revenge of the money pit

I'm not bothered by the "usual" problems of divorce. I'm not lonely, have a perfectly adequate social life, don't have any more money worries than I did when I was married, and manage the kids single about as well as I did before.


What's going to kill me is the house.


Thanksgiving Day I developed a leak under my kitchen sink. As my mother always says, if you're going to have plumbing problems, it'll be the day you have a bunch of people about to troop in to eat. It's tricky to put a holiday meal on the table when every time you run water in your kitchen sink it drips underneath.



Then yesterday I crawled out of bed at zero dark thirty to go to work, and climbed into the shower half asleep. Yowzah. I wasn't asleep for long. There was about four inches of ice cold water from my shower the day before, just standing there, refusing to drain. I was in such a state of denial that I convinced myself that the drain doo-dad was down, and not allowing any water out. I raised it up carefully after my shower and crossed my fingers. When I got home last night the water hadn't budged. Strike One.


So today I took everything out from underneath the kitchen sink (duct tape in hand), only to find that where the water is coming from is from a corroded out part of the either the faucet or the sink itself - way beyond my puny little fix-it skills. And falling in such a way that I can't even put anything underneath it to catch the drips. Strike Two.


Then I went upstairs with the plumbing snake I got from the FX to see about the tub. I even put on my Superwoman shirt that I got as a nursing school graduation present - just to get my mojo going. While I struggled and cursed and snaked, my phone rang five times and Sasquatch came bolting out of his room to tell me that he thought he saw something scurry across his floor. Since his room looks like the New York City Dump, I wasn't surprised. I'd been telling him that all the mice had suspiciously disappeared from the rest of the house and that if I were a mouse, I'd be moving into his room with my beach umbrella and some elastic waist pants. Then, keeping an eye out for fat rodents, I got back to my snaking. Unsuccessfully. Strike Three.


I refuse to call a plumber on a holiday weekend, so we can't use the kitchen sink or the upstairs tub. The upstairs toilet is fine, but the downstairs toilet is a prima donna. The upstairs sink doesn't work - the handles are jacked up. The downstairs shower is, how do I put this nicely, a piece of shit handheld with the water pressure of a squirt gun...but it'll have to do. I showered in it today after the gym, and except for having to wash just one part of my body at a time, it was workable. Barely, but beggars can't be choosers. I have two toilets, two tubs and two sinks - and between them they equal one working bathroom.


When I think of all the times in my life I made myself crazy wanting to own a house, I have to laugh. What I wouldn't give to be able to call a landlord and have them fork over the cash to get things moving again. And now I get to worry all day tomorrow about exactly how much cash we're talking that's going to come out of my tight little fist.


I have to do laundry tomorrow. I can hardly wait to see what the washer has in store for me.

a sigh of relief

Thanksgiving came a day early at chez RC, delivered by the mail lady.


My gas bill - the first since all of my weatherproofing efforts - came. I kid you not, my hands were shaking when I opened it.


Last year, the bill for the first month of heat - a month we were never warm - was right around $400.


This year, the bill for the first month of heat - cold outside, but oh so toasty inside - was...


$104.51.


I have a whole new appreciation for saran wrap.

that's MISS fix-it, thank you

Let the wind blow and the ground freeze.


I'm ready.


In spite of the fact that all I wanted to do today was curl up with


A. a book

B. a DVD, preferably of the chick flick variety

C. my knitting

D. a warm, gassy dog

E. Any combination of the above


I didn't give in to the feeling. I couldn't, really. This morning as my children followed the steam their breath was making through the house, I promised that I'd finish shrink wrapping the windows so I could turn the heat on. And I did. Nine big windows in three rooms - done. One of them twice, because it looked like the poster child of Home Maintenance: Don't Let This Happen To You. I even did one of the stained glass windows on the stairs, and I think I'm going to zap the other one while I'm at it.


It wasn't as hard as I thought, once I got going, but you'd honestly think I've discovered a cure for cellulite as excited as I am. Best of all, between the front storm door, the thermal curtains over my kitchen slider and the saran wrap...it's warm in my house. And the heat isn't even up high. My kids are smiling and I can almost feel my toes. It got below freezing last night, and I swear it was warmer outside than it was in the house.


In a bit of movie timing, my final installment notice on last year's gas bill came in the mail today. I pitched it in the fireplace and watched it burn.


I feel warmer already.


(Even the wireless is doing its part. It has been going out for no reason all night, and every time it does, I get just a little bit hotter. I guess I should be grateful. Every little bit helps).

Nagging - it's what's for dinner

My kids go to their dad's house for the weekend and this is what they do:


Go out to eat.


Go to the movies.


Buy new computer games.


And tennis rackets.


And soccer cleats.


And hoodies.


Go out for ice cream.


And go garage saling - which they love.


Then they come home a few hours before me.


And I walk in the door whipped.


And notice that the dogs have no food.


And there are dishes all over the place.


And overflowing trash cans.


And two dead mice in traps.


And a Sasquatch load of three items in the washing machine and my scrubs for tomorrow still in the hamper.


And a tv and two computers blasting.


