Tag Archives: home ownership

A Terrible Summer and the Family Room We Sometimes Shopvac

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I hate summer. That is not a seasonal declaration, either. On the coldest day in January, when my husband mansplains how to deice my car, while I tearfully scream at him to stop being an asshole and just take me to work, I hate summer.

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At 31, the majority of my life has revolved around the school year. For the first 28 years or so, this helped to mitigate my contempt for the season. Then, I began working as a librarian full time, which meant having an active role in Summer Reading. For those of you unfamiliar, a teen librarian’s schedule is the exact opposite of a teacher’s. Summer is absolute chaos. The library is packed at all hours, with everyone from teacher moms looking for a way to keep their kids busy on the cheap, full daycare classes, unsupervised children who should be in daycare… and it often feels like everyone under the age of ten is cackling or screaming or crying. In fact, every year, by the first of August, I’ve inevitably come to the conclusion that, if I even still want children, my body has probably developed some kind of immunity to procreation, as it does when exposed to chicken pox. All this to say that, the one redeeming quality that was once reserved for the summer months, a time of relaxation, no longer applies to me, as a public librarian wrangling 35 teen volunteers… and therefore, I hate summer.

Now folks, it would not be a stretch to suggest that I’m something of an “indoor girl.” My husband would tell you so outright, but I do enjoy some outdoor activities, such as hiking, swimming, bike riding, outdoor festivals, laying out… and zetus lapetus it is too fucking hot to do any of those things during a Southern summer. Add to that the plague of insects and insect paraphernalia…

Me: ::screaming::
Jake: “What?!?!”
Me: ::spinning in circles:: “Spider web, spider web, spider web!!! It’s on me!!!”
Jake: ::raising a brow:: “Are you okay?”
Me: “NO! I am not okay! I need it to be October!”

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… and I hate summer.

Despite all of this, the assumption that I actually want to leave my home from June to August still persists among my family, because they’re all Lake People. They love getting away for a weekend to share space with a bunch of strangers at a hole full of dirty water and creatures. I hate getting away for a weekend. I don’t enjoy ransacking my bedroom to pack a bag, which will be both overfull and missing something, to sleep in a strange bed, or on the ground with no air conditioning. Y’all, there is no surer sign that someone has a charmed life than their insistence on being poor for a weekend. I’ve been poor. Fuck. Camping. As for the strangers, no thank you. I talk to strangers all day long and they pay me $24 an hour to do it. I don’t need to meet more people. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure every injury I had before the age of 10 happened at a lake. Why would I attempt to relax at the number one setting for horror movies?

Now Jake’s family are not Lake People. They’re Rodeo People. These folks work too hard to understand the appeal of a weekend not spent working cattle or traveling to rodeos. Even attending a softball tournament is more acceptable than a weekend wasted lounging at the lake or anywhere else.

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Every man in Jake’s family.

As for me? When I was six, I wrote in my yearbook that my favorite place to be is “home,” and I stand by kindergarten Belle. While I enjoy being outside for limited amounts of time, when the temperature is between 45 and 75 degrees, it’s with the caveat that I can retreat to my own home, take a hot shower, lounge around in my falsely heated and cooled air, and sleep on my two thousand dollar mattress. Perhaps I love winter so much, because there’s a greater general acceptance of this behavior, but in the South, I feel it’s completely warranted from early June to mid-September, as well… and that’s been my default for much of my life. While everyone else dons far too revealing clothing for my taste and leaps into vats of stranger pee, for me summer is a time to crank the a/c and T-Swift, and dance around the house in my underwear, avoiding any and all people, because I met my quota at work this week. It’s a time to make some real progress on my Vampire Diaries rewatch, read 11 dark paranormal romance novels, and finally get around to that sewing project. I hate summer, but if I ignore all conventional social norms and behavior, it’s bearable… except not this summer. Nope. This summer has been truly unbearable.

