Open Concept
I've been a home for generations. Now I'm about to be renovated to oblivion by a family that doesn't get me.
I have held four families in my rooms like cupped water, and three of them were nice enough not to destroy me. The fourth sits at my kitchen table this Tuesday morning, the woman with her laptop glowing against the dark wood, the man spreading blueprints across the surface where the Castellanos family once kneaded masa for tamales every Sunday. Their daughter, eight years old with fierce dark eyes, traces the blueprint lines with her finger and asks why the walls have to change.
“Because, Luna, the house needs to work better for us,” says the mother, not looking up from her screen.
“What does ‘open concept’ mean?” the child asks.
“It means a better flow.”
Hmph. Better flow. As if I’m some river that has forgotten how to run. Actually, lady, I’m an American Foursquare house with hints of Colonial Revival. Get it right.
The man, David, taps his pen against the plans. “Here. The dining room wall comes down first…then we’ll have to gut the kitchen entirely.” He draws a thick black X across the heart of my interior, where I’ve sheltered a century of meals, arguments, reconciliations, and some others things I forget, but that’s not important.
The child—Luna, they call her—frowns at the blueprint, too. “But where will we eat Christmas dinner?”
“Anywhere we want,” says the mother, finally looking up. “That’s the beauty of open concept.”
I feel something shift in my foundation, a settling that has nothing to do with age. The Castellanos family ate their last Christmas dinner in my dining room three years ago. I remember the way Abuela Castellanos touched my walls when she said goodbye, her palm flat against the plaster as if she were taking my pulse. “Cuida la casa,” she whispered. Take care of the house.
See, she got it. She understood me.
The Castellanos had lived here for thirty-seven years. Their children learned to walk on my floors, carved their heights into my doorframe. When they finally moved to the senior community, they left not because they stopped loving me, but because their bodies could no longer navigate my stairs. Understandable. Sympathetic, even.
These new people…the Wongs…well, they bought me six months ago. They’re not bad people, I’ll admit. David works long hours at his software company, comes home to help with Luna’s homework and Julia’s wine. Julia teaches at the university, fills my rooms with stacks of papers and the rapid clicking of her keyboard. Luna plays elaborate games with her stuffed animals, assigns them voices and personalities and complex emotional lives.
But they don’t see me. Not really. They see square footage and property values and “open concepts.”
“The contractor said Monday,” David says, rolling up the plans. “We’ll stay at my mother’s while they work and come by to check in from time to time.”
Monday. Five days.
I flex my walls slightly, just enough to make the kitchen cabinet doors swing open. Julia glances up, annoyed, and walks over to close them. Her hand pauses on the cabinet handle.
“This house,” she mutters. “I swear it has a mind of its own.”
Well, yeah. What did you expect, Julia?
The contractor arrives early Monday morning with a crew of three men and a woman who carries a sledgehammer like it weighs nothing. They wear heavy boots that scuff my floors and speak in loud voices that bounce off my walls without regard for proper acoustics. Unacceptable.
I try a few small rebellions first. The front door sticks when they try to bring in their equipment. That one is classic. The electrical outlets in the dining room stop working, how mysterious. Oh, and I make the floorboards creak ominously whenever they walk across the room they plan to demolish.
“Old house,” says the contractor, Carlos, not unkindly. “They all have their quirks.”
But quirks aren’t enough. By noon, they have gaudy plastic sheeting taped across my doorways and a radio playing music I don’t recognize. The woman with the sledgehammer—Rosa, I hear Carlos call her—stands in my dining room and studies the wall that separates it from the kitchen.
“Load-bearing?” she asks.
“Nah,” says Carlos, consulting his clipboard. “Just cosmetic. Tear it down.”
Rosa hefts the sledgehammer and I feel a terror so pure it travels through my electrical system like wildfire. Every light in the house flickers.
“Weird,” says one of the workers. “Power surge?”
Rosa draws back the hammer and I make my choice. Every door in the house slams shut simultaneously, locks clicking into place with the sharp authority of a prison. The plastic sheeting billows and snaps like storm-torn sails.
The radio goes silent.
“What the hell?” Carlos turns in a slow circle, his clipboard forgotten. If only he could hear me cackling.
The lights flicker again, then go out entirely. In the darkness, I whisper through my wooden walls, a sound like an old woman’s bones creaking.
“Please,” I tease, though I know they can’t make out the words. “Please don’t.”
Rosa’s voice cuts through the darkness, “There’s gotta be a breaker box.”
But I control the breakers now. I control the locks, the lights, the very air that moves through my vents. For the first time in my existence, I am not sheltering the people inside me.
I’m holding them hostage.
They’re trapped for twenty-seven minutes before Luna arrives.
I hear her bicycle bell first, then the sound of her backpack hitting my front porch. She tries the door, finds it locked, and begins to pound with her small fists.
“Mom? Dad? Why is the door locked?”
Hm, good question, Luna. Why is it?