There was a bright spot. A big one. Now I can turn on my heat.


Our dear friend Kevin - a Bunco husband in a million - putting up our new storm door. Custom sized, of course, for a 120 year old house. Not the door. Just the space the door goes in. It took him two days to build the surround. And all he wanted from me was the money for the supplies. $25. We argued over this and he told me I was a crazy woman, which made me laugh. People who live in glass houses...


I don't think my kids appreciate Kevin enough. Because if it hadn't been for him, they'd think even less of me than they already do.

Fun Monday #8

This week's Fun Monday is being hosted by kitten and here's what she wants from us -



I think it would be neat to hear about the story behind your home and the road you live on. It doesn't have to be historical, maybe just something that stands out to you. It would be nice to have pictures to go with your little story. I also would like to know who has the oldest house. Whoever has the oldest house will get a little Christmas treat from little ole me.

This is my street earlier this week after we had gotten about five inches of snow.




This is my house. Interestingly enough it doesn't sit on my street. I have one of those old neighborhood addresses where the house faces one street but has the address of the one on the side of it. Very confusing for pizza delivery people.



This is my middle son pretending to shovel snow when in actuality he is constructing a snow fort for the ages on the side of the house. His brother, about to walk out the front door, is soon to find out about the snow fort. The hard way.


I've talked about my house a lot, so I'm a little worried people are sick of hearing about it. It's a style called Folk Victorian and it was built in 1887. We were married in 1987 so I've always loved that symbolism. There was a major remodel done in 2000 which changed a lot of things in the house in interesting ways. There are stairways outside leading to nothing, the basement stairs are backwards and someone made a period fireplace surround Art Deco. On purpose. I want so badly to learn the history of this house, but it hasn't happened yet. It will. Like the rest of my family my house is quite the character.


But here is the most important thing about my house. This is the house I have dreamed of my entire life. This street is the street I fantasized about for years but couldn't manage. Sometimes I feel like I literally created this house out of the sheer force of my desire. It's not a Craftsman style - still my favorite. But it's airy and light and every morning of my life when I walk down the stairs for the first time I get this wave of absolute joy that it's ours.


It needs work. It needs paint. It needs that Art Deco surround gone.


And I...


...need it.

Fun Monday #5

Today's Fun Monday is being hosted by Blue Momma at Life in the Fish Bowl. And this is what she wants us to do:


I want you to show me your......projects. More to the point, I want to see your unfinished projects. I have so many that I really need some reassurance that I'm not the only one. Home improvement projects are what I have in mind, but it you don't have any of those show me any kind of project - needlework, cooking, scrapbooking, etc. You can even show me your spouse if they qualify as a work in process. And please, I WANT PICTURES!!!! You can talk if you want, but you don't have to. I know since you are all bloggers talk is bound to happen, but I most definitely want to see photos of those unfinished projects.

Great. Just when I've committed to not writing book length posts for Fun Monday, too. I have projects galore afoot because, as I've said before, my house is trying to kill me. We've owned it a year and a half and have made a lot of progress, but...


This place gives The Money Pit a whole new meaning. Here is a sampling of home projects we are a) in the middle of, b) working up the courage for or c) too scared to think of for long (but will somehow have to).

I've complained about my fireplace before. We're trying to decide on tile and haven't had much luck. I'm about to scrap everything and start all over again.



There are two of these windows along the staircase. For the most part they're in great shape, but a few of the smaller pieces need to be replaced. And they need cleaning, as they are old house double paned and are hard to get to. You can see the broken pieces here (especially the half moon piece on the bottom right side).




This used to be a transom window over the front door, but someone de-transomed it. I'd like to restore it to the way it used to be. Eventually. On a way more global note, if you look around the window you'll see a lot of really lovely molding that needs to be stripped. The entire house is full of very interesting details that are all covered by (fifteen coats apparently) of white paint.




This is the hole in the downstairs family room ceiling. I badgered the Film Geek to take out the existing fixture so we could hang an Ikea chandelier I've had for a year. But...once he was in there he ran into one problem after another, culminating with the fact that the new hole is now way too large for the fixture. So we're replacing the existing fixture (which is fine, really) and we'll hang the chandelier in the entry hall.



This is the humiliated chandelier that started all the ruckus in the first place. It's combined wired and candles and I really wanted it over the dining room table, but I'm not willing to tear out an entire plaster wall to get it there. Eventually it will find a home that isn't covered in dog hair.




This is the big, bad scary monster that sends both the FG and I to our corners with our thumbs in our mouths. This is shot from the entry hall and shows the staircase going up. There's a lot of scraping that needs to be done in the top right hand corner and then it all needs painting. But first we need to fix a spot on the roof that's letting small amounts of water in.

The staircase curves and the ceiling is really high and there isn't enough money in the world to get me on a ladder up there. This'll be the one we hire out...eventually.

(The window at the top of the stairs is the match to the one mentioned earlier, by the way. It also has some small broken pieces).



My major project in the planning stage is landscaping the front yard. I didn't do a blessed thing last year because I was so overwhelmed by the whole thing. But this next Spring I'm planning a massive attack even though I'm still scared half to death.

