Going Home Again : Southland residents stick with the familiar and buy the homes they were raised in.
Lionel and Pam Ochoa didn’t sleep well the night they moved into their El Monte home. Like many new buyers, the young couple felt out of place, homesick.
But it wasn’t the house that upset them. The Ochoas knew it very well--Pam Ochoa had grown up there. What felt strange was their new bedroom--the same one Pam’s mother had slept in for 20 years.
“When we walked into the bedroom, all we could think of was Mom,” Pam Ochoa said. “I didn’t think we should be (there).”
“Not the best atmosphere for romance,” added Lionel Ochoa.
Welcome to adult life in your childhood home.
Like other Southland residents who bought the house they were raised in, Pam Ochoa, 26, lives with warm memories of her family every day. “I liked the fact that we were moving into a home --not just a house,” the fourth-grade teacher explained.
A childhood home, unlike other houses, comes with a built-in persona--one that exudes either heartening or haunting memories. Some buyers who go home again feel empowered by their reminiscences and want to honor those memories by maintaining the family homestead.
Other owners say their enjoyment is tempered by guilt over adapting the house to their needs as well as the fear of returning to what they’ve outgrown.
But whether it’s been a positive or negative experience, most family home buyers would agree that never before has a real estate transaction taught them so much about themselves.
Keith Jacobson knew what he was getting into when he purchased his grandmother’s Westchester home in June, 1993. After years of Sunday dinners there, the house was familiar territory. In Southern California, that’s especially important:
When the Northridge earthquake hit “it was pitch dark, but I knew this place back and forth,” said Jacobson, 36, who grew up just around the corner. While the neighbors were stumbling around without lights, Jacobson knew the house’s layout by heart, after years of playing “Hot Wheels” along the hallways.
Even before the earth shook, the Los Angeles Kings account executive could pinpoint the home’s strengths and weaknesses; there was no hiding of the home’s defects.
Other childhood-home purchasers echo Jacobson’s relief at not having to deal with sellers who may mislead buyers about the condition of the property.
Not only are family-home buyers intimately familiar with the house’s flaws, they know the closest supermarkets and movie theaters, the quickest way to the freeway. And the next-door neighbors may not need an introduction.
“There’s a great deal to be said for living in a community you know,” said psychologist Dr. Irene Goldenberg, a professor at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. “There’s a lot of stress and pressure in our society, and living in a familiar place can lessen those strains.”
Goldenberg said living in a family home can inspire a sense of history, of belonging, which can be especially refreshing in Southern California’s peripatetic lifestyle.
Beth Walker, a prominent community relations professional (she did not want her real name used), appreciated the intergenerational lesson--the sense of being rooted--that her four children received while living in their father’s childhood home in the Fairfax district.
“In California, it’s so rare to live in the same community, let alone the same house, as your grandparents,” she said. “My children saw their grandparents all around them--it was a very positive experience.”
Kathie Swanson, who is renting her parents’ Encino home, marvels that her 2-year-old son, Evan, finds the same hiding places she did as a child. Swanson, 34, enjoys telling Evan about his grandparents’ carefully tended garden. “My parents’ sweat is in this house, and even if we did buy it, it would always be their house,” she said.
Swanson and her husband have talked about renovating the 1950s home, but so far they’ve resisted.
Swanson’s desire to put her own mark on a house in which she was once the dutiful daughter illustrates what is for many family-home buyers the most significant challenge. “(Buying a childhood home) is similar to moving into the first wife’s house,” Goldenberg said. “You feel haunted by the way someone else lived.”
Freda Garbose, 58, remembers being “afraid of losing (herself)” when she and her husband bought his parents’ 4,500-square-foot Georgian Colonial house in the small Massachusetts town of Gardner.
Garbose had already selected a site and an architect to design her “dream home” when a family-business opportunity prompted a relocation in the early 1960s. “I wanted what was mine, not someone else’s. I didn’t want to become my in-laws,” she said.
Garbose painted every room in the house white, updated the kitchen and added a master suite. In adapting her in-laws’ house to the needs of her young children, Garbose said, “all my worries about keeping my own identity disappeared.”
The prospect of putting a new veneer on a familiar facade appealed to South Pasadena resident Joanne Connor, who asked that her real name not be used to protect her marriage-and-family counseling practice.
