From the outside, the house looked ideal. Anxiously awaiting the realtor, we were charmed by its Tudor style. It had been hand built in 1929, with half-timbered beams, leaded glass windows, a thick stone turret, and a tile roof capped by copper cupolas. And it would soon be ours. Like our marriage, it was perfect—on the outside, anyway.

Two months later, after our daughter was born, we moved in. The last I saw of our Manhattan tenement was the brown metal door slamming shut behind me as I maneuvered down four flights of steps and into the taxi that took us to the hospital. A day later, with baby bundled snugly against the February cold, we opened the door to our new home.

The first few days in our new home, I’d run my hand over the polished oak banister and walk barefoot on the pegged oak floor, smooth under my feet. I’d slow dance, holding my newborn to my chest, in front of the flagstone fireplace which—in my imagination—my husband and I would sprawl in front of each night, wine glasses in hand, staring passionately into each other’s eyes while our daughter slept blissfully upstairs.

Instead, once my daughter was in bed, it was lonely night after lonely night of numbing myself with television while my husband spent hours alone in his office. Driving home from a rare date night, I’d get a brief thrill looking into the dining room from the outside, the light from the wrought iron chandelier making the leaded glass parallelograms sparkle like diamonds. But behind the shimmer, my marriage had lost its luster, and I was miserable. I’d spent the last few years trying—and failing—to make my husband take the drugs that tamed his bipolar disorder, and I was finally beginning to realize that I couldn’t simply will him better. And the suburban town where we now lived, though close to his parents, was far from my friends in the city. I felt isolated.

All I dreamed of was fleeing: the house, town, marriage. Finally we called a broker and put the house on the market—and accepted an offer the following day.

We moved back to the city, in the hope that a change of scenery would save our marriage, but life isn’t a fairy tale, and soon our time together—like our dream house—became a distant memory.

Years later, emotionally patched up and happier than I’d ever been, the man I’d been seeing and I decided to move in together. We wanted to flee the city and move to the countryside. Dreams of centuries-old farmhouses danced in our minds as we surfed through online real estate listings, convinced that we’d quickly find a house as perfect as our relationship seemed. But we needed a town that wasn’t too small and our daughter needed good schools. There were old farmhouses in our dream town, but they were in short supply and too expensive. Our fantasies were tempered by reality. And reality was tempered by our realtor.

When our realtor pulled up in front of the light green ranch-style house with lavender shutters, my husband and I exchanged glances. No way was this ugly thing going to be our new dream home. It was more suburban Levittown than bucolic small town.

However, something drew us inside for a look. Inside, the house was worn and shabby, floors a patchwork of scuffed hardwood and linoleum. On the first look, we decided it was definitely not for us.

But there were also aspects about the house that drew us back: a deck in the front with a view to the mountains; acres and acres of protected woods behind the house; close to town, but situated on a quiet dead-end gravel road; a private writing space. So we came back for a second look, and a third. On the outside it may not have been our dream house, but we were more interested in finding a home—and it was quickly becoming the home of our daydreams, as we brainstormed ways we could fix it up. We made an offer and it was accepted.

In the weeks after, I stopped caring that the house was as alluring as a strip mall—we made it ours. We ate dinner on the deck almost every night that we could, watching as the tree leaves on the Shawangunk Ridge changed from green to orange and red. When the trees were bare, we observed how the snow whitened the ridge from our huge ’50s picture window. Our daughter sang happily in her room, painted in the hues of pink she’d chosen from our multiple visits to the giant home stores to a buy catalog’s worth of supplies (flooring, light switch plates, slate tiles) that we needed to change our ugly duckling into—well, not quite a swan, but a slightly less ugly duck.

Each day and night we built memories and our life together seemed far stronger than the 1929 Tudor’s hand-hewn stone walls. After our daughter was in bed, my husband and I read together on the sofa, or held each other in the kitchen, kissing like hormone-addled adolescents. (And, nearly five years later, we still do.) It truly didn’t matter what the house looked like on the outside—we were filling it with life on the inside. What we originally thought wasn’t our dream house, in fact, was.

Submissions to Back Porch may be sent to nmeyer@scheinmedia.com