The problem is that I don't know what I'm doing. But I'd better learn quick.


This is the front of the house. (Which will hopefully be painted in the next year or so. Uh oh. I'm back in a fetal position again).



This is one side yard. The other side is about the same size. (Oh yeah, we also have to extend the fence line to the privacy fence on the left). The middle area is ours, but when we moved in we only fenced the part right by the house. The middle is a huge day lily patch and I didn't want the dogs to destroy it, so for now it's just left open. But our neighbors put up a privacy fence so we're going to extend ours to theirs. And landscape it. (Rocking in corner crying for my mama by this point).




I hope Blue Momma feels better that she isn't alone in her project overload. Because I all of a sudden have a migraine.

I need my teddy bear.

Touchstones

There's one in every family and my family is no exception. One person is the emotional stabilizer, the one who pulls rabbits out of their hat and keeps everything going, the one who listens to everyone and solves everyone else's problems or goes down trying. This is the person who has their nervous breakdowns in private so no one else freaks out. The person who everyone else feels secure enough with to totally unload on. One person is always the touchstone.

That person is me.

And right about now I'm going down.

Maybe I need a good nights sleep. Maybe I need the weather to drop below 150 degrees. Possibly I need a bottle of Chardonnay, a bowl of pesto (and a spoon) and every Hugh Grant film I can dig up. I might try it, with a few exceptions. First off I have no wine, so I'll substitute lemonade. There' s not a drop of pesto in the house so I'll swap for some gorgeous farmer's market tomatoes with a hunk of fresh mozzarella. There is no substitute for Hugh Grant, so that part gets left alone. It's a crucial part in my recovery and I'm not taking any chances.

Maybe I just need to have a minute to myself to sort things out. There's a lot going on...

The Film Geek's shoot is not going well. This is unsurprising for several reasons, but still a problem. The shoot got pushed back several weeks to accomodate an actor and in the process inconvenienced absolutely everyone else. The new semester started today, so he's trying to work fourteen hour days (on an open prairie in the heat) and somehow get his students up to speed at the same time. One of the guys on his crew is trying to undermine his position just to be a shit. Their schedule keeps changing, thanks to the same actor. The in town and location shooting just got flip flopped, so all the days I arranged to work while he had days off are now moot and I am without child care while he is out of town. Sasquatch has done a good job for me lately, but I'm just not confident of the dynamics of leaving an older dictatorial brother in charge for a twelve hour shift.

FG's exhausted, hot, feeling underappreciated and overworked. Feeling like he's only giving half of himself to each of the two jobs he's now trying to juggle. He takes his students very seriously, but this feature is a big deal professionally. If this goes well an even bigger project will follow. And we could really use the money. We don't call this house The Money Pit for nothing. His stress level is palpable and we are two weeks into a six week shoot. He feels like he can't breath and he says his chest hurts. Yesterday he just snapped and told me he was walking away from the film. This is a first. In twenty years the man has not ever walked away from a job, even when he should have. For an hour in the car on the way to the set he examined all the angles, all the reasons he should throw in the towel. I was driving him basically to be a good wife and also to give him a chance to vent. He ranted and raged and for one awful moment I thought he was going to cry. And then, I knew this was coming, he said, "What do you think I should do?"

Now we all know there is no right answer for this, so I pointed out the pros, cons and possible repercussions of each side of the fence. I never mentioned the words money or heart attack. I told him that ultimately he was the one who would have to live with his choice, so it stood to reason it shoud be his decision. As I dropped him off I crossed my fingers that he could live with whatever he decided. It was all I could really do.

Next up is Sasquatch who is having a semi-stressful entrance to High School. Believe me when I say that it could be worse, but it's still tricky. He can't sleep at night so the mornings are pure hell. He's disorganized and defiant about it, so something as simple as carrying a backpack becomes a power struggle. He simply cannot understand why I want him to have all of his stuff together and contained. Because he's so tired he's particularly short tempered, especially with me. I'm his safety zone, you see, the person who gets to experience all of his teenage glory. The homework level has really been kicked up as well, so he's feeling some pressure himself.

I was preoccupied with the Film Geek and wondering what the final outcome would be when Sasquatch came into the room to tell me that he had just realized that he had left tonight's homework at school. When I asked how that happened he got furious and accused me of "attacking" him. This is his favorite spiel. When I ask him a question I'm "attacking" him. When he goes balllistic on me he's "explaining" himself. Evidently there's a difference somehow. He raged at me that I never listen to a word he says and that he's tired of me always being "the victim". Then he slammed into his room.

Imagine a sitcom where when one character exits from one door another enters from the other side. Exit Sasquatch, enter Gumby, who has just realized that one of his pet rats has a lump on it's back. As I was walking into the room to look, I pointed out that this rat is over two years old and that we might need to keep that in mind. At that point he collapsed in tears and hysterically started making lists of all the things we needed to do to keep the rat alive. This list thing is evidently genetic.He had heard Sasquatch yelling at me, so he pulled himself together quickly so as not to upset me. This, of course, upset me more. Just because your brother is a teenage drama queen doesn't mean that your feelings aren't legitimate. I held him and he cried and then we plotted out Operation Rat Rescue. He went back into his room to try to go to sleep.