Inside, Carlos is on his phone with the fire department. Rosa has given up on the sledgehammer and is examining my walls with a flashlight, running her hands along the plaster as if she can divine the source of their misfortune. Good luck is all I can say.
“Hey,” Luna calls through the door. “I can hear you in there. What’s wrong?”
I freeze. This is…unexpected. I’ve never spoken to a child before. The previous families’ children sensed me sometimes…a presence in the corner of their vision, a whisper that might have been the wind. But I will admit that Luna is a bit strange, even for a kid. When she plays with her stuffed animals, she does so with such fierce imagination that the boundary between real and unreal can sometimes appear, I don’t know, negotiable.
So I whisper to her through the keyhole, my voice like leaves rustling, “A lot of things are wrong, kid! They want to tear down my walls! Can you believe that?”
Luna goes very still. “Who wants to tear down your walls?”
“The mailman, who do you think? The people inside with the dang hammers.”
“Are you…” Luna’s voice drops to a whisper. “Are you the house?”
“Was it that obvious?”
She’s quiet for a long moment. I can hear her thinking, the way children often think with their whole bodies. “You know, my parents aren’t bad people,” she says finally. “They just want to make you better.”
“I don’t want to be better,” I whisper back. “I want to be me.”
“OK. Well, who are you?”
And suddenly I’m telling her everything. About the Castellanos family and their Sunday tamales, about the jazz musician who lived here in the 1940s and practiced late into the night until my walls learned to resonate with his saxophone. About the young couple in the 1960s who painted murals on my kitchen walls and slow-danced in my living room to records all scratched with age.
“And the coolest part is that I hold their memories,” I tell her. “In my walls, in my floors. And So, when they tear me apart, where do you think all those memories will go?”
Luna’s crying now, soft sniffles that somehow break my heart. “I don’t know,” she says. “But the people inside are really scared right now. You’re scaring them.”
The truth of it hits me like Rosa’s sledgehammer. Through my walls, I even hear Rosa’s voice right then, shaky now. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Houses don’t just...do this.”
Carlos is reassuring his crew that it’s just an electrical problem, but his voice lacks conviction. And in the dining room, where I’ve trapped them, the plastic sheeting moves without any wind to push it, and the temperature has dropped ten degrees.
It suddenly dawns on me that in my effort to protect my memories, I’ve started creating new ones. Bad ones. Memories of fear and a house that holds its occupants prisoner.
“Fine, I’ll let them out,” I whisper to Luna. “But I’m pretty sure you’re not even supposed to be here, by the way. You’re parents are probably freaking out, wondering where you went.”
The locks click open. The lights flicker back to life. The radio resumes its cheerful noise, and all is well.
Eh, just kidding. The damage is done. I hear Carlos talking rapidly into his phone, asking for backup, for someone who deals with “unusual situations.” By evening, he’ll have called the Wongs to inform them that his crew won’t be returning.
“Don’t be sad,” Luna whispers through the keyhole. “Maybe there’s another way.”
But I know there isn’t. Not really. Frightened people don’t negotiate with houses. They call exterminators.
The new contractor arrives Wednesday morning with different equipment and a different attitude. She wears steel-toed boots and safety glasses and introduces herself to my empty rooms as if I’m a police station.
“I’ve seen everything,” she announces to no one in particular. “Termites, mold, asbestos, foundation issues. Houses don’t scare me.”
Challenge accepted. Hm, that is how they say it in that show Abuela used to watch, isn’t it?
Anyway, the contractor’s name is Maria, and she works alone. She sets up her equipment with methodical precision, ignoring the way my floors creak under her feet, the way my doors swing open when she passes.
When she raises the sledgehammer to my dining room wall, I don’t bother fighting her.
The first blow cracks the plaster, sending fragments to the floor like fallen teeth. The second blow opens a hole large enough for her to reach through. The third blow reveals the hollow space between my walls, where mice have made their nests and where the Castellanos children hid love letters from their parents.
I feel each blow harsher than the last, but I also feel something else. A release.
Because with each crack in the plaster, each piece of my structure that falls away, I remember why the Castellanos family left. It wasn’t because they stopped loving me. It was because their bodies had stopped loving them. And they loved me so much, they didn’t want to install wheelchair ramps or widen the doorways.
I guess they loved me enough to let me love someone else.
I remember the last Christmas dinner in my dining room. Abuela Castellanos in her wheelchair at the head of the table, her children and grandchildren crowded around her. The table barely fit in the room—they had to squeeze against my walls to reach their chairs. But they made it work because the work was worth it.
After dinner, while the others cleaned up, Abuela Castellanos remained at the table. She stared at my walls for a long time, her eyes tracing the faded paint, the small scuffs and scratches that marked decades of family life.
“We have to go,” she said quietly, to me or to the room or to the ghosts of all the meals we’d shared. “This house needs a family that can run up and down the stairs. That can use all the rooms.”
