Sundays with Stretchy Pants » house

We Thought it Would be Worth it

Abby — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:16:51 +0000

Yes, it’s a great house. Yes, it’s in a perfect location. Yes, we knew it would be tight for a while. We thought it would be worth it.

Turns out, it’s just a house.

We find this American Dream to be bullshit.

Bryan and I have a different American Dream. We felt it for the 4 years we spent renting when we moved to Columbus, and we thought something was wrong with us because we enjoyed renting so much. We figured we had PTSD from our first home-ownership and renovation experience, but now we are embracing our renter nature.

We don’t want to pay this kind of money (or any kind of money) for just a house. We want disposable income. We want to visit our family in Michigan and take a real family vacation. We want to take the kids wherever they want to go. Right now, this means Comic-Con and The American Girl store and to little cabins on Lake Michigan and Tawas Bay. We want to take them wherever else they want to go. We want to go away for the weekend, just us two. We want to be tourists in our own city and anywhere else we feel like it. We don’t want to buy mulch. We don’t want to buy carpet. We don’t want to put in another new bathroom. We don’t want to spend the weekend in the yard. We don’t want to pull weeds. We don’t want to plant flowers. We don’t want to fix doorknobs. We don’t want to buy prettier doors. We don’t want to seal the asphalt. We don’t want to buy paint. We don’t want to go to the hardware store. We don’t want to buy more stuff to fill up this house. We don’t want to spend any mental or physical or financial energy on just a house. We don’t want to be in debt. We don’t want to keep up with the Joneses. And anyway, we suspect that the Joneses have at least 1 credit card that they will never be able to pay off. We don’t want that.

We want to do stuff, not buy stuff.

Except for consumables. I love to buy consumables. I want to go out to eat so much that I get sick of it. Also? I like to buy beer WHENEVER I WANT. I’m out of beer much more often than I care to be and that is not cool. And I think it’s extra important to have an unlimited beer supply when you have a mortgage that prevents you from doing the things you want to do with your life. You can see how owning this house is a lose-lose situation.

We’re not house people anymore and I blame HGTV for making us think we’re supposed to be house people. I’m totally deleting that channel off of my tv and I’m only ever going to watch the Food Network and the Travel Channel when I’m in the mood for reality tv. And then we’re going to follow Man V. Food around just for fun because that dude’s life looks AWESOME.

Yes, moving sucks b@lls, but owning a house sucks b@lls dipped in poop, and we are just not into that.

Oh, and the children? I was worried about telling the children because, after all, children are usually the reason people buy awesome houses in great locations, so I thought this house meant something more to them, but when they heard the plan, Liberty said, “Good, I’m bored of this house anyway!” and Lena and Maya agreed. One of the things HGTV told me was that kids need their own space to decorate however they want. They didn’t tell me that once the space is decorated, the kid will want to change it within a month, which is exactly what happened here. I laughed and laughed and laughed when first Liberty, then Lena asked me to re-paint her room. Now I know better. And all of the kids know exactly what they’ve given up in order to live in this house. It’s not worth it to them, either.

Feckless Friday: Passive-Aggressive Paint Job Edition

Abby — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:01:03 +0000

Remember the other day when I said I might paint my entryway? Well, in a surprisingly not feckless move on my part, I painted the first coat that very day. It looks lovely, but I’m out of paint. I’ll get some for the second coat soon, I promise. Definitely by summer.

About that paint job…you know how I was born in Michigan and raised to be a UofM fan? And you know how The Ohio State University hates the Wolverines? And you know how I don’t really like to wear UofM garb this close to campus because dummies make snide comments? And you know how one time at Bryan’s old job his anti-UofM boss wrote him up for a safety violation for having a UofM pen sticking pointy side up in his pen thing? (Oh yes he did! Bryan had to petition to get it off his record and everything!) And you know how we bought a house right here in Columbus where everybody hates U o fM? Well, I subconsciously wrote Columbus a passive-aggressive note when I painted my living room and entryway:

*looks better in real life*

I think the note says, “Suck it, Buckeyes. GO BLUE!” Yeah, I pretty much painted my house maize and blue. By accident. Technically, it’s sweet maple and sweet sea or something like that, but still. I didn’t even realize it until I looked at it with Bryan and said, “I just really like how those colors look together,” and he very excitedly said, “Hell yes you do! Maize and blue, baby!” And I think he clapped.