Cue sitcom timing. The phone rang and it was my husband telling me that he and the director had had a come to jesus talk and he was staying on the film. They basically told him to do whatever he needed to do about teaching and they would work around him. They told him they had his back. The guy giving him so much grief will be looking for a new job very shortly unless things change fast. He sounded calm. He sounded relieved. He sounded tired. Nothing hurt. He was on his way home for the night. And tomorrow he'd go back.

Every unpleasant day in my life has some surreal element in it, just a little drop kick to keep you awake. Mine was supplied by Surfer Dude, who had to appear in our little soap opera somehow. He's all fired up for this next Kid's Top Chef competition he's planning and keeps fiddling with things in the kitchen as he prepares. (This event is weeks away, BTW). Whenever I walked into my kitchen there was a pile of all different kinds of peppers and jars of spices artistically stacked up. Except the position kept changing. First it was on the table. Then it was piled on the counter. It made its final appearance on the island before I said if he didn't put the peppers away I would feed him nothing but Pop Tarts until he went away to college. Foodies evidently don't eat Pop Tarts, even ten year old foodies, because the pepper pastiche went away.

So I sat on the computer (writing this) and felt absolutely drained. I could really use just one day where people take their problems elsewhere. Let someone else be the touchstone for a change.Usually I call a friend and vent. Last night it was just me and the keyboard, practicing the ancient art of internet venting. Some might even call it whining. Hell, I might even call it whining. Still...

I'm feeling better. Maybe I don't need Hugh after all.

But why take chances?

Color My World

Sitting out on my fabulous, newly screened porch, I was thinking about paint. I absolutley adore paint. It's one of my Very Favorite Things, so I probably spend a lot more time thinking about it than I should. My paint chip collection is world class in its scope. I am continually amazed at what you can do with just one gallon of the stuff. It's like magic as far as I'm concerned - the good kind. Let other people redecorate or wallpaper or move around furniture, I just head for the paint store. It's the closest thing to a quick fix I have. (Short of a big cold bottle of Diet Coke with Lime, anyway).

I'm pretty sure my paint fetish started during all those years we rented in South Pas and always had to have white walls. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against white walls, I just hate not having options. Personally I'm very big on options, and if this is some latent demonstration of my inner control freak I don't want to know about it. I'm sure it also has a lot to do with hating being told what to do, but if I get any more off subject here I'm not sure how I'll recover.

Paint. We were discussing paint. (Effective segue, although lacking in finesse). I have paint on the brain partly because we just had a small episode involving our kitchen and a series of very bad moves on my part. When the kids and I were in California in January, the Film Geek painted the kitchen for me. This was a very big deal and took a lot of time, because our kitchen is pretty large and had a whole slew of stuff that needed to be prepped and taped off. Before we left I gave him the paint chip we had decided on and didn't give it another thought. The night we came home he proudly led me into the kitchen and flipped the light on so I could check out his latest production. Drumroll, please...

I hated it. Not the painting. The painting was fine. It was the color. The color that I had chosen and now made me feel like I was inside a truck full of frozen salmon filets. And the sheer size of the room made it worse. I felt like I was inside a big truck full of frozen salmon filets. I had expected a very soft kind of peachy melon color and I got this. It was not good, but I didn't want to say anything to this man who was so proudly showing me what he had done. So I put on a smiley face and told him (very honestly) how much I appreciated that he had done it for me. And I did, I really did. It wasn't his fault I hated the color.

It was time for Plan B, which in this case stands for Botched. I lived with the walls for months while I tried to figure out what to do. Every time one of our friends would walk through to check on the house redo progress I would offer the same disclaimer for the kitchen - "Okay, you can look, but it isn't DONE yet". Around Spring Break I started to really look at my options, but of course first I had to fess up to my husband just how much I really hated the kitchen. In a heroic display of restraint he simply shook his head, said "well, it's your kitchen" and walked away. One of these days I'll tell you about how this is the second time I've done this to him, but he reads this too, and I don't want to give him any more ammunition than I have to.


On to solutions. First I got the idea to take a color I had on hand and mix it with a little glaze to make a color wash to apply over the paint and mute it a little. The color was really pretty and looked good on the frozen fish walls, but no matter what I did the application was blotchy. It was so bad that I called the Film Geek and told him casually that when he got home from work late that night he might not want to look at the kitchen walls until I was awake and could explain. No matter what I did, I couldn't fix it, so now my frozen fish walls looked like they had a bad case of poison ivy. I finally threw in the towel and conceded that I needed to buy a new color and simply repaint the one big wall something totally different.



I had originally wanted a red wall in there, so I went to the paint store and came home with a bunch of red chips in my very favorite brand. I love this paint so much I could happily do my own commercial for them, never mind that it would put me in the poorhouse if it wasn't for the online coupons. Even then...it's like a bad love affair. I wish sometimes I'd never even laid eyes on this paint.