Folks, when we bought our house, a year and a half ago, Jake and I decided to keep the converted garage as living space. It had a large closet, access to a remodeled 3/4 bathroom, and a heat and a/c window unit. Combined with the placement right off the laundry room, this allowed us to use it as a bedroom, creating a true split floor plan… with a little work and money. After painting, installing a closet kit, finding 96″ floor to ceiling curtains, it made a huge bedroom, both private and luxurious, with the thick pile carpet Jake insisted on installing. For a few months, it was awesome. Then… the rains came.

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Our house is built on the side of a hill, toward the top, preventing any possibility of flooding on the left side of the house, where the original master was placed, while necessitating a retaining wall on the right… next to the garage. In a normal year, this retaining wall would prevent the garage from flooding. This, however, has not been a normal year. If fact, I’d be willing to bet that this has been one of the wettest years on record for Cherokee, bringing several inches of rain in just minutes on multiple occasions… and ultimately flooding the bedroom.

The first time, in October, it wasn’t so bad. We put some fans on the carpet and Jake poured some tar. The second time, just after Christmas, Jake rented some equipment, dried out the carpet, toiled in the drive for a few days and was certain he’d fixed the problem. The third time, he dried out the carpet with a leaf blower while he researched and brainstormed, determined to put that hydrology degree to personal use, and resolve this issue, once and for all. The fourth time, he tore out the flower bed and put down more tar. The fifth time, he bought pipe to install a drain behind the retaining wall. As this went on, through much of winter and spring, I became more and more defeated, withdrawn, and downright depressed.

As much as I hate playing the role of The Damaged Girl, there was something about being uprooted from the haven of my bedroom, feeling as though my home was threatened, that opened old wounds. While anyone would feel a bit unsettled with their home in disarray, it was something deeper for me. Suddenly, I wasn’t a thirty-something homeowner, but a 22-year-old panicking at the sound of a doorbell, after being forced to move ten times in two years. The true homebody that I am, I had no retreat through the stress… exactly as I felt the day my home burned to the ground and killed all of my pets, leaving me with no place to even lay my head and cry. The circumstances were vastly different and yet, all of the emotions were an echo of those long forgotten heartaches. Just as I once lay in bed, watching my well-loved That 70s Show DVDs, on loop, I spent an entire Saturday unable to move, as I binge-watched The Office.

Jake was supportive and compassionate, showing me more care than I’d ever guess a hard-as-nails country boy was capable of, even though he couldn’t quite understand my distress. When I began to suggest abandoning our converted-garage bedroom, however, he would insist he could fix it, perhaps feeling as though he’d failed me or that he should have been able to resolve the issue, when he literally majored in water. Eventually, I accepted the fact that I could no longer sleep in our bedroom, too stressed from my obsessive weather analyses, though I traditionally love rainstorms, to find peace. When Jake woke up one morning, to find me sleeping on the couch, I quietly told him…

Me: “I think we need to move into the other bedroom.”
Jake: “Okay.”

… and so it began… more renovations, on the heels of the expense and stress of Jake’s attempt to waterproof the garage, which came on the heels of transforming the converted garage into a bedroom in the first place.

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Despite the coming projects and expenses, I was relieved to have a solution, even one that would make summer more stressful and miserable than ever, more expensive than winter and spring combined. You see, when Jake and I bought our home, there were a couple of odd design quirks, such as the kitchy, trendy barn door over the master bathroom, which I hated and immediately sold. Of course, this left us without a bathroom door, not that a door that neither latches nor locks really deserves its name. The master bedroom in a house built in 1980, is also substantially smaller than one built post 2000. While I measured and measured, there was simply no way our entire bedroom suite would fit in the intended master. Luckily, the media console fit beautifully next to the dining table, but there would simply be no room at all for a bookshelf. While most of my childhood mementos were lost in my fire, I cherish and display the few survivors… so I would need wall shelves.