Apparently, I’m a huge fan of college sports.

I Actually Acted on Info Gleaned From a Forwarded Email

Abby — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:52:35 +0000

And I’m a little excited about it.

Help me, people. I’ve gone insane.

My dryer hasn’t been drying my clothes very well and I read in a forwarded email that I should scrub the lint filter with a nylon brush until I can run water through it with no puddles forming. So I did it.

Do you see what January has made me do?

Also, I think I’m going to paint the wall that has been painted like this for at least 6 months:

I guess I got all burned out on painting after doing the basement, Lena’s room, Liberty’s room, Maya’s room, my room, the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room. I thought I had enough in me to do this small entryway, but once I put the blue on the wall, I lost steam in a big way.

Maybe this little project will kick off the finishing of a couple of other little projects, but I doubt it. I still need to paint a small hallway, and the stairway that leads to the basement. And the computer room. Damn, I forgot about the computer room. There’s a lot of crap in that room. Oh, and I want to repaint the kitchen and part of the dining room. I probably won’t, but still.

Painting Stuff and Things

Abby — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:42:19 +0000

I’m busy and maybe I’m still in mourning. I don’t know. I paint stuff and take the kids to the pool and think about Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite and run and play variations of hide-and-seek, but blogging hasn’t been on my to-do list.

We’re heading to Michigan today (not Cluck & Tweet’s Michigan, but still). My sister and I will beat my my nephew’s girlfriend and my niece in tennis on Saturday morning and then we’ll spend the rest of the day gloating about that while the kids swim in the pond and play with their cousin Riley. Sunday, there will be an Aldrich family reunion, and then a childless trip home as the kids are staying a few days in order to camp with my inlaws. What will we do with no children? Paint, of course. I’m going to paint 14 hours a day for 3 days. I hope I finish the whole house. After my 14 hours of painting, Bryan and I will eat at restaurants and maybe go to Zoombezi Bay one night. Who knows? We’re crazy kids, we could do anything! ANYTHING! As long as the painting gets done, I mean. The painting must get done. I will miss the children because they rock, but they’ll be in good hands and they’ll still rock when they get back. And the walls will be painted. Yay!

Oh, and new toilet! Monday! Plumber!

As usual, don’t break in while we’re gone and make sure you cry because you miss us. If you could videotape yourself crying and post it on Youtube, that would be a bonus. I’ll give you bonus points. (You didn’t know I’ve been giving you all points all this time? I won’t take away any points for that).

Old Man Cheezer and Maya’s First Blog Post

Abby — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:39:36 +0000

We hired somebody to do the tile in the basement bathroom and Liberty has nick-named him “Old Man Cheezer.” I don’t know why. He is an old man, but he doesn’t smell like cheese and I’ve not seen him snacking on cheese.

Soon, when Old Man Cheezer’s work is done, our plumber (“Young Man Crackerz, with a ‘z’” says Lena) will be able to get in there and get that place toileted up. Then the big children won’t have to carry their tired tushies all the way upstairs and to the other side of the house in the wee hours of the morning when the tinkle fairy comes. They’re very sad and sleepy when that happens. Every morning I hear them dragging themselves up the stairs and through the house whimpering, “When is our bathroom gonna be dooooonnnnnne?” The poor babies. The worst part is, when Maya (whose bedroom is right next to the bathroom on the main level) hears the walking dead, she races to the bathroom and locks herself in there shouting, “I have to go peeeeeee! Really baaaaaad!” And then I imagine she silently cackles while Lena and/or Liberty stand outside the door yelling, “Hurry UP!” I told them the toilet would be in there this week. I lied. Old Man Cheezer is going out of town today and he won’t be back to finish his job until Monday. Then we’ll schedule Young Man Crackerz.

