It's a dirty wonderful life.(In Real Life: First-person America, purchasing of townhouses)

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When my husband suggested we buy and fix up a dilapidated townhouse in Washington D.C.'s historic Mount Pleasant neighborhood, it sounded terribly romantic.

We didn't purchase your average fixer-upper, with out-of-date shag carpeting and cracked bathroom tiles. Our once-grand three-level townhouse had been tortured by its previous owners. They hid leaky pipes behind drywall, and boarded up broken windows. A back door no longer on its hinges was braced shut with a metal pole. Our "as is" purchase included a houseful of rusty light fixtures, several soggy rolls of rotting carpet in the basement, and a still-filled, but unplugged, refrigerator.

Like a student who enters college thinking of caps and gowns and instead discovers the reality of all-night study sessions, I quickly learned that painting trim and dusting walls comes only after months of grueling and filthy preparatory labor. For every hour swinging a paintbrush I put in 20 more scrubbing and scraping. Demolition and cleanup occupied more of my time than I would ever have imagined. Hauling bags of broken tile and plaster to the dump became our weekend "dates."

Though home improvement is harder than I'd imagined, pride of ownership is far more powerful. Sure, the place was a dump ... but it was our dump. Not just because we hold the deed, but because we've "mixed" our labor with the place.

Small victories came to loom large. In our second week in the house, my husband and a friend decided to dedicate a Saturday afternoon to replacing a back window that had been boarded up. They started work around noon. By midnight, a gaping hole still opened into the back alley and a torrential downpour was well under way. Yet another few hours into Sunday morning, the window was successfully installed. I still marvel each time it opens and closes.

There are things you would never do except to your own home. The barbed-wire-topped fence in our back alley enclosed ...