Category: Happy @ home

So here’s a quirky little peccadillo I’ve never told you about. You know I like to take pictures, right? I’ve got tonnes of pictures of the boys, of landscapes, of still lifes, of people and stuff and abstracts, you name it and I’ve photographed it, and some of them are actually pretty good if I do say so myself. And every now and then I get all excited in Winners or Michaels, usually when there’s a really good deal to be had, and I buy a whole whack of frames. And then?

*sound of crickets*

I literally have boxes upon boxes of frames — with nothing in them. Much as I love the idea of actually framing my own pictures, of having a tangible copy out to enjoy, every time I get a frame into the house I get all anxious and critical and can’t find a single picture worth investing the $2.49 at Costco to make a print and frame it.

Weird, eh? I don’t know if it’s a self-confidence thing or what. And there have even been a few that I’ve actually gotten as far as framing and then — put them back in the box. Actually making it to the point where they get hung on the wall happens about once every couple of years. The whole print to frame to wall process is just too arduous and insurmountable.

Ironically, it was decluttering and staging the place that finally pushed me into printing and framing a bunch of stuff, just because the pictures that had actually made it into frames and on to the walls were almost exclusively of the boys and other family shots, and “they” say you aren’t supposed to have a lot of family pix up when you’re showing the house. It strikes me as nothing less than perverse that we spend hours repairing all the holes in the walls and repainting the place only to be told that we should put in a bunch of nails on the nice fresh paint job to hang pictures that I couldn’t bring myself to hang before and that will only stay up for about five more weeks.

This whole moving thing is more Kafkaesque with each passing day.

This whole house-selling thing? Is way too much work. Way, way too much work. I haven’t been this tired since there was a newborn in the house.

I’d thought that getting the place up to standard would be the hard part, and that simply keeping it clean for the showings would be challenging but not impossible. Ha! No such luck.

(Oh yes, I am going to whine in this post. Consider yourself warned. No doubt there are people with far larger problems in their lives than selling a quarter-million dollars worth of townhouse but right now? Oh yes, there be whining ahead. And maybe a little whinging, too.)

The good news is that after what seemed like a slow start, there’s been a fair bit of interest in the house. We had two showings on Sunday afternoon, another one Monday evening, three on Tuesday evening, and another two scheduled for 4 – 5 pm and 6:15 to 7:15 this evening. I mean, we can’t sell it if we don’t have people coming through, right? But do they have to cluster their visits around nap time and dinner time, the two most disruptive times of the day? I can’t believe we’re actually sick of eating out!

Plus, it’s a pain in the arse to come home from work and spend a frantic 90 minutes wiping down every surface in the house, and vacuuming, and swiffering, and mopping, and hiding the kids’ toys, and remembering to move the bowl full of fancy raffia balls back on to the dining room table while making sure that Lucas doesn’t launch any (more) of them, and flushing all the toilets (you can never take that chance, I learned) and hiding the dish towel and the dog bowls and the waste cans and all other signs of life while also remembering to place the feature sheets in an artful and welcoming fan on the table… well, you get the picture. And then we have to go somewhere else and do something for an hour or three, and by the time they’re done it’s past the boys’ bedtimes. Has it really not even been a week yet? I can’t keep this up for much longer!

One of the most annoying things is that there is simply nowhere to hide anything. The closets, the cupboards, the basement, the garage — anywhere where we might have stashed a little clutter has to be kept tidy and orderly. Even the laundry has to be folded and put away the moment it gets removed from the dryer. We are lazy people, simply not accustomed to having to work this hard for such a sustained period of time.

Even living an austere life makes a certain amount of mess, and now that it’s been four days and six showings without an offer, I can’t possibly relax in the house if there is something more I can clean. I’m down to the kind of cleaning that would be scoffed at by even the most obsessive neat freak; I just finished polishing the pipes behind the toilet for god’s sake. But, says the voice in my head when I’m thinking of — say — pausing to write a blog post or something, “Don’t stop now! What if that little bit of grime in the back corner of the cupboard under the sink is what turns them off? What if they would have bought the place if only the garden were more fully weeded?” Gah!

There are probably bigger jobs I could do to make the place more appealing (the ugly blue carpets come to mind, as does the deck in need of repainting) but I simply don’t have any more money to throw at the problem. Instead, I will obsess over the most minuscule amounts of dirt and disorder and wonder if *that’s* what has prevented people from making an offer.

Oh, I know this is nothing to whine about. It will all be worth it in the end. But today I’m tired and cranky and resentful that I’ve spent so much of the last week cleaning and so little of it enjoying this last spectacular week of summer with the boys. And I miss my camera like crazy — I haven’t taken a picture in two weeks. What the hell is up with that?

Speaking of which, it’s been about 30 minutes since I’ve cleaned something, and we have to be out of here in another hour and a half for tonight’s round of showings, so I have to go. Wish us luck; I’m not sure how long we can keep this up!

When we found the house in Manotick, we hadn’t been seriously looking for a place, and we had entertained only the briefest thoughts about selling our place. Mostly, the thoughts were along the lines of, “Man, if we were ever to have to sell this place, we’d have a crapload of work to do.”

To exacerbate the situation, I had the highest hopes this year of actually checking off a few items on the household to-do list this summer. We’d do one small thing every two days during our mutual vacation, and have at least a dozen things finally done by the end of the summer. Uh huh. And the actual number of items we ticked off the to-do list? Um, none. Add to that the fact that we are a family that seems unable to rise above the tide of clutter in the house and has simply surrendered to it and lived happily amid the overflowing piles and untidy stacks of ungodly amounts of stuff. Holy mother of Jesus, when did we get so much stuff?

