Skipping Town

Two weeks ago, our frustration with our still-in-progress home reached a critical point where Andrew feared I was going to burn the house down if we didn't fix SOMETHING. We decided to address the room that had become the focus of my weariness, our front living room, which has been a mish-mash of play area, random furniture, and a piano. I was sick of the foam tiles, sick of the mish-mash, sick of our old couch. With heavy hearts, we knew we had to go to Ikea. We set out in the late afternoon on a Friday, when Andrew was working from home. The Elizabeth, NJ, Ikea is almost impossible to get to. We've been there a few times now, and the only time we haven't gotten lost is when Dad and I went near Christmastime. Every single other time we've gotten lost either going or returning. This time was no different. We got hideously lost and wound up on a highway sort of in the direction of home, and nowhere near Ikea. Andrew, determined to get there, convinced me we should tr...

Our house has a lot of space. Much of the space, like the uninsulated sleeping porch and wood-walled room in the attic, is only somewhat useable. The “rec room” in the basement, though a large, appealing extra space, has been completely unusable for various reasons, namely crumbling asbestos tiles and all around dismalness. Itching for another DIY, and needing some runaround space for the girls during the winter, we decided to tackle this room as our next project last month. Painting the wood paneling and the ceiling was pretty easy. We also painted the bureau thing that covers up the water and gas meters, which stick out of the wall. But then we had to address the asbestos-tiled floor. First, we talked ourselves into just carpeting or tiling over it. But some research led us to believe that this wasn’t the safest choice, since many of the tiles were already broken. Andrew sent a sample away for testing, and the asbestos was confirmed. So we decided we had to have the tiles profess...

When we moved in, our house was pretty much left as nice as it could be. Everything was freshly painted, and the wood floors had been refinished. There wasn’t much the sellers could do about the ancient kitchen or second-floor bathroom, which need to be gutted. But you got the sense that they’d done what they could to make this house appealing to people like us—ready to fall in love with a real gem of a home, and willing to put in some work. Then…you get to the attic. There, you get the sense that the sellers just threw up their hands and prayed the rest of the house would carry its deadweight. The attic is kind of a mess. There’s one really great wooden room, billed as a bedroom and ideal for an office or playroom someday, once it gets insulated. There’s a large raw storage space. There’s also a guest bedroom and guest bathroom, and it’s in these rooms that Rochester would have found ample comfort for his insane wife. The guest bedroom is a DIY project for another time, so I’l...

We have no DIY experience. We own a small toolset, a drill with a cord, and a cordless drill. That’s it. Our house came with an elaborate workbench in the basement, along with a large selection of nails, bolts, and other misc., but it has yet to be used for anything but piling things on top of. I say all this by way of introducing the next few posts I’ll write here, highlighting the DIY projects we’ve completed so far. I’ve taken lots of before-and-after pictures, but I haven’t yet put them together. So, here we go, with DIY #1: The Sleeping Porch, which we undertook at the end of the summer. “I didn’t expect this part to be so…difficult.” If we’d been featured on the HGTV show Renovation Realities, this comment from Andrew would have flashed onto the screen, immediately after an arresting image: Andrew and me in our painting clothes, winter scarves tied tightly around our mouths and noses, the “sleeping porch” we were attempting to renovate barely visible in a swirl of whi...

This weekend, Mom and Dad came for a quick visit, and we were fortunate enough to be able to arrange to show them our new house. Andrew and I were so excited for the trip—we hadn’t visited the house for many weeks, and no one besides us had seen it yet. We were anxious to show it off, and eager to hear confirmation that we’d made the right choice. When we arrived at the house on Saturday morning, our broker wasn’t yet there, but cars were in the driveway. People approached us: the owner’s daughter, son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. They were at the house to do some work and packing and hadn’t known we were coming. It felt like an illicit meeting, pre-closing: should our lawyers have been present? were we trespassing? There is something inherently odd about the process of turning a house over to a new family, particularly when the house in question has been lived in by one family for so many years. Even if selling is the right or only thing to do (as it seems to be in this case, ...

Today was a big day in our household. First, it was a big day for Lucia: the first time we’ve left her with a babysitter for a long period of time. We had to go out to NJ today for our home inspection, definitely not something a toddler could sit peaceably through, so I found a sitter for her. I was extremely nervous about this event. I had the sitter come for two hours yesterday, so Lucia could get familiar with her. I typed out tons of instructions. Early in the week I ordered a DVD of Olivia episodes to make sure Lucia could watch her show as usual without the sitter having to figure out our ridiculously complicated on-demand cable thing. I showed the sitter where everything was both yesterday and today. I emphasized, many times, the importance of keeping track of Bibi and paw-paw, so much so that before I left today she looked around a bit nervously to make sure she knew where they were. We were leaving Lucia for six hours. (We took Greta with us.) To my surprise, Lucia was fine. S...

We got the house, our glorious house, and here it is: My lesson in real estate: let’s not do this too often. We got the house, but we had a couple of weeks of craziness to get here. After a day of seemingly normal, successful back-and-forth with the seller on a Tuesday two weeks ago (we offered; they countered; we countered back), negotiations went haywire, and suddenly no one was responding to our bid; it seemed the sellers were trying to find another buyer and that we would ultimately be forced to make a blind bid. It was all a lot of real-estate jostling, with our broker angrily threatening to withdraw our offer, accusing the seller’s broker of acting deceitfully, and the seller’s broker responding with a lot of explanations and mild panic. All we knew by late the next night was that we likely weren’t going to get the house unless we offered asking price or higher. Which we just couldn’t do. So I spent that night crying on the couch, feeling robbed, because if we’d just accepted the...