I’ve written twice before about a house I built in Truckee. The first time, I talked about how everyone who visited saw a modernist masterpiece while I mostly felt overwhelmed by how much the home demanded of me, how much attention and upkeep and mental space it required just to live in it day to day. I told myself the work was to make peace with that gap, to learn to enjoy the house the way everyone else clearly did instead of feeling weighed down by its scale. The second time, I wrote about pocket-listing it for sale and leaning on the concept of sunk cost, the idea that what you’ve already put into something, whether it’s money, time, or ego, shouldn’t determine what you do next. I was proud, at the time, of pushing that emotion aside.
The house is now in escrow, set to close next week. For anyone catching up mid-story: in 2020 I bought land in Truckee and built what I thought was going to be my dream home.
I expected this final chapter to feel complicated, some blend of grief and relief that would make for a tidier ending. It hasn’t been complicated at all. What I feel, even before the sale is final, is just relief, plain and total, the kind that makes you realize how much weight you were carrying without fully admitting it.
I built that house to be extraordinary, and by most measures, it was. It was also a lot. A lot of house, a lot of complexity, a lot of everything except the one thing I actually needed, which was ease. I could afford it. That was never the issue, and that’s exactly the trap. Affording something and needing it are two completely different questions, and I let the first one answer the second for years. The capacity to build something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to build, and it took me three tries at writing about this to fully admit that to myself.
What I didn’t expect, and didn’t write about in the earlier pieces, was how much the experience would cost me in a currency that had nothing to do with money. Somewhere in the process, I stopped loving Tahoe itself. Not the mountains, not the lake, not the life I used to have up there, just the version of it that came wrapped in a home that asked more of me than I realized I wanted to give. I’d go up expecting to feel restored and leave feeling depleted instead. That’s not what a place is supposed to do to you.
So I’m starting over, deliberately smaller. I’ll rent for a while, with no pressure to make any single place mean everything. Eventually I’ll buy again, but something simple enough that one person can actually manage it without a team behind him. Simple isn’t a consolation prize this time. It’s the whole point. I’m learning, later than I’d like, to ask what I should want before I ask what I can afford.
What I’m really doing, three pieces and five years later, is trying to fall back in love with Tahoe on its own terms, without a lot of house standing in the way of it.