Y’all, my husband deserves a big gold star. Whereas two and a half years ago, Jake couldn’t even discuss decor that wasn’t a dead animal, today he truly trusts me. Not only does he realize that I can envision things he can’t and that I’ll make choices that ultimately reflect him and his taste, he trusts me to dream it up and then make it happen, himself. So it happened, that he cut, stained, sealed, and hung 360 degrees worth of shelves for his mementos and mine.

Meanwhile, I organized… and painted… and organized, and painted. I started by switching the closets, which fucked up my back, to the point that Jake had to take me to the doctor, because I couldn’t drive myself. Then I painted and organized both the old bathroom and the new one… then the new bedroom and the old one. Jake scheduled an appointment with a contractor to install a pocket door, the only door that would fit. He flaked. I told Jake we should go with someone else and he insisted he knew how these guys worked, as he wrote him a check. The contractor flaked and we lost money. We fought.

Oh, how we have fought this summer. Summer is bad enough when I have a cozy hobbit hole I can hide in, until the worst of the heat and biblical plague of insects have passed. This summer, not only have I hated being outside, I’ve hated being inside, as our house has been in complete chaos. As if that weren’t enough to further ruin an already rotten season, I’ve spent the last two months going toe-to-toe with my best friend and the most stubborn man alive. He gets frustrated because I spend money on a project, when we aren’t done with the current one. I get frustrated because these are all projects we’ve planned and I’m following the agreed upon timeline. He tells me we don’t have the money for paint for the garage and then writes a check of equal value to a flaky handyman, without doing his research. He wants to save, unless it’s time to spend money on something he wants and I want to banshee shriek that it’s not just his fucking money. We rarely fight about money, unless we’re spending a lot of it and this year we’ve had no choice. Now we’re both so stressed that everything sets us off.

– Jake hangs up the phone in his work truck with his coworker. –
Coworker: “What’s wrong?”
Jake: “You know how a mockingbird will just dive bomb a hawk’s nest and get it all riled up, as it defends it’s home?”
Coworker: “Yeah?”
Jake: “Well, Belle’s nest is messed up… and I’m the Hawk.”

We’ve worked and we’ve fought and I’ve hurt myself and we’ve sweated and spent far too much money on paint and wood and stain and rollers. Finally, as Summer Reading comes to a close, as back to school supplies and even Halloween candy are appearing on Wal-Mart shelves, despite the consistently 90+ temperatures, there seems to be an end in sight. What was once a spare room with a TV and an elliptical in it, is now our surprisingly spacious bedroom, complete with pocket door and shelves all around. What was once our watery bedroom is now The Blue Room: a Family Room We Sometimes Shop Vac. Jake told me I couldn’t paint it in one day, so I naturally threw out my hip and blistered my hands proving him wrong.

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The Family Room We Sometimes Shop Vac is more is more or less empty, for the time being and it will take us two months to catch up financially, but Summer Reading is finally over and Jake and I can stop being total assholes to each other. I can once again arrange my nest and Jake can stop fucking dive bombing it. Now, if only it could be October.

Buying a House With the Duchess of Cambridge

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It’s part of the American Dream, y’all: owning a home. Fortunately, it’s also one part that’s a lot more attainable in the South, where property values and the cost of living are low. Regardless, I’ve been dreading it… not owning a home, but choosing one… not because of me, but because of Jake.

If you’ve followed my blog for, well… a minute and a half, you’re aware that my husband and I are very different people. Introvert and extrovert, librarian and manual laborer, I plan everything and he responds in a drawl “It’ll be a’right.” At 25, I wept over a 98.5% on a graduate school assignment and after seven years in and out of college, he literally chose his major out of a hat. I am pink glitter and sparkly flats. He is dead animals and work boots. I’m an indoor girl and he’s a country boy. If we couldn’t agree on bedroom decor without tears, just a year ago, how would we ever agree on a home for the next thirty years? 

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You’d think, from the above description, that I’d be the one with the expensive tastes, that it would be the gal in the blinging shoes that just had to have the envious wood burning fireplace and stately trees, granite countertops, the expansive kitchen with brand new appliances. Well, you’d be wrong, because it is, without fail, that when making any purchase, I am the one excited by most possibilities, while Jake turns his nose up at nearly all of them.

