Would it be rude to blindfold my guests?
My sister and her boyfriend are coming to visit tomorrow — our first houseguests — and my house is a big ugly pile of blech. And I’ve lived with it just fine for the two weeks we’ve been here but right now, trying to put things in order for their arrival, it’s driving me straight bonkers.
Sure, some of it is because I have planted my butt on the couch and knitted when I could have been painting the inside of the built-ins, but some of it is because there’s only so much you can do with hand-me-down furniture and a 100-year-old house when half your shit is in the basement and the other half is strewn about the house because you have two kids under 4.
Blame-shifter, that’s me!
But really. It’s bugging me. Maybe it’s the lighting tonight or something but everything just looks janky. Suppose I’m lucky our coffee table isn’t made out of milk crates. And nobody really cares whether my house is “decorated” except for me, but I do care. I’m very sensitive to my surroundings, don’t you know. All the personality quizzes tell me so.
The scariest house on the block …
… The fixer-upper! Ha ha ha ha.
So trick or treating was Thursday night in our town. Owen was a trick or treating machine, my little Batman. Already has his costume picked out for next year, too (a knight). And Mac got into it, too. Slowly but surely, plodding down the block, dragging his pumpkin bucket thud-thudding behind him. Would rather walk by himself than let me carry him. Those two were the cutest things you have ever seen.
And back at the ranch, Iain ran out of candy just 45 minutes into it. I LOVE this town. We didn’t get a single trick or treater the whole 6 years I lived in Baltimore. But here? Swamped. Seemed like almost every house participated. Tons of kids. A good time all around. Though our house was the lamest one on the block: our only decorations were those two puny pumpkins, and the huge overgrown evergreens blocked the view, so a lot of people seemed to pass us by.
Or maybe they really were afraid that “money pit” is catching.
Speaking of having just moved in. I also took a few more pictures of the interior, just so you can see what’s going on. It’s all the same furniture as the Baltimore house, and none of our pictures are hung yet, and there’s a lot of holding pattern going on (cordless drill in the dining room, etc). But this is what it looks like right now.
I’ve moved the sewing table around a bit in the guest room (and set up my serger! omg! more on that later!). I also had Iain hang some curtains in the boys’ room. And I unpacked all my sweet, lovely, precious sewing books and petted them for a while.
Since we have internet again, I’ve been cruising the sewing sites and my favorite pools in Flickr, gathering ideas. I might get an etsy shop up before Christmas. And I have some knitting projects in mind for this fall. It’s ridiculous all the stuff I want to do when I still have to set my house up, you know? But whatev. I have the rest of my life to do both.
Oh! And I’m doing Nablopomo again. So watch me dredge my brain for post ideas every single day for the next month. I might even do a contest — a little one. I like giving things away now and then.
I tried to do Nablopomo last November, do you remember? But that’s when I got really sick, spending a lot of time in bed or at the E.R. All through October and November last year I was sick as a dog, still trying to breastfeed Cormac and ending up at the hospital for dehydration, low potassium, arrhythmia, a bunch of stuff. Turns out undiagnosed chronic disease + demand nursing newborn = illness x infinity.
God, those were hard times.
God, I’m rambling in this post.
Anyway. With a good doctor, a handful of uncomfortable, invasive diagnostic tests, and 9 pills a day for the last year, I’m good as new. Just about, anyway. I hope the stress of moving abates a bit and things really get under control.
OK! This post took an unexpected turn. I’m going to dial it down, turn it in, and hope for an A-minus. See you again tomorrow.
House sneak peeks
Oh my God. It’s not the moving that takes a while, it’s the damn unpacking. Lord. Half this house is still a disaster zone. But I do have a few teasers for you. Which, hmm. That makes it sound as though you should be expecting something awesome. You should not be. It’s still all my same hand-me-down furniture, just in a different, older, draftier house.
Whatever. It’s MY house, though. I like that. I like this house. I sense great potential here.
bedroom
kitchen
kitchen detail which still amuses me
How to watch TV in a valley in Western Pennsylvania when you don’t have cable
Dudes! We’re officially in the new house. It’s fabulous. Mostly. I mean, there are a LOT of boxes around here, and we keep finding little nuggets of wtf (“tub diverter? who needs a rusty corroded tub diverter?”). But it’s mostly fabulous.
However, it’s also a tiny bit unfabulous. Yesterday’s wtf nugget was this: when we tried to plug the TV in so Owen could watch some Saturday morning “Toon-age Mutant Ninja Turtles,” we discovered that we get zero reception here. I’m talking Nothing. I’m talking the snowiest snow that ever snowed, on every single station. We fussed with the rabbit ears, we moved the TV around, we tried our digital tuner. Nothing.