So the Film Geek and I look at colors and he picks his favorite two (which were not my favorite two) and we haggle a little and I finally agree with his number two choice. I head back to buy the paint and on the way decide to give in and go with his number one choice, because I still feel bad about painting over all his hard work. It takes a while for the paint guy to come over and help me so I drift back over to the paint chips and see a red that I had somehow missed earlier. I pick it up and look at it next to the one we've decided on, thinking that it really is quite pretty, but most likely too dark. I'm still wandering around when the paint guy comes over to see what I want to get. I give him my order and am five minutes into my wait while he mixes the paint when I look down and realize that I gave him the wrong paint chip. And this is custom mix paint - no refunds once it's mixed. I imagined my husband's face and my life flashed in front of my eyes. And for all of you pessimists out there, let's just leave Freud out of it, okay?



By the time I got home I was in the if life gives you lemons make lemonade mode, and started painting. When the Film Geek got home from work his immediate response was "Is this the color I picked??" (He said this right before he took the roller out of my hand because he didn't like the way I was painting, by the way). I babbled well no it isn't the same color and it's really kind of a funny story if you just think about it. Honey? Honey? We finished the two walls in relative silence and then looked around the room.



I absolutely loved it. The color was just drop dead gorgeous and looked great with the two frozen fish walls we had left alone. The red muted the other walls and they complemented each other really well. The Film Geek wasn't too sure, but said he trusted my judgement and that he figured the color would grow on him. He hasn't griped since, so I figure either it has or he's just given up the fight. As for me, it makes me happy every time I walk in, and that has to count for something, right?


Like he said. It's my kitchen.

Home Improvement

The stars aligned and the heavens smiled last night as The Film Geek and I actually worked together on a home project and didn't kill each other. The sound you hear is angels singing in astonishment and pure joy. We do not have a good track record, you see, although we've really been making an effort to get better. We know why we work so badly together, we just haven't been able to do much about it. I'll explain it all and then maybe someone can provide some words of wisdom. God knows we need help.

First off is the good news. We managed to do most of the work to rescreen the sun porch last night, just in time for the storms we're expecting today. The sun porch is reached through a sliding glass door in the kitchen, so when the slider is open the air flow is wonderful. Since most of these storms come with high winds, it really cools off the house fast, besides just feeling good. The problem we had is the the college boys who lived here before had torn the screens, so bugs and animals and such would get on the sun porch. Obviously we didn't want them in the kitchen so the slider had to stay closed. And said bugs and small animals made sitting on the sun porch less than desirable. The dogs didn't help matters, since they would just use the holes in the screens as a shortcut to the back yard. Dee Dee in particular, being built like a walrus, is always up for a shortcut.

So The Film Geek took off the old screens and pieces of wood holding them on, and then we hung new screening and staple gunned it in and replaced the wood. I pounded nails out of wood and held screening and fetched things he needed while he was up on the ladder. It went without a hitch, really. Well, one hitch. While I was in the kitchen finishing dinner, I heard my husband yell "Oh, no she did NOT!!", while chasing walrus dog around the yard. Seems she had seen or heard a dog walking by and headed out to the yard to stake her turf - straight through the eight foot screen panel we had just hung. Dear lord, this dog is dumber then dirt, and if the kids didn't love her so much I'd arrange an accident for her. If she goes through the screen again I just may anyway. I don't suppose anyone is in the market for a two hundred pound black lab with more than a touch of borderline personality disorder and an insatiable need to lick the furniture? She's good with kids - really. First one to email me can have her. Or better still, for faster delivery, just call me. Please. I'm begging.

The problem my husband and I have is that we have very different styles in terms of home projects. Take painting for instance. He can happily spend a week prepping a room to paint. He patches, putties, sands, scrapes, takes a peek, fondles the walls, repatches, reputties, resands, rescrapes and then repeeks and refondles. Repeat this loop a minimum of three times. Then we get to the actual painting part. We start with freshly washed walls (the only part of this whole process that he feels I'm competent to handle, but he still watches to make sure I put the proper amount of TSP in the water). Then he tapes, retapes, sleeps on it for a night or two and then finally begins to put the actual paint on the wall. Gimme an A, gimme an N, gimme an A, gimme an L - what's that spell? Film Geek!

His complaint with me is that he considers me sloppy in my work. That I can paint a room in an afternoon worries him deeply, since it obviously means I've done a half-assed job. I have literally had the man take the roller out of my hand to "fix" one of my "mistakes" to his satisfaction. I defy anyone to look at any of our rooms and tell me who painted which one. He does not see it this way and that's all I'm going to say about that. While he's gone this weekend I'm planning on painting the computer room and he knows it. He's got a little twitch right above his left eye and I don't care. I'd like this room painted before Christmas. 2009.

Stay tuned for updates as they unfold. And I really am serious about the dog. Call me. Please.

Adventures In Real Estate - The Money Pit

Now that we’ve gone over the utter chaos that was our last moving experience, it’s time to introduce the cause behind it all. The picture below was taken by the Film Geek the first time we saw our new house together, and it was, literally, the vision that fueled us when the tank was completely dry. Have you ever seen a house that needed love more? When I was too tired to move I would park in front of it just to remind myself of what the stakes were. Sometimes I didn’t even care anymore, but by then it was plain too late to do anything about it. The entire experience reminds me of the saying “be careful what you wish for because you just may get it.” Well, we wished all right, and we got it, too. It’s just that some days we’re still not sure if we knew what we were wishing for. This house is bigger than the both of us. Meet The Money Pit.