She was right, of course. The Wongs run up and down my stairs daily. Luna claimed the small bedroom on the second floor that the Castellanos grandchildren used only for visits. David uses the third floor study that had been empty for years. He’s doing all kinds of interesting things in there. Not that I always mean to pry. I’m just glad he keeps busy.
Maria swings the sledgehammer again, and this time I help her. I show her where the wall is weakest, where the support beams end, where she can work most efficiently. My dining room wall comes down in pieces, and with each splinter, I feel the space opening up, breathing.
That night, Luna comes to visit me again.
She sits on my front porch with her back against my door, her homework spread across her lap. The porch light casts a warm circle around her, and I can hear her pencil scratching against paper.
“Are you okay?” she whispers.
I consider the question. My dining room wall is gone, leaving a pile of rubble and a gaping space where once there was separation. My kitchen, exposed now, looks naked and vulnerable. Tomorrow, Maria will continue her work, tearing out cabinets and fixtures, stripping away the accumulated layers of my life.
“I think so,” I whisper back through the door. “I think I’m in the middle of learning something.”
“What’s that?”
“Open concept lets me see more of what’s going on. It’s kinda nice.”
Luna’s quiet for a moment. “My mom says we’re going to put up pictures of the old families who used to live here. She found some photos in the attic and wants to make a gallery wall to honor the people who lived here before us.”
A gallery wall? I had not expected this. Not at all!
“And my dad says we’re going to keep the original hardwood floors. Polish them up but not replace them. He says they have character. I don’t get what that means. Characters are in books, not floors.”
Character. The word settles into my foundation like a blessing.
“Luna,” I whisper, “will you do something for me?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“Will you help me…remember some things? Not really the walls or the rooms, since I have those on lock, but the people. Like…like the way Abuela Castellanos would hum while she cooked. And how the jazz musician played the same song every night until he got it right. The way your parents dance in the kitchen when they think you’re not watching."
Luna giggles. “They’re terrible dancers.”
“They’re actually quite decent, in my opinion. And not that I want to preach, but someday, when you’re grown up and you have a house of your own, you’ll remember the way they danced, and you’ll know that love lives in those million daily moments. Take the morning coffee and the homework at the kitchen table and the way someone says your name when you come home, all of it.”
“Will you remember me?” Luna asks.
“Well, yeah,” I promise. “I’ll remember that you listened to me when I was afraid, and that you taught me how to appreciate a better flow.”
She presses her palm against my door, and I feel the warmth of her hand through the wood. “I’ll come visit you while they’re fixing you up,” she says. “Even when you’re all torn apart and messy.”
“Dang, really? Thanks.”
After she goes inside, I settle into my foundation and listen to the Wongs’ evening routine. David washing dishes, Julia grading papers, Luna reading aloud to her stuffed animals. The sounds are different from the Castellanos family, but they are good sounds. They’s the sounds of people making a life together.
Tomorrow, Maria will continue her work. She’ll tear out my old kitchen and install new cabinets. She’ll open up my spaces and let in more light. She’ll change my floor plan and my lighting and my very sense of self.
But tonight, I’m still the house that holds the echo of a musician’s saxophone, the warmth of a thousand Sunday dinners, the hushed secrets of children who carved their names into my doorframe. I’m still the house keeping an eye on things. Someone has to keep the water running, the good times flowing.
And tomorrow, I’ll start learning all kinds of new things to take care of.
In the morning, when the Wongs return from David's mother’s house, they’ll find me at least a little bit changed. My dining room wall will be gone, my kitchen exposed and vulnerable. But Luna will run up my stairs and David will admire my original hardwood floors and Julia will stand in my new open space and say, “You know what? This is going to work for us.”
And I’ll whisper, too quietly for anyone but Luna to hear, “Yes, David. You’re quite right. Well said.”
I didn’t know any better, but I knew differently, at least. How to hold on by holding space. And I’ll admit I was a little embarrassed the first time Luna caught me playing with her stuffed animals, assigning them names almost as fiercely as she could.
I’ll have to be more careful next time.
Author’s Notes
I’ve always been weirdly emotional about houses. Not just the ones I grew up in, but the ones I walked past a thousand times, the ones I visited once and still remember the smell. I think places hold memory in ways we don’t always notice…until something changes.
To that end, I like to think of Open Concept as a ghost story with no ghosts. It’s about gentrification and renovation and the quiet war between memory and modernity and so on and so on. But it’s also about families. How they come and go, how they leave fingerprints on the walls, and how sometimes, a house might love you back. Or it might be smack talking you when you’re not listening.
This story was also partially inspired by one of my lifelong best friends, Tyler, who bought an 19th century mansion a few years ago and ended up becoming a TikTok sensation while he and his family documented their renovation of it. It’s @ouroldhouse, if you’re interested, and I’ve loved seeing their progress over the years. How they’ve modernized it, sure, but also retained the house’s personality, as well, while raising their kids inside those walls all the while.
So if you, yourself, have ever been a house, I hope this story makes you feel, uh, seen. If you’ve ever been the people inside one, treat it gently. And please…before you take down the walls, ask them if they’re ready.