And now, Maya would like to tell you about this:

The water is super, super, super, super, super deep and nobody can touch. Moms and dads can’t touch. Big girls can’t touch. Teenagers can’t touch. Little girls can’t touch. Toddlers can’t touch. Babies can’t touch. There should be a baby diving board in the baby pool. So come here and dive! It’s where the water slide is! And if you lay down on your back, you go super fast! And if you sit up, you go slow. So come here and dive off the little board and dive off the platform and dive off the medium board! So I want you to come here and diiiiiiive! It’s fun! And how you dive is you bend down and put your hands over your head together and make sure your hands go in first and then straighten your legs. Bye bye!

And she also wants to tell you about the water slide.

Hello, my name is Maya and I’m going to tell you about the water slide! Yay! The water slide is fun, you should come at the swimming pool and this is the same place where I talked about the diving board, so come here and go swimming! And you can do a bunch of stuff, but you can only go down on your butt on the water slide, so you have to come here and swim because it’s summer time, it’s summer time, and I love summer time! Now you sing it! The slide is swirly because it doesn’t go straight down because when you start going you go left, right, left, right, left, right, and at the end you’re in water. Right now come to the swimming pool! Boom boom, boom boom, boom boom. Bye bye!

I Did Some Work

Abby — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:55:19 +0000

If you’re my friend on facebook or flickr, you’ve already seen this stuff. But I think some of my blog friends aren’t on facebook or twitter, and, well, I don’t want to deprive them of the fascinating and not at all boring adventures of our reacquaintance with home ownership.

Did you all have a nice Mother’s day whatever? Are you all enjoying my birthday month? I hope so, because I have a present for you. Remember when the basement looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

I painted it and now it never gets messy ever. That’s how you know I’m a good mom.

Ok, technically, it looks like this right now:

But it’s not my fault a Bitty Baby factory exploded all over it. I don’t know why there’s a hammer on the floor. I’m a little bit concerned about that.

I know the rug doesn’t go with the room, but it’s covering up the burn marks from when the vandals tried to burn it down, so I guess it has to stay. I also finished the basement bedrooms. Liberty’s:

I had to add a couple more dots yesterday, though, because when I moved the furniture back, it covered some up and made it look like there were too many dead spots. So there are now a couple of dots to the right of that window:

I finished Lena’s room, too. Here’s her favorite wall:She chose a different color for each wall, with peace signs on just the yellow. Here are the other walls:

Apparently, you can’t click them to big them up, but oh well.

It’s not all beautification around here, though. Bryan threw this bathroom away over the weekend:

The shower in it (what, no picture? I don’t know why.) was all moldy and grosser even than the toilet and sink, so it’s all ripped out now. Because we throw ugly away in this house.

Oh my goodness, did you fall asleep? Me too. I’m sorry there’s nothing happening in my life right now besides this house. I’ll try to make this next bit a little more sexy and fascinating for you, through liberal use of exclamation points. Ready? Here you go:

You won’t believe what I get to do now! I have to go clean the mold! Off of the walls! In the yucky bathroom!

I’m Not Painting Over the Graffiti

Abby — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:01:33 +0000

It’s the little touches that make a house a home and I say the graffiti stays. After all, does your house have graffiti? No? How sad for you. I also think the weight bench is a nice touch and is in keeping with the style of the unfinished part of the basement.

I added some more pictures, if anyone is still interested in the snoozy story of our house. I’m still painting stuff. I don’t have pics of the girls’ rooms all put together and lovely yet because I haven’t done the dots and peace symbols yet. Soon!