The house was built in 1887 and is a style called Folk Victorian, which I had never heard of before. It pretty much means it was built for the common folk who wanted a “real” Victorian but couldn’t afford one. The house is on a double lot in one of two historic areas in town, and the entire neighborhood is treed to within an inch of its life. Towering is a good word for the trees, even from our (very tall) second floor the trees go on forever. It feels a little like you’re in a tree house.

Okay, here are the bare bones details. The house itself isn’t huge but it’s very spacious feeling, because almost the entire place has ten foot ceilings. Downstairs is an entry way, living room, dining room, family room, kitchen, bathroom and laundry/mud room. The kitchen, bath and laundry were part of a big remodel in 2000 and they’re quite large. Upstairs is a bath, a library and three bedrooms. One of the bedrooms was added the same time they did the remodel and it’s really more of a sunroom that is used as a bedroom. It’s also enormous. The house has an attic and a basement, which I’ve already described (unfortunately). We have a great front porch with a swing, and the entire side yard is planted with orange and red day lilies. It’s quite a respectable house, even simply on paper.

But it’s the extra stuff that grabbed us by the throat. The floors are pine and oak throughout, and the living room has a fireplace. The windows are all tall and thin and the light just pours into the house. There is a stained glass transom window over the glass front door and two original pieces of stained glass that follow the curve of the stairs. The staircase is something else. It’s literally the first thing you see when you walk in the door and it curves like a candy cane as it rises upstairs. Virtually every room has crown molding and the downstairs has carved doorway and window molding. There are nice built-ins in the family room. The kitchen has partially stainless steel countertops and more storage space than you can shake a stick at. Off the kitchen, through a sliding glass door, is a screened in porch that has a hard wood floor and is fully wired. There are lilacs planted all along the screen so you can smell them in the house. When you go out the back door from the laundry room you are on a brick patio that is surrounded by an arbor that has built in wooden benches along the perimeter. From there a brick walkway leads to the driveway. There’s even a basketball goal for the kids.

The clincher to the deal was the separate studio at the back of the lot. It’s attached to a double garage and it’s enormous. One of the families that lived here before turned it into a textile studio, so there are hoists and everything. It’s plumbed, fully wired, air conditioned and has a great big high ceiling with wonderful windows. There’s even a pretty good sized storage loft. My husband would sell me to the gypsies for this studio. This was the single most important factor that brought him on board for this godforsaken process. Sometimes he goes out there just to pat it and tell it how much he loves it. This is where he does his model building, and this is where his enormous stash of modelling supplies lives. In our old house they had their own bedroom. Now they have their own house. And they're out of mine. :)

Now for the down side. The house does have some issues, which I guess is to be expected in a hundred and twenty year old building. It has old house floors, as in if you drop something it will roll all the way across the room. Some college kids rented it for a few years and it shows. There are only three closets in the entire place. (I guess those Victorians didn't have many clothes). The walls are all plaster, and a lot of the downstairs is the horsehair plaster, which can be a biatch to repair. A few of the walls needed help badly. To give you an idea how badly, the sellers took ten percent off their asking price because they didn't want to patch the plaster or paint. I don't work at my job to feed my kids, I work to buy plaster patch. (True story - when I went to the local hardware store just a block away I introduced myself and said I was new to the neighborhood and that they'd be seeing a lot of us. They asked which house and when I told them they said "You'll be wanting the big bucket of plaster patch".)

It was unfenced, so the first thing we had to do was put in a fence. Because of the layout if you were driving down the street pre-fence you could see straight through the screened porch into the kitchen, which I wasn't crazy about. It's on a corner, which doesn't thrill me either. There are only three bedrooms, which took some thinking outside of the box. The sunroom bedroom is big enough that we put a temporary divider in the middle to create two bedrooms. Eventually we'll do a permanent wall. I hate the basement. And the street is way more urban than I'm used to. We're sort of on the outside perimeter of the neighborhood. There's an assisted living facility right across the street and we live only a block off of one of the main drags in town. It's not a huge street, but I can see the stoplight from my west windows. It's kind of odd. From my east windows all you can see is trees and big old houses, but the view from other side is more city. We are only half a block from a supermarket, so there's a fair amount of foot traffic. Our city is crazy about roundabouts and there's one right in front of us. Every now and then some drunken frat boy will forget it's there and drive right over it, making quite a racket as their entire undercarriage gets ripped off. I thought the more urban aspect of it could be problematic, but I absolutely love it. I can walk to get anything I need, and there are days I never even get in my car. Both the Film Geek and I can walk to work if we want. The convenience is wonderful.

It's a good place. I think we'll keep it. At least until I finish patching the walls.

