The Bungalow
So you’re living in a house. It’s a nice house! It’s a familiar model, built by a good local company, and it looks a fair bit like the other houses in the neighbourhood. You’ve definitely made it your own — you’ve put your art up on the walls, you have some choice furniture, the lights change colours, there’s even a small yard! You get compliments on this house when people visit — people “love what you’ve done with the place” and think that “you chose SUCH a good location” and “they’d love to have something like this soon — how’d you get it?”. You’ve had some great times in this house, and on most days you’re happy with it.
But you’ve always wanted to live in a singularly weird bungalow. Everyone around you lives in a house, and so do you, and again — you like the house! But if you think about what gets you excited, what sets your brain and heart on fire, where you want to live when you grow up? It’s bungalows all the way down.
Ever since you were a kid, you’ve imagined different parts of this bungalow. Some nights, you’ve dreamed of waking up in a hammock and sliding down a fireman’s pole for breakfast. Others, you picture bookshelves that are actually living tree branches, snaking along the walls. You’ve imagined a room that is just pillows with a flat screen TV on the ceiling, and a bouncy castle in the basement with an ice cream fridge and a wine cellar beside it.
It’s a truly weird bungalow, don’t get me wrong — you haven’t seen one much like it. But you’ve seen most of the components somewhere, and there’s no reason in your mind why every part of it isn’t possible, and why they couldn’t come together into a new and awesome whole. Over time, the bungalow starts appearing fully formed in your mind, and it dawns on you, slowly and then all at once, that if you don’t try to build it you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
Sure you’ve never actually lived in this bungalow, but that’s because one like it doesn’t exist yet! You’ve slept in a hammock before, you’ve bounced in a castle, you’ve had massive pillow fights — those are some of your finest memories. If you don’t build this bungalow now, you will spend the rest of your days in that nice, well decorated, prefab house, wondering what a bungalow could’ve been like. You’d be mostly happy, but always with the gnawing feeling that this is not where you should be living.
So you gather some building materials and research how others install hammocks, and how someone might possibly grow tree branch bookshelves. You’re almost embarrassed to tell people that you’re seriously thinking of building one — people talk about bungalows, they read and write about them, they visit them on the weekend, but no one you know lives in one. Meanwhile, your friends keep complimenting your house and telling you how much they admire it, while everyone you’ve grown up with decorates their house and makes renovations. Some get a nice kitchen. Others get a nice coffee machine. And you’re sitting there, just sketching your bungalow, until it’s time to build.
You only have the one plot of land to build it on though, the one your current house stands on. It’s fall — the days are nice, but the nights are cold, and you don’t want to sleep outdoors. So you tear down parts of your house to make room. First the shed in the yard, then the foyer, then the dining room. You try building the bungalow a little piece at a time, but it doesn’t really work; the house is in the way.
The house isn’t very comfortable anymore either, and the night wind blows through to your bedroom sometimes. Now that you’ve stripped the exterior, you see it differently; the foundation was starting to rot, and you don’t particularly want it back. People cast worried glances, and ask what was wrong with the house, and if you want help finding a new one, and one of their friends moved to a cottage here or a townhouse there, but the more they talk, the more you realize how important that bungalow is to you.
You understand that you can’t have both — the lot is too small. You’re going to have to choose between the bungalow and the house. The bungalow shines clearer than ever in your mind, but the blueprints are still rough. You’re not an architect, there aren’t exactly many bungalows in the area, and you’re going to have to build it to see if it stands up. It’s scary, and you’re not sure if you trust some of your designs.
The house, on the other hand, looks nice, and detailed home renovation magazines arrive at your door every week. Maybe you could make it work? You’ve lived in a house your whole life! Sure you’ve gone on vacation sometimes, but you’ve always come back to this house; maybe it’s not too late? Yeah you’ve torn down the facade, yeah you’ve seen the mold in the basement, but the structure is still there. You could convince yourself this was all a fun experiment, a big renovation, and hey, you could still use some of the bungalow materials! But the compromises ring hollow as the wind whistles through at night.
One morning you wake up, take a deep breath, and knock the core of the house down. It’s surreal to watch it crumble, like a dream you wake up from and are happy to forget. There’s no going back now.
You attack the bungalow project with renewed vigour. There’s space now, and you’re really doing it. You’re keeping that promise to yourself, to all of your selves — past, present, and future. What you didn’t account for is just how fucking hard it is to live on a construction site. Sure, there are sunny days, when a wall you just built remains standing or a section of the blueprint gets finished, and you feel great and optimistic. But the nights are long and cold curled up on the concrete, and you can’t see the blueprint in the dark. On those nights, it’s so hard to keep the bungalow in your mind, to know why you’re even doing this. You miss the house dearly. One of your friends just got a new dining table. It looks nice.
You’ve slept in the cold before, more than most. You surprise yourself with your resourcefulness, your resilience, but you don’t know how long you can live like this. Some parts of the bungalow are taking shape, but they can’t hide you from the cold yet. Other parts are more complex than you thought. You adjust the blueprint. You keep building. The nights get longer.
I know how you want the story to end, what you want me to tell you. You want to hear that you press forward through the hardship and uncertainty, that you build that bungalow, and that you’re warm at night. You live there happily for the rest of your life, and look back on your time living in a construction site with fondness at the struggle and the pride of overcoming.
Maybe that’s what happens. Others seem to believe you can build the bungalow — you’ve built some pretty cool stuff in the past, even though you’ve fucked up your fair share of construction projects as well. Maybe this one works out. It feels like it has to, and like eventually it will.
But what if it doesn’t? What if you try your hardest, and it just turns out that fireman’s poles don’t belong in houses? What if they do, but you’re just not a good enough builder to make it work? What if the cold wins, and you get tired and give up — on the bungalow, on yourself? You buy a flashlight so you can read the blueprint when the void yawns widest.
But right now, you don’t know how the story ends. This is just the first few chapters. Right now you’re still living among steel beams and deflated bouncy castles and a half-woven hammock, operating on faith and fumes with no end in sight. And all you have left to do is wake up, every morning, and build.
