Futile House Hunting
Rune and I engage in the sporadic habit of looking at new houses--we're talking houses we would never buy because they're either too far away or too expensive. We've done this for years, but it comes in waves usually triggered by one look into any of the kids' rooms. Lately, worn tile, peeling wallpaper, chipped paint, or a visit to a friend's house (most of whose look like a showcase home in Architectural Digest compared to our kid ravaged one). Why don't you just fix up the kids' rooms, you ask? Ha! I spent countless hours remodeling the boys' room--repainting, cleaning the carpet, putting up wallpaper border, buying and assembling new furniture (twice, since I usually assemble each piece backwards first), etc. Now, you walk into that same room and it looks like Hiroshima Part II. We're talkin old computer monitors lying in a ball of tangled electrical cords, broken dresser drawers, piles of clothes, unlabeled CDs, empty cracker boxes, spoons which have become glued as a permanent fixture to the desk top, and so on. The only upside is you can't see how stinkin filthy the carpet is under all the debris, but for most, the smell is a dead give-a-way. It looks like nothing had ever been done, remodeling-wise. Although I still have the bruises and the drained bank account to prove it, try telling that to the city inspector when he tacks up a condemned notice on their door. All the room needs is a mummified sibling and thirty seven neglected cats wallowing in their own excrement to make it onto the six o'clock news. Anyway, back to the main subject. Things like this drive us to look, but we can't bear the thought of leaving our neighbors and we can't afford the kind of house we really want, so...we slink back to our ever-deteriorating pile of bricks and mortar and vow to fix it up from stem to stern when the kids move out. Of course, by that time, I'll need to outfit it with handicapped railing, wheelchair ramps, a place to hang my teeth, and a cabinet for my Depends, but that's life in a house of five kids. We're here for the duration.