Adventures in Real Estate, part two

Even now, a year later, I get a pain in my gut when I think about that time. To say we went from zero to sixty doesn’t quite do justice to the situation. Because the fact was that we were committed to buying one house, but we absolutely had to sell the one we were living in first. We had to have the money from the sale of the house to swing it. And, since we had given up on the idea of selling four months earlier, we hadn’t done a thing to the house in preparation. Things were about to get very ugly.

I don’t think I overstate when I say that it was, plain and simple, seven weeks of hell. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that without our friends it never would have happened. For starters there was Kevin. Kevin is the husband of a fellow Bunco Babe, and the man is the king of the handymen. Not only is he handy, but he’s an artist as well, so everything he does has a craftsman sensibility to it. There does not appear to be anything he can’t do, I don’t care what his wife says. I bow at the altar of Kevin to this day, and I don’t care what my husband says either. The problem was that he had a full time job, so he did all of our stuff at night and on weekends. Our estimate from a local plumbing company to replace our plumbing was over $10,000. Kevin did it himself, with mostly copper pipes for around $1400.00. And replaced the walls he had to tear out to boot. When he was done with that he built a deck porch for us to replace the one that was falling apart. For one sixth the estimate for a vastly inferior porch. He was at our house so much that his poor wife Polli actually brought their kids over a couple of times just to see dad. Of course we were paying him, but his input was, as the commercial says, priceless.

I started packing as soon as I got back from signing the contract on the new house. As soon as boxes were packed we moved them to a storage space across town. It didn’t take us long to realize we needed a lot of help. Enter our friends again. I sent out an email that said HELP! and organized a workday for anyone who felt like coming over and lending a hand for a day. We bought a bunch of pizza, snacks, soda and beer and were astonished, amazed and grateful for the response. We had people everywhere. Some were in the yard with huge power tools they brought, some were peeling up bathroom linoleum with a blow dryer and chisel, there were groups in several rooms painting, and people with pickups were moving huge amounts of stuff across town. Kevin was moving through all of this lugging lumber and pouring concrete. I don’t think we had really understood how much there actually was that needed to be done, but the sound bite of the day was my friend Melissa who walked in, looked around and said, “Oh, honey. Where should we start?”

The fact that the Film Geek and I are still married is a testament to the fact that we were both too exhausted to file divorce papers. There were moments, however, that will live in memory for a very long time. There was the paint on the family room floor, for example. It was a concrete floor and the room was huge, like 16 x 36. We didn’t want to have to put a new floor down, so I came up with the idea of the high gloss concrete paint that’s so popular right now in lofts and urban type stuff. Well, the paint wouldn’t set. No matter what my husband tried, big chunks kept peeling up. Then there was the night he accidentally knocked over an entire gallon of paint in the downstairs bathroom and just laid down on the floor and curled up in a little fetal ball. This was the same night when he had earlier bellowed for me to come downstairs and bring him something. (First rule of doing home projects with the Film Geek is that whatever he is doing at the time is always more important than whatever it is I’m doing, so I always have to put my stuff down to fetch something for him). Well, he needed something or other, but the last time I’d stepped into his lair I barely escaped with my fingers intact. My friend Laurie was over inspecting the damage, and she valiantly offered to go in my place, since he couldn’t yell at her, could he? She cautiously went down the stairs calling out “yes, honey? What do you need?” I could hear the snarl from the kitchen. She came up, patted me on the back and made a wide eyed exit.

Then there was the kitchen tile that had started to lift, and needed replacing, but the pattern had been discontinued. Or the new bedroom door that I accidentally hit with a ladder and put a big hole in. We had sawhorses in our front yard and an industrial size dumpster in our driveway. We found out that one of our three huge picture windows had slipped in the frame so that there was now a two inch gap at the top. Our roof started to leak and the oven stopped working. The automatic garage door refused to work the day before we had to move out. The upstairs toilet had to be replaced unexpectedly when it started to spew water everywhere. The sliding glass door to the deck gave up the ghost. I could go on, but my ulcer is beginning to act up just thinking about it.

I still couldn’t tell you how, but we officially went on the market April 3rd, even though we had to cancel both of our realtor walk throughs because of the family room floor. My folks were visiting on their way through to their new lake house one state over and they had problems of their own. They had ordered a bunch of furniture, arranged to have it delivered and planned their entire trip around that delivery date, only to find out at the last minute that the store had completely lost their order and couldn’t (or more appropriately wouldn’t) do anything to fix it. Our Open House was scheduled for that weekend and we still had doors down, electrical outlets hanging and a sticky family room floor. We were a bunch of people on the edge.

Then the phone rang. It was a local realtor who wanted to bring some people through that afternoon. I said hell no. By chance our realtor was there and she said hey now let’s not be hasty and asked me which realtor it was. When I told her she told me firmly, like you would speak to a rabid dog, to let him come and look. She said he was a good guy and would understand why the house looked the way it did. Barb had helped us buy this house, our first, and I trust her completely. I told him to come on over. For the next hour we all ran around like crazy people trying to make the house look like something other than a house of horror. We decided that we would all leave except Barb when they came through. On our way out, the Film Geek and I had a screaming fight in the middle of the street and he got in his car and peeled off. My folks and I got in the car to make ourselves scarce. I'm sure they were questioning our sanity.

