another child, for the benefit of our first, ourselves, and our notion of a family.