True to her training, Connor, 41, analyzed whether she had “separated” sufficiently from her parents and two older sisters to move into the family’s elegant Spanish-style home. “I wanted to know if I could come back here as an adult, if I had done enough work on myself to make this my home again,” she explained. “In talking to my family, I realized that my memories would be comforting, not burdensome.”
Family therapist Nancy Steiny, a former director of the Southern California Counseling Center, understands Connor’s fears. Certain rooms of a family home, she says, may remind the purchaser of stinging punishments--or of joyous celebrations. “It’s important to put a new imprint on those rooms that carry bad vibes,” she said.
One dramatic way to establish that new imprint is to redecorate the house, which can serve a dual purpose: helping to alter those bad vibes and showing off the new owner’s personality.
“I was a child of the 1960s and we believed you had to be completely different from your parents if you wanted to be an autonomous human being,” said Walker, the former Fairfax resident. “But then I found myself living in my in-laws’ house. I had to make the house reflect my tastes.”
For some childhood-home buyers the redecorating process can produce much guilt. Connor, who wanted to undo all her parents’ 1950s Sunset magazine decor, fretted over whether her sisters would resent the changes she had made; Swanson worried that if she altered the decor, her father would wonder what was wrong with the way he had it.
The guilt can intensify when it comes time to sell the home. Mar Vista boat broker Charlie Segal felt such remorse over putting his grandmother’s tiny, Cape Cod-style house up for sale that he took it off the market and refurbished it so his growing family could continue living there. “I guess I had more attachment to it than I realized,” the father of two said of the house he’s lived in, on and off, since 1981.
Segal, 35, cited “financial convenience”--he assumed an existing loan to help establish his credit--as a primary incentive to purchase the home.
And when a child buys from his parents, who may no longer need a large home, he may be able to secure a house that’s larger, more solidly constructed and in a better neighborhood than he could otherwise afford. For first-time buyers, a childhood home may be the only way to break into Southern California’s real estate market.
Both Goldenberg and Steiny urge Southlanders who are considering the purchase of a childhood home to sort out any anxieties before signing the deed.
Begin, they advise, by talking openly with family members. Be willing to hear their concerns about what you’ll do to the house, but remember that you’re now an adult, with an adult’s freedom of choice. Steiny recommends answering criticisms firmly, without losing your sense of humor: If mom sniffs that she’d never put that ugly green lamp on that table, simply say “it looks good to me” and move on.
In a home sale between family members, who each have well-rehearsed behaviors, setting parameters becomes crucial. Steiny’s advice? Make it clear to parents or siblings that just because they used to live in the house, it belongs to you now. They can’t just drop in. Such boundaries are hard enough to establish for any new homeowner, even more so in a family-home situation.
But with challenges come rewards: Childhood home buyers possess a unique opportunity to study their family’s dynamics, to learn more about how childhood events affect them today, Steiny said. Making this kind of purchase “gives people the chance to think differently about who they are and what kind of life they want to lead,” she said. “They are forced to think about how they want to be different from their parents.”
Goldenberg adds that creating a ritual to mark the passage of the house from one generation to another helps secure those choices. Such rituals can either be public--a festive housewarming party, where family and friends can check out the new arrangement--or private, as in writing a poem. Holiday celebrations can be modified to reflect the new tenant’s style. Steiny, who calls crafting rituals “a very freeing experience,” says that by doing so, owners will come to see the house through an adult’s, rather than a child’s, eye--a crucial part of the acclimation process.
Adopting new traditions can also help buyers accept the significant compromises--of location or layout--that often accompany a family-home purchase. Fond memories, according to one buyer, can make a mediocre home feel satisfactory. But potential buyers whose recollections aren’t so rosy should ask themselves one key question: Is living in this house a choice I can truly live with? If the memories of your childhood, or your current attitudes toward family members, are harsh, you might want to consider a different home.
Freda Garbose knows well the trade-offs that come with buying a childhood home. She initially refused to move into her in-laws’ home. But when it came time to sell the house 16 years later, it was Freda, more than her husband, Bernie, who didn’t want to leave.
“At first, I felt like I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,” she said, smiling at the memory. “But then I made that house my own--and I wound up with the best of everything.”
