Home Sweet (New) Home

As my loyal blog followers might have noticed (all three of you), I’ve been slipping in writing new posts. It’s especially crappy of me, since I’ve been promising a post on our search for a new home for quite a while, but have managed to evade that topic the whole time.

Well, the search is over. We moved into our new home on June 13 after months and months of toiling in the housing market. You’d think that this would be a really great time for a young person to buy a nice home – it is, but you have to be wearing your patience hat the whole time. From the time we were preapproved for a mortgage till settlement, our process took nearly nine months. Nine months. Just chew on that for a minute. It’s like we had a baby, but it is shaped like a house. “Congratulations! It’s a colonial! Pass out the cheap cigars!” We certainly labored through this process and, oh yeah, we definitely have our work cut out for us in the long term.

We’re already feeling the crunch of homeownership and just how much time and money it saps out of you. For example, before we had moved in, I had intended to clean the floors thoroughly so that when we moved in, all our stuff would be sitting on a nice clean surface. Also, I had this pathological need to get rid of the funk-of-owner’s-past so I could be rest assured that I was only living amongst my own funk and/or the funk of my choosing (insert significant others and pets here). The whole main level is hardwood and ceramic tile, so this should have been a very simple goal to adhere to. A little sweeping, a little mopping… But no.

Certainly, cleaning the floors before the move didn’t happen – we were too busy packing up the old place and I was too busy in school. No problem, I’ll clean the floors once everything is moved in, but before we start unpacking. Ha! Good initiative, bad judgment, as we used to say in the Marines. At this point I’m not only beginning to understand how much work a house is, but how important prioritizing tasks have become. Like, do I want to clean my floors, or perhaps dig out my underwear so I have something clean to wear? But before I dig out the underwear, I have to dig out my toiletries so I can shower. Crap! Where did I pack the shower curtain? Oh my Lord, this water pressure sucks; we need to call the plumber, and so on and so forth as the higher priority tasks keep piling up.

Once I had unpacked everything, I told myself I would definitely clean up the floors. Whoops…forgot I had family coming in to town...and I can’t forget about the paper that’s due and the mid-term I have to study for...oh look, the fence and deck builder salesguy showed up to give us a quote. Oh great!...The family is here…yay...I hope they don’t notice the messy floors - well, if they say something, we’ll tell them it’s our funk. Little white lies are OK, right? We’ll blame it on Tucker. He’s deaf now, so he makes a great patsy.

OK, so now the family has departed – NOW I can clean my floors. Well crap, now I have to study for the final – damn these condensed summer classes... Finals are over, how about now? Nope, I promised Dad I’d come up and work on the boat. By now, the funk of two adults and four animals is layering on top of the former owner’s funk, as is the number of pairs of socks I am now wearing to separate myself from all the funky grossness. I'm becoming convinced that if one were to analyze a cross section of the funk on my floors, one might actually find trilobite fossils or some other goody from the Paleazoic era.

By the week of July 18th, I am finally able to clean my floors – halleluiah! Excited to complete my long awaited task, I start the job at around 5:30 pm, thinking I’ll have the whole house done by bed time. I begin to clean the floor of the family room, a modest room measuring 14’ x 19’. By the time I finish removing the contents of the room, manually sweeping and “swiffering,” and putting everything back in the room, the time is now 9:00 pm. Three and half hours to complete one room? Clearly I need better tools.

After acquiring a new canister vacuum and a steam cleaner (and spending yet more money on the house we’ve owned barely a month) on the following Friday evening, I am excited to finally clean my floors now that I have the time AND the tools. But wait! T-man wants to go to Best Buy and buy a big screen TV (and we spend more freaking money). Well, we have to set the TV up so we can watch every single channel in high definition and analyze every DVD in the house to marvel at the effects of digital upscaling – there goes another weekend.

By now, Frank and I are becoming very close. Frank is what I named the funk on my floor. I figured, since he's been around so long, I might as well assign him a moniker. It was nice, really, having Frank around, like an old friend, except that now I’m wearing six pairs of socks to separate myself from Frank – we’re not THAT close. I decided the magic was gone when I noticed the collective pet hair was beginning to gather up in corners and Frank began accumulating little salt and pepper afros all over the place. It was then I knew – Frank had to go.

But last weekend was sucked up by another project – spending more money on carpet for the stairs. Zoie nearly fell down the whole flight of hardwood stairs one night and from that point on demanded to be carried up the stairs. Fine, I’ll carpet the stairs – the things we do for our pets, I swear… Now I’m sporting a major pouty face. I’d have to tolerate Frank another week. This was fine, except now I’m up to a full dozen pair of socks at once and I have to do laundry every day now to keep up with the demand of foot dressing.

I finally cleaned my floors yesterday, August 3, a full 7 weeks and one day after moving into our home. Ew.

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All joking aside, T-man and I are quite ecstatic to be in our own home, our own little chunk of the planet to which we can lay claim. Thanks a million times over to all of our awesome friends who came out and helped. Out of all the people to whom we timidly turned to for help in the awful tasks of moving, nearly all of you made it out to help us – you guys ROCK!!! Special thanks to friends and family who listened to us bitch and complain about the insanely arduous house selection process – I’m pretty sure we were the poster children for everything that could and would go wrong in home purchasing. Also, a fist bump and a nod to our realtor and mortgage broker-turned-friends for putting up with our millions of phone calls, emails and questions and for working WAY harder than they should have for one client!

To see pics of the house before we moved in, go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/esimmons

Please take special notice of the hideous décor, to include the master bedroom that is so pink it is almost reminiscent of being in the womb. I thought about posting a sign on the door for visitors: “Welcome To My Cervix – Feel Free To Head On Out,” but T-man quickly vetoed the idea. I can’t understand why…

Pictures of the T&E-owned house will be posted later, after some much needed wallpaper scraping and painting. *shiver*