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That’s right, y’all. The same man who still wears his 2003 high school football t-shirts is too good for new trees, a gas fireplace, and white woodwork. For the past year, I’ve been mocking him for his insistence on the perfect brick color, declaring that he insists we can’t buy a house that isn’t between Red Brick No. 4 and Red Brick No. 9 and honestly, it’s not that much of an exaggeration, because I married the freaking Duchess of Cambridge.

Me: “We’re going to be looking at a house and you’re going to make some ridiculous statement about how this wall is just the wrong shade of beige, and I’ll be like ‘Plus, it’s haunted.’ You’ll be all ‘Haunted?’ and I’ll respond “Yeah, cuz I’m about to murder you in it’ and then we’ll have to find a new Realtor.”

Indeed, when we started this process, Jake insisted that we have a newer house, with air ducts through the ceiling, old trees, lots of natural light, a deep kitchen sink with the power wash faucet, a wood burning fireplace, a two car garage, dark woodwork, at least an acre of land with no HOA, but located off the main road… and also, he’d love it if there were a water source on the property. Essentially, he wanted to live in a newly renovated Thomas Kinkade painting.

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Oh, wait. He said no siding. So, not even a newly renovated Thomas Kinkade painting will satisfy my husband, P Kate.

I, myself, had some deal breakers as well. As much as I love the curb appeal of two story homes, I didn’t want to heat and cool the second story in the South, worry about baby gates, or feel like I was constantly going up and down stairs, forgetting something. Whereas Jake had to have space outdoors, I had to have space indoors.

Me: “I don’t want our kids underfoot and on top of each other all the time.”
Jake: “That’s why you make them play outside.”
Me: “Yeah, if they’re like you. If they’re like me, they’ll want to play inside and they’ll hate outside. I’m not subjecting a child to that.”

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For me, it was less about square footage and more about division of space. I wanted our kids to have a space of their own, to be kids, without being yelled at for making a mess or being loud and crazy… and I wanted that space to be somewhere other than their bedrooms, so they would also have a place to be calm and rest. I also wanted a place, ideally a large master suite, that could be a completely kid free zone, an idea on which Jake and I agreed, having both grown up in homes where children did not enter the master bedroom without an invitation.

What the requirements came down to for me were one story, with either four bedrooms or three bedrooms and a formal living/dining room that could one day be a play room. I hate carpet, but since Jake apparently dreams of living in one of those carpeted cat boxes, I’d have accepted it in good condition. I liked the idea of a big back yard, but would’ve been happy with a 1/4 acre lot. Proximity was high on my list, close to work and also close to the Catholic school where we go to church and intend to send our kids to school and I’d have really liked an actual laundry room, as opposed to the nook between the kitchen and the garage… but that’s more or less it.

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I didn’t care if it had siding or what color the brick was, as long as it wasn’t too garish. I preferred something post 1980, but would’ve been content with a remodeled 70’s home. I like garages, but we never use the one in our rental home, so I could live without one, and the same goes for a fireplace. I’d have probably agreed to an HOA, were it not too restrictive, but figured we’d price ourselves out of a neighborhood like that in an older, smaller suburb, like Cherokee anyway. Mostly, I wanted to find something quickly, because interest rates are rising and it’s a sellers’ market out here, as the Turnpike comes through our neighboring town of Harmon. What did I want out of the home buying process? The same thing I wanted out of the wedding planning process: to contentedly put it behind me. What did Jake want out of the home buying process? The same thing he wanted out of the wedding planning process: a fucking fairytale.

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Oh, look. It has a water source.