An hour later my cell phone rang. Barb asked me how I’d feel about having a contract for my house in my hand by the next morning. I told her it wasn’t nice to mess with crazy people, and she replied that while I might indeed be crazy, she wasn’t messing with me. We had sold our house to the very first people who looked at it. For basically the asking price. It was our nineteenth wedding anniversary, and we weren’t even speaking to each other.

The song Bad Day was really popular during that time and it kind of became my anthem. The line about “where is the passion when you need it the most” really stuck out. I kept telling myself that we were doing this for a new house we both adored, and tried to keep in mind that this really was a good thing. I reminded myself of this when the kids and dogs were all having nervous breakdowns from the chaos. I chanted it like a mantra during a move that made getting the house ready to sell look like a walk in the park. To this day when I hear that song I go back to that time and still, in spite of a generally optimistic nature, can’t laugh about it at all. This is why we drag our feet now about anything home repair oriented. Even with a years perspective it’s still too fresh.

Although…last night my husband read yesterday’s post and chuckled. We started comparing notes and before I knew it we were trying to top each other’s horror stories. I think we may finally be approaching closure.

Time to go buy some paint.

Adventures in Real Estate, part one

When we sold our old house and bought our new one last year, we did almost everything wrong. Or at least backwards. We got some things right at least, but the whole experience left us feeling a little fragile. I bring this up now for a reason. Spring has sprung, and like a lot of the world we’re in home improvement mode. It isn’t going as smoothly for us as it could, and there’s a good explanation for that. Let me take you back in time, back to the first week in February 2006. Actually, scratch that. Let’s go back even further, to Fall 2005.

I wanted a new house. The Film Geek was not so sure. I was finally working and all in all we were in a position to pull it off. We called in our trusted realtor just to walk through and tell us what we’d need to do to sell. We figured that it would help us at least decide if we wanted to pursue it. It was discouraging, to say the least. The entire front porch had to be repoured or rebuilt, and the plumbing had to be completely redone. These were the big things, but there were plenty of small ones. We ended up with two entire pages of single spaced things to do. Now we all know I like lists, but this one was just plain intimidating.

Winter was coming and we were trying to decide what to do. In the Midwest, and especially in a college town, the Spring market is huge, and if you miss that window you can have some real problems if you’re selling. April 1st is the magic cutoff date. We went back and forth as only we can do, and finally one day the light bulb went on. For the first time in years we were comfortable and relaxed. I wasn’t stressed out by school. I loved my job. Finances were being kind. My husband wasn’t in the middle of any projects that were killing him. The kids were all doing well with everything. Why rock the boat? We decided to stay put. There was nothing wrong with our house really, just a bunch of stupid stuff we could now fix at our leisure or ignore. When we finally made this decision there was the huge feeling of relief for both of us. A huge cloud of potential anxiety went away.

Fast forward to February. I was taking the kids to school and saw a really cute house with a For Sale By Owner sign in front. More out of idle curiosity than anything else, I wrote the number down. I have a real estate clock the way some people have a biological clock. I just love houses for sale. Really, I just love houses in general. This real estate lust was particularly bad in LA where we couldn’t have even afforded a small carport in Watts. It’s never gone away, especially now that so many of these cute houses were actually possible for us. I went to open houses regularly, but I was fixated on one particular neighborhood, a sixteen square block area smack in the middle of the elementary and middle schools my kids go to. The area is one of two historic neighborhoods in town and is full of older, funky houses and huge old trees. It had, of course, also become quite trendy, and anything that went on the market tended to get snapped up fast, and often with several people bidding against each other. Part of the reason I was okay with waiting a year to sell was that I was so discouraged by how fast these houses were going. We had pretty much decided to wait it out for as long as it took. The FSBO house wasn’t in this area. Like I said, it was just curiosity that made me write down the number. I stuck it in my purse and promptly forgot about it.

Later that afternoon I drove by the house again and remembered. I called the number from my car while I sat in front of school waiting for the bell. The woman who answered the phone turned out to be someone I knew, and when she found out it was us, she said she was sure this house was way too small for us, but there was this weird hesitation in her voice. Then she slowly said that she and her husband had another house that they were thinking about selling that summer, but they weren’t totally sure when. She said if I wanted to take a look at it to let her know and then she gave me an address solidly in my dream neighborhood, on the very street I drove down at least once a day just to covet. In a trancelike state I picked up the kids and drove straight to the house. I parked in front, took one look at the house and knew immediately that the Film Geek and I were in very bad trouble.

We saw the interior of the house the next day, and our troubles intensified. I was hooked the instant we walked in the front door. My husband is made of stronger stuff when it comes to real estate, but when we got to the separate studio he actually pressed his nose against the glass like the proverbial kid in a candy shop. Our eyes met, and it was one of those marriage moments where the stars align and two brains really are as one. And those two brains were screaming the same word. Sold. Without ever really even going on the market. I was terrified someone was going to hear about it and outbid us. We had a contract on the house the next morning and were in escrow by lunch.

We had seven weeks to get our house ready to put on the market.

to be continued…