“Oh crap,” I said.
“But the [redacted] Steelers game is going to be on,” said Iain. “I have labored long hours to make this house a castle for you, my queen. And this is how I am rewarded? I am bereft, too long deprived of that noble sport which makes Sundays worth getting up for.”
“I know, darling,” I said. “This cannot stand.”
“But wait,” he said. “Perhaps this indicates we should purchase a premium cable package? I do so enjoy the Discovery Channel. Also the National Geographic Channel. Also, the Steelers are supposed to be playing the Giants, if I haven’t mentioned that.”
“No, my sweet. We have no need of a premium cable package, even if the DVR service is included, which would seriously be cool. It’s far too dear. I will solve this problem for you. I will conquer the constraints of geography, distance to the transmitting station, and something about magnetic … curvature … dipole … rotational … something something, for you, my love, to bring you the football and other local programming you so richly deserve,” I said, indicating the lowly rabbit ears perched atop our mantel.
As you might have surmised, by this time I had skimmed Google’s offerings (mute before clicking) on the subject. The pickings were slim, and also kind of a lot too technical. But our heroine persevered, as she does when the topic might involve entertainment or the spending of lots of money on gadgets.
We went to Wal-Mart. (On a Sunday. Doy.) Instead of buying the 42” HDTV and looking up the number for DirecTV and dusting our hands of the matter, we bought a Phillips flat-panel array UHF/VHF indoor antenna with amplifier. Once home, tension mounted as we carefully unpacked the box, and lifted with gentle hands our possible $30 savior.
We hooked it up. Nothing. Twiddled the dials. Nothing. Moved the antenna as far as the coax would allow. Nothing. Hauled the whole setup upstairs. Nothing. Brought it back down. Nothing.
“We are at the mercy of the valley in which our new house apparently sits,” I said.
“Might as well return this dumb ol’ thing,” said he, boxing up our disappointment and hunting for the receipt.
“I refuse to concede defeat,” I said.
“Get the tinfoil,” he replied.
Our old rabbit ears were whisked back atop the mantel, nudged into a corner, and all the curtains thrown open. Iain carefully fashioned a sort of wing thing from foil, calculated the distance and compass location of the nearest Fox affiliate, adjusted accordingly, and crossed his fingers mightily.
He was rewarded. Not only did channel 66 come in, miraculously and replete with a subtitled telecast of a religious ceremony … but so did the local Fox affiliate. Every other channel was a blizzard of snowflakes, but that Madden guy’s face beamed out from our television. Victory was ours. Well, mostly Iain’s. But still ours.
There was much rejoicing. The Steelers played poorly and lost to New York, but at least they were on.
Later in the evening, after the kids had gone to bed, we surveyed the room for other ways of watching television, television that was not Fox. I gathered my iPod-compatible mini home stereo system and one of those cables with the red, white and yellow things on the end. Iain unpacked the digital projector he uses to show Keynote presentations at school and his MacBook Air. We hooked the Air to the projector and the projector to the home stereo speakers and pointed the whole setup at the big blank wall over our couch. We surfed to hulu.com. Thanks to the miracle of high-speed internet, office equipment, and the brainchild of a new media genius, we were able to watch Thursday night’s episode of the Office larger than life and three days late. As the theme song played and the credits rolled and Michael Scott said more hilariously inappropriate things on my living room wall, I drank a cup of tea, smiling at our ingenuity and not really mourning that HDTV/premium cable package thing all that much, I swear.
But later, defeated after all (woman cannot live on hulu alone) I ordered Comcast’s basic cable online ($11/month for a dozen local channels) (beware the tedious chat-room step) and sighed. Now I just have to return that antenna to Wal-Mart and wait for the installation technician next Monday so I can watch 30 Rock on Thursday nights, as it was meant to be seen (though the season premiere is on hulu right now, I’m saving myself for Liz Lemon Thursdays). Geography and distance to the transmitting staion and unwillingness to figure out how to set up an outoor aerial may have bested me in the end, at least as far as over-the-air signals are concerned, but finding a cool use for that blank wall space was worth it.
We’re on the brink
Today begins phase-one possession-moving, as I twittered last night. My husband and some of my in-laws are moving our stuff from the storage unit into the new, clean, fixed-up house today, while I stay at Grandma’s and kid-wrangle. I have a trunk full of new curtains and a burning, itching desire to get in that house and make some decorating. It’s killing me that I have to stay back when there’s unpacking to be done. I mean, I’ve been mulling furniture arrangements in my head for six weeks and hoarding copies of Domino like they were Twinkies.