So it goes, I was exhausted by the experience before it had even begun. It’s a uniquely stressful process, not just because of the Duchess, himself, but simply the nature of purchasing the home we plan to live in for the next 20 years. At 33 and 30, Jake and I talked it over and decided that the time in our lives for a starter home, had passed. Were we five years younger and five years further from starting a family, perhaps such a purchase would be an investment, particularly in Cherokee, where property values are rising… but we’re not and buying a home with the intent to sell in the near future sounds exhausting, when the next five years are guaranteed to hold babies and toddlers.

So, not only are we expected to choose the perfect house for us, within our current income restraints, but one that will fit a family we haven’t even begun to grow, both indoors and out, in case we have an adventurer and a hermit, while still remaining affordable amidst expenses like daycare and Catholic school tuition. It’s not enough that I find something close to my work or close to Jake’s work, but close to the Catholic Church, where we’d like to send our entirely hypothetical children to school, but still in a fair school district, in case that’s not an option later. Y’all, I just got used to making accommodations in my life for Jake. I’ve just stopped calling babies “it”… mostly. I’ve just gotten excited about the prospect of starting a family in the next couple of years. I’m not ready to commit to where my children are going to school!

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Fortunately for Jake and I, I jumped early… as I tend to do… and we were pre-approved for a mortgage two months before we could actually make an offer, if we didn’t want to pay both rent and a mortgage for a month. So, for the next two months, we bickered… over the importance of a fireplace in the South, where it rarely even snows, over where Jake was even planning to get firewood, over flooring options, over siding vs. brick vs. stones carried over from Windsor Castle by hand, over whether or not that one has a “weird roof”, over square footage and our budget…

So, by the time we were actually able to look at houses, we’d narrowed down our boxes. We both had a more realistic understanding of what we could afford and what we actually needed. Having considered every listing that had come on the realty website for the last two months, I at least had an understanding of how long homes were staying on the market and how choosy we could be… which was “not very.” All the bickering ultimately paid off, by the time we looked at our third home. The first was a poorly executed flip, with bent and wavy aluminum back splash, crooked tile, and a window seat that extended onto cinder blocks, adding up to a home that was still about $10,000 over budget. The second was an open house we’d stumbled upon, with an enormous luxurious shop and nice shed on one acre, but only three bedrooms with the master being so small that we’d never get our furniture in it. Finally, the Monday before the weekend we’d scheduled to spend a day looking, I had a feeling about a listing and asked the Realtor if she’d show it to us that night, since it was just 10 minutes from work. She agreed and after two months of squabbling, we found our home.

I’d have never converted a garage, but I fell in love with the idea of finishing the conversion to a master bedroom, since there was a 3/4 bath right off of it, creating a true split floor plan and fourth bedroom. That means, when the time comes, our existing master will make the perfect den/play room and our kids will have their privacy and quiet and we’ll have our grown up cave. Jake got his wood burning fireplace, as opposed to a modern gas fireplace and his large trees, because this house was built in 1980. Being a well done flip, however, meant we got new appliances, granite counter tops, and completely remodeled bathrooms… three of them. With the converted garage, we’ll have 2,300 square feet indoors and more than a full acre outdoors. We financed less than $200,000 at a 4.75% interest rate and have a manageable mortgage. Less than 10 minutes from both of our workplaces and 17 from the church, it is absolutely perfect and we have a total of six weeks of overlap, before we have to leave our rent house, in which we can make it truly ours. It’s a good thing we found it when we did, too, because literally every house we were scheduled to see that weekend was under contract by the weekend. That’s right, y’all. The fighting is over and all we have to do is agree on paint colors and a couple of pieces of furniture!

Me: “Literally every dining set you chose was over a thousand dollars and you turned your nose up at every one I suggested.”
Jake: “They were just really small.”
Me: “They were seven piece sets! That means they seat six. Who are you inviting to dinner, the Duggars?!?”

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Me: ::crying:: “You’ll never be happy, until you have a hearth you can do jumping jacks in, just like your parents’. We’ll never have that kind of money. We’ll never be able to buy the thousand dollar dining set.”
Jake: “That is not true. I’m always happy with you and you’re always good enough.”

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