Two of my cousins and my sister-in-law (the one who is always a bad influence on me at Easter) are coming to stay with us this weekend because we’re all running the Capital City Half Marathon together. I’m excited about that. My sister-in-law’s name is Tracy and my sister’s name is TracEy. Is that confusing to you? My kids call my sister “Aunt Tracey” and they call my sister-in-law “Different Aunt Tracey.” They don’t know how right they are. TracEy was going to come down for the race, too, but she is cursed with an ultra-talented daughter who is the lead in her high school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, which happens to open this weekend. My niece is kind of a big deal. I’m going to buy a copy of the dvd and everybody who visits me over the summer will have to watch it over and over.

One more thing, after I posted that picture of the Pacer with the chick standing next to it, somebody said something about all women in the 70s looking like that, so I want to give you a clearer picture of my mother during the late 70s/early 80s. This is exactly what she looked like, down to the roller skates:

She looked so much like Linda Ronstadt that I would stare at that album cover wondering how in the world they decided to put my mother on the cover. Was there a contest? Did they just see her at the roller rink and snap a picture? And why didn’t they just put this Linda Ronstadt person on the cover? I thought maybe it was because she was ugly and they didn’t want her on the cover. But then I thought about the albums in my dad’s collection with Garfunkel on the cover, and I decided ugliness must not be an issue. It was so perplexing, but I never asked anyone about it and it was years before I realized that my mom was not a famous album cover model. I’m quick like that.

In Which I Fondly Remember my First Pork Roast

Abby — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:10:09 +0000

It’s spring break around here for my nieces. Truthfully, my kids have been on spring break since the end of February. That’s how it always goes with us. We take a huge break from doing math from the end of winter until about May and then we get back into the swing of things. Sometimes I have them go to Quizlet.com and play games there, but not while their cousins are here. For sure.

I posted some pictures of my messy, messy, nothing is where it actually goes house. It’s extra messy because of the sleepover/spring break/let’s not make the children do chores attitude that’s going on this week. It felt false to kick the blankets/stuffed animals/toys out of the way before snapping pics like this:

That’s what the basement looks like every morning this week. Oh well. At least there are some sweet pictures like this to maybe redeem me:

How could I make these sweet girls clean up their bedding? What kind of a monster would I be? They’re obviously chillin’.

So I made a couple of pork roasts in the crockpot the other day and turned them into shredded pork bbq. It was yummy, but that’s not the point. Certain foods in my life are tied to memories of certain people. I don’t want to say that the food is the most important part of the memory and the person is just secondary, but it seems like my most vivid memories of people have to do with food.

Every single time I make a pork roast, I think of my ex-stepdad, Marc. When I was a junior in high school, he and my mom got married. Not only were we able to move out of our apartment up above Dave’s bar, but this marriage came with a Sam’s Club card and a dude that was a great cook. (Yes, those facts were more important to me than the fact that my mom was also able to get rid of that perpetually muffler-less Chevette in favof the Beretta of Hotness.) After 7 years eating frozen chicken patties, chili, spaghetti, canned ravioli, steak ums, and the like, I couldn’t believe it when I came home from a greuling softball practice with my friend Katie, “starving for death” as Maya would say and Marc had a pork roast in the crockpot. A pork roast with onions, potatoes, carrots and special seasonings. I instantly started drooling, asked him what it was, and then proceeded to eat half the thing over the kitchen sink. With my hands. Like an orphan. I’m pretty sure I grunted and hunched to warn the other animals not to touch my food. I can’t speak for Katie, but “scarfing it down” doesn’t even begin to describe what I was doing. I know for sure that I didn’t even take the time to put my softball glove down. It was still clutched in my armpit. I was starving for death and there was real food. And my stepdad is the type of person who doesn’t know you love him unless you’re eating his food. Especially if you’re eating it over the sink, straight out of the pot, which, as anybody knows, is the best way to eat food.