I am ready. We’re so close I can taste it. Tastes like polyurethane and Sheetrock, but damn it, people, I’ll take it. Have you seen the light this place gets? Let me at it.
I’ll call this one “Oh my God, we still haven’t moved in”
Heya! Have we been living with my in-laws for three months? You betcha! Is my new house, for which I am dutifully paying the dumb ol’ mortgage every month without benefit of actually living in it, a big ol’ mess? You betcha! (or, “tu betchus!”)
I cannot believe I thought we’d get all this work done in a week or two. A WEEK OR TWO. We closed on this sucker Aug. 29 and Iain and my father-in-law (and me and my mother-in-law when we don’t have the kids) have been busting ASS at every opportunity. But as it goes with money pits, as soon as you solve one problem two more pop up. Right now the men are trying to get the wiring, which snakes through our black hole of an attic, to not be quite so much of a fire danger. Then maybe we can hang some ceiling fans, patch up all the holes in the ceilings, paint what hasn’t been painted and clean this place the heck up.
The good news is that we sort of have a deadline: Halloween. Or Halloween-ish. My sister-in-law and her family are coming in from Texas and there’s six of them, plus four of us, plus Ma and Pa, plus the dog, and those numbers do not add up to “three-bedroom ranch.” So we’re going to get us and our stuff out of the guest rooms by then and by God, if I have to do it all by myself in the rain we are going to move in to the new house.
Patience has never been a virtue I’ve been acquainted with.
Meanwhile, since we’ve been here Cormac has learned to walk and even talk a little bit, and Owen is using vocab words like “exhausted” and “autopilot.” I still drive him 45 minutes to school twice a week and last weekend I heard him say, when my mother-in-law mentioned this thing they have called Sunday School, “School on Sunday? YEAH!”
I also went to a fall festival in one of the many little towns ‘round here where I overheard this sentence, which quite perfectly sums up the region sometimes: “Oh no. You have hay in your mullet.”
Not that we live here yet, but this new town we’re moving to is Le Sweet. Did I tell you that yet? Holy shit. Stars Hollow minus Lorelai’s hyperspeed banter. I love it. And people actually TRICK OR TREAT around here, unlike the neighborhood we moved from in Baltimore, where the trick was dodging glass bottles and the treat was that mythical day you finally got your hands around the neck of the hooligan who knocked out a hole in your siding.
Ah, but that’s olden days. We’re in limbo right now, and I’ve never liked limbo, but soon (?) we’ll be in Small Town Paradise, and everything will be lovely, and you’ll all be invited to the housewarming.
The world is going down the tubes, but I feel all right
So hey! The American economy is sinking like a pair of eyeglasses dropped over the side of the boat during the “It’s A Small World After All” ride at Disney World. But that’s OK, because Iain and I (and my father in law) are making progress on the interior of our new house … which we bought before the markets truly tanked, which means … probably bad things for our mortgage. (Not Lehman Brothers-bad, but I bet we could’ve gotten a better rate, dammit.)
There’s still a chance we might finish the work and move in before (American) Thanksgiving.
And the price of gas is spiking again, just when I’m close enough to visit my family on a semi-regular basis. But that’s all right, at least my dollar goes farther when I only have to travel three hours, rather than nine, to get to Ohio.
And, lucky me, I drained my 401(k) before the giant market fumble. I’m a winner all around!
p.s. VOTE OBAMA. McCain broke America once already (and that’s just this week! “Free market” my heinie!).
Moving on. Have a piece of Settlement Pie
Thank you, everyone, for all the very kind words on my last post. My up-time is very short these days, but I hope to be able to thank you all personally soon. It really means a lot to me.
And now for something completely different.
Good bye, blue house:
We closed on you yesterday. You were perfectly adequate. Also, you are where my babies came home from the hospital, where they cried through the night and where they got their first teeth and where Owen learned to walk. I am going to miss the place where those memories were born.
Hello, new house:
Picture of new four-square house here, which I took down after a while
You look beat to hell and you have a funny smell about you, but you came at a good price and you are in a killer neighborhood. In less than a week, Iain and I are going to buy you and scrape out your insides and paint you: you will be “redd up,” in the local vernacular, and then a week or two after that we are going to move in and a whole slew of new memories will be born.
Reporting live from the north hills
I found the public library! And it has wifi! I am a happy woman.
