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Sunrise likes coming home.
She likes the order. The routine. Having supplies.
She likes making pizza from scratch. She likes her cooking tools. She likes clean bed linens, laundry done, dishes washed and things where they belong.
And she loves the people there.
Then there’s the house.
Or, as Sunrise put it much better:
“I do love these people. I do feel grateful to live there…. then there’s the ‘but.’”
Oh, I knew there was a but.
Sunrise lives with her spouse in a detached house they own in Richardson, Texas. Their household income is between $100,000 and $150,000. Her spouse brings in most of it.
There are two people in the house now, and on the surface this sounds like a pretty orderly operation.
Sunrise does most of the cooking, dishes, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping and household administration involving appointments and birthdays. Her spouse mostly handles repairs, maintenance, the yard, bills and finances.
Dinner together happens about five nights a week, although they don’t necessarily eat in the same place every night.
A normal weekday evening is pleasantly uneventful.
“Dinner is ready, prepared while watching the news, eaten, exercise happens, then either reading, or tv, and bed”
That’s it.
Nobody is screaming from upstairs.
Nobody is asking where the soccer cleats are.
Nobody has discovered at 9:14 p.m. that a scale model of the solar system is due tomorrow.
Dinner. Exercise. Reading or TV. Bed.
I could live with this.
They spend most of their time together in the family room. There’s a second guest room they barely use. The fridge has magnets on it.
They never got cable television.
They still have a landline.
Sunrise line-dries as much laundry as possible.
I enjoy all three of these details more than I should.
The landline especially.
There is something wonderfully defiant about still having a landline in 2026. Somewhere in that house is a telephone number that has probably survived several presidential administrations and has no intention of going anywhere.
Actually, leaving town is a bit of a theme here.
Sunrise grew up in a somewhat similar household. Asked what she swore she’d never do that her parents did, she answered:
“Never leave my hometown”
She didn’t.
But when I asked what regularly puts her in a bad mood at home, the answer was:
“Leaving town”
I don’t know the full story there.
I’d like it.
Mostly, though, Sunrise’s answers keep circling back to something much more physical.
The house needs work.
A lot of work.
And she knows exactly what work.
This isn’t one of those vague, “I’d love to update the kitchen someday” situations.
She has a list.
When I asked what she wishes she’d done differently, she said:
“There’s a list: I would have pushed for renovations in the first 7 years instead of after 25.”
Twenty-five years.
That’s a long time to look at a floor you don’t like.
I’m not sure exactly how long Sunrise has lived in this particular house, but her answer makes clear that the renovations have been waiting a very long time.
And they aren’t merely cosmetic.
The kitchen is inefficient.
The bathrooms leak.
Getting to the backyard is difficult.
She wants a side door.
The television is sitting on the floor.
There are floors she wants replaced, a kitchen layout she wants changed, a Murphy bed she wants installed and more bookshelves she wants added.
Then there’s the painted paneling.
“Get the painted paneling stripped or replaced with wood”
Sunrise has thought about this.
Renovation is also, according to her, “the big silent subject” in the household.
That’s interesting.
Not the big argument.
The big silent subject.
There is a difference.
The things creating tension include “Renovation, floors, paint, the inefficiency of the kitchen, the leaky bathrooms.”
Meanwhile, Sunrise keeps cleaning.
She says one thing she does around the house that nobody seems to notice is sanitizing touch points.
“doorknobs, rims, etc.”
She also likes order inside closed cabinets, drawers and shelves. That’s what would apparently fall apart if she disappeared for a week.
Not civilization.
The drawers.
I understand this.
There’s a particular kind of household work that is only visible when nobody does it anymore.
Nobody walks into a room and says, “Wow. The doorknob is remarkably unsanitary-free today.”
You just touch it.
Sunrise notices.
She also notices the dirt that won’t come clean.
That may be my favorite detail in the whole submission.
When I asked for her favorite and least favorite parts of household life, she gave me both ends of it in one answer:
“Making my own pizza from scratch, most of my cooking tools,; cleaning the same dirt that won’t get clean and should have been ripped out 20 years ago.”
There are few things more irritating than cleaning something that has passed the point at which cleaning can help.
You scrub.
It still looks dirty.
You scrub harder.
Still dirty.
Eventually you’re no longer cleaning. You’re participating in a long-running dispute with a building material.
Sunrise appears to have been losing this particular dispute for approximately two decades.
Which explains her answer when I asked what she’d change about the house if nobody else got a vote.
Not one thing.
Basically everything.
“All floors, kitchen layout, Murphy bed and more bookshelves. Get the painted paneling stripped or replaced with wood”
Give Sunrise unilateral authority and there may be a dumpster in the driveway by noon.
There are other little household rules and quirks.
The house rule everyone knows is:
“Don’t lock the storm door.”
I have no idea what happens if you lock the storm door.
I enjoy not knowing.
They also apparently spend money on something other people might consider wasteful.
The landline.
Or “Lind line,” as Sunrise typed it.
I assume she means landline, although part of me hoped Lind Line was some obscure Texas household luxury I’d never heard of.
Nope.
Just a telephone.
And for all her complaints about floors, bathrooms, paneling, access to the backyard and the television apparently living on the floor, Sunrise doesn’t sound like someone who hates her home.
Quite the opposite.
She looks forward to coming back to it.
“I look forward to the order, routine, having supplies”
That’s a good answer.
Not the decor.
Not the square footage.
Not even the people, although elsewhere she makes clear she loves them.
Having supplies.
There’s something deeply satisfying about opening the cupboard in your own house and finding the thing you knew would be there.
Maybe that’s part of why the physical problems bother her so much.
She clearly pays attention to how a house works.
She cooks. Cleans. Does laundry. Sanitizes the touch points. Keeps cabinets and drawers orderly. Notices inefficient routes through the house. Notices the backyard access. Notices the kitchen layout.
Of course she notices the floor.
She has to live on it.
And there is one answer that makes all of this more poignant.
When I asked what she wouldn’t normally admit about her household, Sunrise didn’t tell me about a secret stash of money, a bizarre habit or something happening behind a closed door.
She wrote:
“A buyer will tear it down”
Oof.
After all those years thinking about the floors.
The kitchen.
The painted paneling.
The leaky bathrooms.
The side door that should have been there.
The dirt that won’t come clean.
She thinks whoever eventually buys the place may simply knock the whole thing down.
Maybe she’s right.
Maybe she isn’t.
But I can see why she’d wish she’d pushed harder in year seven instead of year twenty-five.
Because the renovations weren’t really for the next owner.
They were for Sunrise.
She was the one who was supposed to get the better kitchen.
She was supposed to walk across the new floors.
She was supposed to have easier access to the backyard and the extra bookshelves and the bathroom that didn’t leak.
And now?
She still comes home.
She still cooks.
She still cleans.
She still knows exactly what she’d change.
She still likes having everything she needs right where she expects to find it.
And despite the floors and the paneling and the bathroom and the dirt that should have been ripped out 20 years ago, when I gave her an open question to answer anything I hadn’t thought to ask, she came back to the people inside the house.
“I do love these people. I do feel grateful to live there…. then there’s the ‘but.’”
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