SOME FRIENDS of ours just moved into a new home. We went to visit and were awestruck by the hardware on the drawers and cabinets (all of it matching and present), the sunken garden tub, the pristine painted walls, the smooth, clean glass with no fingerprints and the coordinated window treatments.

It was tough to come home, where our windows have not responded to treatment. Our bathtub is sitting beside the barn waiting for us to get the room ready for its installation. It might not even fit through the door. One drawer in the bathroom opens with a butterfly clamp. The stairs need to be refinished, and the living room floor is half covered by the particleboard that used to be under the carpet we pulled up last spring.

The floor in the kitchen has a decided tilt— put a ball down and it rolls to the corner.

But there’s a picture hanging on the wall of a young man who was born under this roof, and lived in this house before dying of the wounds he received in the Battle of Shiloh. Next to it is a framed copy of his father’s will, leaving belongings to the 11 children who lived here.

That original hardwood floor that we’re slowly uncovering dates from the 1840s. By the front door, where the oval of glass is wavy and distorted, we hung another photocopied picture, this one showing the road in front of our house as it appeared more than 100 years ago, when it was called the broad path.

This house has fulfilled my Olivia Walton fantasies. I have visions of being a grandmother sitting on this porch waiting for the kids on Sunday afternoons. This house has inspired me to bake bread, paint chickens on the boards that fall off of the barn, and dream of making this a working farm that grows something so unusual and lucrative that I can spend whole days here instead of commuting to a job that pays enough to cover the mortgage.

We don’t have a garbage disposal or wall-to-wall carpeting or French doors. But we have an incredible view of tobacco, corn, soybeans and cotton stretching nearly as far as we can see. And we have a story of a couple named Henry and Permelia, who built this house in 1829, and added on to make room for those 11 children. The graves we can’t quite see from the window are likely theirs. I’d like to think they’re happy this house has little kids to abuse it again, with parents doing the best they can to keep up with all that the place needs. I’d like to think that Permelia stood in the yard and threw bread to chickens and geese the way we do, and that she walked the hall at night, checking on the children before she went to sleep herself.

No offense to my friends.I think they bought a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood where fancy coffee and exotic groceries are five minutes away. They’ll be happy there, and their children will probably achieve higher standardized test scores than ours and get into the right fraternities.

But we bought more than a house. We bought a story.