A Home Hunter Attached to the Garage

My husband and I have been house-hunting for six months now, and if the big Realtor in the sky happens to be reading this, we are quite ready to move beyond hunting into actual gathering, thankyouverymuch. Not that it’s as physically demanding as it might sound since we are looking for a house in South Pasadena where, apparently, only three houses are allowed on the market at any given time. Which is probably why we like the city so darn much.

Over the months, we have looked at a fair number of houses and learned that any tour of property in Southern California invariably winds up in the garage.

Now, if it were up to my husband, I think we would begin in the garage--he has been known to walk right through the kitchen oblivious to the fact that there seems to be no room for a full-size stove, his eyes on the door off the laundry room or backyard that leads to the garage. And I know what he is thinking. He is thinking: Is there an additional room attached to that garage? Has it been or could it be converted into an office? If not, is there enough street parking that we could convert the whole thing into an office?

It doesn’t even have to be an office. It just has to be a room. Where one could be alone, in relative silence, a Woolfian room into which I would be allowed entry but the children would not. Daddy’s room, I call it now. “Go find Daddy’s room,” I tell the kids when we enter an empty house. It distracts them while I try to figure out where we would put the stove, since it won’t fit in the kitchen.

Not that I don’t appreciate a good garage when I see it. Growing up in Maryland, I was fascinated by garages. My grandparents, who lived one county over, had a garage, and when I was small I thought it a mysterious and beautiful place, probably because I wasn’t allowed in it. While they sat in lawn chairs on the back patio, I would peer through the doorway, leaning into the dark scent--oil and metal and old cut grass, the tarry smell of roof shingles.

I could see the outlines of the treacherous garden tools--the beaks of the various hedge shears, the eerie line of shovels, the coffee cans full of screws and nails and bolts. In the middle of it all my grandpa’s big Mercury lurked in the darkness, gleaming like the presidential limousine.

For a while, my aunt and uncle had a house with a garage that included a grease-pit, which, as you can imagine, my cousins immediately claimed as a clubhouse. But they lived in the next state so the ecstasy for me was intermittent.

My family never had a garage; we had a basement, which has many of the same features, literally and imaginatively, as a garage. Dank concrete, check; tool bench, check; storage space, moment of hesitation in doorway caused by spooky silhouettes, check, check. No car, of course, but the washer and dryer filled in as Major Family Appliance. As a child, I considered the garage a housing addition to aspire to, like a swimming pool or a secret staircase. (Now that I have a garage, I discover it adds not a whit of glamour or mystery to my life.) I find it ironic that I, and many of my friends, grew up garageless in the East, where snow and salt and rain were actually known to mess with a car’s appearance, but here in temperate Southern California, it is the rare house that doesn’t have one. In fact, many garages occupy more square footage than, say, the sleeping quarters and certainly, the kitchen. A few we’ve seen have had questionable-looking doors, doors that sort of shlumped rather than shut, and one had a nice window frame but no window, which was quite odd.

But, for the most part, they were good, solid structures, with the familiar motif of tool bench and boxes, outgrown bicycles and old lamps stacked against unfinished walls to the skeleton of the roof. They smelled like my grandpa’s garage (except for the cut grass--no one seems to cut their own grass anymore). And so, for a minute, during every house tour, I get to imagine that I’m 6 or 7 again and everyone I love is still alive and we’re all going to eat steamed crabs and corn on the cob any minute now. It’s a nice moment to have in the middle of yet another shoulder-dropping realization that this isn’t the right house either.

Maybe next time, we’ll just buy the garage.

Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.