I’m Going to Blog About the Spartans

Abby — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 04:18:51 +0000

I’ve been feeling nostalgic about the Spartans lately since they made it to the Final Four. I was raised to hate them and if I still lived in Michigan, I don’t think I’d be happy for them. In Michigan, the Spartans of MSU are UofM’s natural and most obnoxious foe. I honestly had no idea that there was a huge rivalry with OSU until I moved to Columbus and found out that the the Buckeyes are #1 in Big 10 annoyingness. And I’ll root for the Spartans because, well, they’re not the Buckeyes. This may come as a surprise to the Buckeyes who read this blog, but in Michigan, the rivalry is UofM vs. MSU; we just don’t care about OSU so much up there. Anyway, I’m especially happy for all of my friends who went to MSU (they let anybody in, so I have tons of friends who went there, unlike UofM, which is a more selective university so the only person I know who went there was my bonafide genius Uncle Tom. And, no, UofM: Flint doesn’t count. It doesn’t. Don’t give me that. It doesn’t.)

Ho hum. What else? The house? The house’s roof is leaking right where we thought it might leak, so it’s good that we made the seller give us money to fix it. And also? Also, there are mice in the bread drawer. Consistently in the bread drawer. Bryan killed one with a dustpan. It was caught in the trap, but struggling to get free. He had to do it. I don’t want to know how many more there are, but our cat better get on the job. I’ve been getting good mouse-killing tips over at Facebook, but I wonder if I should just maybe make the drawer into a cage and move the stupid hamster in there too. I can’t win against these rodents.

On the bright side of the house, there’s room! And the basement is a walk-out! And it’s finished! And we can send the kids down there when they’re being too loud! Or we can have them on the main floor with us when we feel like tolerating the loudness!

Other than that, we’ve just been unpacking and working on things (I may have an oven tomorrow!) and yelling at Vonage over releasing our phone number in a timely manner so we could switch carriers. Lena found it particularly entertaining when I yelled at them on the phone. Mommy was very mad and the bad lady on the phone was lying to her and trying to trick her into not switching carriers. The bad lady wants Mommy to keep wasting her money on terrible, terrible phone service and so she had to yell at her. And file a complaint with the Public Utilities Commission. It felt good. But we still won’t have our phone working until April 16th. And I don’t even believe that it will work on that date.

Right this minute, Bryan is trying to get our new tv hooked up and he’s having troubles. My nieces are here visiting for the week and Taylor (the 15 year old) had to tell him to push a button and also to plug something in. Both tips helped, but he’s still having trouble. He’s wearing a head lamp thingamajig and it just occurred to me that the head lamp may be the perfect book light for bedtime reading. I’m going to steal it. And if he says, “Hey, isn’t that my head lamp thingamajig?” I’ll just look straight at him and blind him with the light. It’s ok because I’m always searching for the perfect book light.

I wanted to watch Slumdog Millionaire (I would watch it over and over and over again. Good movie.) with Taylor and our new tv, but Bryan’s still working on it and Taylor fell asleep. Because it’s boring here with no tv and an uncle who walks around with a head lamp on all time.

Maya’s sleeping and Riley (11 years old), Lena, and Liberty are in the basement rec room watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas again. And then they’ll all hold each other and cry, I guess. They know how to party. BTW, Amazon.com just told me that of people who buy The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, 7% buy it with Twilight. FYI. I find that odd.

I Was a Fat Baby (I Think We’re Buying a House)

Abby — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:30:50 +0000

Yes, the baby is fat, but look at that bathroom! Isn’t it gross? But still, I turned out ok. Sort of. I say this because we’re buying a house with awesomely dated bathrooms. Maybe. You never know until you actually close. We have a closing date (March 19th), time, and location, so we’ll probably close. But still. It’s a great house, great location, just a little dated. The bathrooms are especially dated, with seashell-shaped sinks in one of them. The other one has a dark brown toilet. And those bathrooms always make me think of that old bathroom in that picture up there.

Oh, and! There’s a Florida room. My friends and I get to play Golden Girls in it. I get to be Betty White because she always had a story about back in St. Olaf and I always have a story about back in Chesaning. I’ll let those of you who know Lynne, Kristen, and Dawn guess who gets to be lusty Blanche, straight-talking, offensive Sophia, and steady-eddie Dorothy. It’s hard to pick because they’re all so slutty and offensive!

Anyway, I’m packing. All the time packing.