So I’m still not entirely sure how, but we did it. We’re officially here. We moved all our worldly possessions into the 22-foot rental truck, drove 300 miles west, and unloaded them all into a (rather sketchy) 10x20 storage unit in the sticks here in Pittsburgh. By ourselves, with no help, because I think we thought our marriage needed a challenge or something. This morning I have dockworker hands and my arms feel like stretched spaghetti, but we’re all very happy. Now the hard part’s done. Well, part of the hard part.
We found a house we like (intellectually, anyway), an American Foursquare (I looked it up) in a picturesque small town about half an hour from my in-laws. It was an estate sale, where the previous occupants had been a little on the Methuselan side of things. The latest updates look to be a kitchen and bath circa 1956. The backyard is sea of peat moss. The paint is peeling and the gray aluminum siding is coated in grime. The carpets are: dark green. Did you catch that? Dark green carpet AGAIN. Guess what’s getting hauled out the minute we get possession. The house has three wee bedrooms and only one bath, and a kitchen just big enough for me to turn around in but not to cook. There’s an oven the size of my head in the wall and a fold-down counter top. The faucet is growing some sort of hard-water stalactite and the wallpaper, if I remember correctly, is patterned with chickens.
But no matter! I heard that real estate is all about this thing called location, or so they say. So we made sure to find the very best part of town, where the rest of the houses easily sell for a third-million or more (that’s Big Ticket out here, in case you’re from Baltimore ), and looked for something in our laughably tiny price range. And this is it. So with a little guidance from my father-in-law, we’re going build an addition next summer. OK, Iain’s going to build it while I take pictures. An addition will give us a master bedroom, an eat-in kitchen, a second bath and a first-floor laundry. It pays to be related to people who do this kind of thing for a living and know what they’re talking about. And if you get rid of labor costs, and build your own cabinets, then you really just need to cough up the money for 2x4s and drywall and shingles and whatnot. So it should be a pain in the ass but not too expensive.
Ha. Typing this out is funny. If I were reading this on somebody else’s blog I think I would probably laugh at their big dreams, which will surely be dashed in about July 2009. But not ours! We’re really going to do this. But before we do build next summer, we’re just going to make the place livable for the meantime. When we close (at the end of August), I’m going to pick up a few gallons of neutral paint, some white enamel, and a floor sander, and then I’m going to tear out those awful carpets and stomp on them.
Househunting and other slow-moving things
So we’ve been here, dog-sitting the poor, pathetic, sad, blind dog, since Wednesday. We’ve toured about 10 houses and made an offer yesterday on a fixer-upper in a great part of town, and still waiting to hear back on that. Turns out that our price range … well. When you sit down and chart it out, trying to buy a house on just one schoolteacher’s salary is like trying to frost a cake with your feet. You’ll get something eventually, but it probably won’t be pretty.
And my god. Have these people not heard of staging? Or, I don’t know, Lysol? Soap and water? Storage? One house was especially foul and stinky and dirty, though you could see how someone with money could come in, gut it, and make it fabulous. We are not that person. Other houses are brimming to overflowing with lace and ceramic cats and Nascar memorabilia. I haven’t got the slightest problem with any of those things — if you’ve seen my collection of wicker baskets, you know I understand — but in this day and age I really expect people to clean it up a bit, you know? Ah, well. Perhaps I’ve watched too much HGTV.
So, as I’ve said, we put an offer in on a fixer-upper that’s within our budget. The drop-dead gorgeous Victorian with brand-new kitchen, four bedrooms, and two full baths turned out to be about 30K above what we could comfortably afford and still have money for mac’n’cheese. Sucks. I mean it really, really sucks. I planned the rest of my life in that house the moment I walked through the front door. Oh, well. If we get the fixer-upper and fix it up, it’ll be all right. And if we don’t get it, that’ll be all right, too, because to really make it work would require us building an addition down the road.
Aren’t y’all thrilled? Isn’t this fascinating? I know it’d be way more fascinating if I could give you MLS numbers and whatnot, but I’m not gonna. Sorry. There are wackos in the world and you might be one of them.
So, in sum: I hope to hear from our lady realtor tonight or tomorrow, and then we’ll know if we should settle in for the long haul and wait for more houses to come on the market, or start researching kitchen remodels at Lowe’s. Only time will tell.
In the meantime, most of my updating is happening at Twitter, usually at least one a day. The dial-up situation here is killing me, in addition to making me feel like a.) a spoiled brat who can’t deal and b.) a junkie with a wicked case of withdrawal. Typical.
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