So when the dust settled and we realized that yes, we did in fact just buy a house in Manotick and it was not, as a matter of fact, conditional on the sale of our current home, we had an enormous amount of work to do.

E. Nor. Mous.

We started cleaning right away. On the day we made the offer on the house, we spent about six hours doing the sort of cleaning you only do when your in-laws come to visit. Except my in-laws are so easy going that we stopped sanitizing the place for them years ago. Which might be more than part of the problem.

We rented a storage space that looks like a garage in a place near my work, and each night we’d load up the Mazda with as much crap as we could cram into it and each day I’d drop it all off on the way to work. Then I started having to make more than one run each day. The extra chair in the living room, about a dozen ride-on toys, a bookshelf, endless rubbermaid bins of off-season or between-boy clothing sizes, small kitchen appliances that hadn’t been used in a year but that might still come in useful some day, half a dozen cartons of books, another half a dozen cartons of various bits of paper too important to throw away but too insignificant to keep on hand… oy, the sheer amount of STUFF! And we threw away about that same volume of stuff, bless our poor garbage collector’s little heart.

Right about the time the place started looking all neat and tidy, we tore it all apart again to paint half the main floor and one of the bedrooms upstairs, and then had to spend another two days after that cleaning the place up again. Yeesh!

In all, we put in 12 solid 10 hour days of hard labour, hauling and scrubbing and hardening our hearts to sentimentality so we could get rid of even more stuff. The problem, of course, is once you really start looking, you realize how much has to go, and how dirty everything really is. When I found myself hand-washing and drying the light bulbs from the bathroom fixture, I was pretty sure I’d officially lost my perspective, if not my mind. (Truth be told, for a long moment I actually wondered if I could run them through the dishwasher. I mean, washing them in the high efficiency washing machine was definitely out of the question. They’d never survive the spin cycle.)

We did all those annoying little household jobs that really should have been done months (often, erm, years!) ago. We hung the closet doors we’d bought for the front hall last summer. We replaced all the cupboard and drawer handles in the kitchen, since one has been broken and another missing since, um, well, a while. We patched the holes that the baby gate pulled out of the paint and filled in the dents and chips and nail pops in all the rooms we didn’t paint. We tightened loose screws and oiled squeaky hinges. And we scrubbed the place within an inch of its life, until it gleamed in a way very much unlike it has ever seen a messy family of five living in it.

On Wednesday night, the night before the photographer was to arrive to take the pictures for the real estate listing, we looked around us in astonishment. Whose house was this? Honest to god, I really didn’t think we were going to make it, but we did. The house? Looked amazing. For one blissful night, we relaxed in a clutter-free and totally spotless house.

Due to a fluke in vacation planning, the stager couldn’t make it until after the photographer had come and gone, and she arrived on Friday. To crush my soaring expectations. From the “dated” brass light fixtures permeating the house to the front door and garage in need of paint to the bathrooms in need of an update, she showed us everything that was wrong with our house. Our home. It was hard not to take it personally.

She showed us a hundred places where we could bust even more clutter, and I could only laugh and say, “I really wish you’d seen it before!” She told us brass light fixtures are very 1995, and that I should consider taking them down and spray painting them black, and suddenly I felt like I was in an episode of Trading Spaces and started looking around for the cameras. She said that our style is has a very rustic vibe to it, but to sell we need a neutralized contemporary sort of feel. We’re all about the knotty pine and vivid colours, but what appeals to the mass market is that dark espresso wood and leather feel. She said we absolutely needed a dining room table in our dining room that has served, tableless, as a sort of a central play room for the past seven years, and she showed me a dozen spots where I should add decorative pieces.

And that’s when I started to get balky. Okay, so our style is not exactly contemporary, I get it. Okay, so we still need to streamline things a bit more, fine. I need to take down the family pictures and take the boys’ names in letters from their bedroom doors. Gulp, okayfinethen. But seriously, I just spent two solid weeks decluttering and storing and throwing things away like the house was on fire, and now you want me to ADD knick-knacks? But not just any knick-knacks, bien sûr. They have to be DECOR knick-knacks like big vases with fake grass and trios of fancy candles on otherwise empty tables. And when she told me I should leave a book and a coffee cup on a little side table beside the easy chair in my bedroom, I think I actually rolled my eyes.

Remember I said I was pretty sure I’d lost my perspective, if not my mind, when I found myself hand washing and drying the light bulbs from the bathroom mirror fixture? I take it back. After unloading 60 cubic tonnes of crap from my house, the point at which I officially lost my mind was when I was standing in the middle of the grocery store asking the clerk where I could find those little raffia balls that go in bowl (that I’d rescued from the trash) for the dining room table we’d rented for a month.

So even though we truly thought we were done on Wednesday, between Friday and Sunday we’d also repainted the en-suite bathroom and bought a new comforter for the spare bed and replaced our rustic wooden mail box with a nondescript white one and fixed the front interlock and moved another dresser into a closet and sent another three or four carloads of stuff to storage and replaced all the family pictures with framed art courtesy of my 365 project (thank god for overnight printing at Costco!) and replaced 21 brass plug and light-switch face plates with flat white ones. And our long weekend plans now include repainting the front and garage doors, sigh.

I flat out refuse to spray paint the brass bits of the goddam light fixtures black, though. You don’t like the brass fixtures? Paint ’em yourself.

A girl’s gotta draw a line somewhere. Go ahead, try and find some dust in my house to draw it in — I dare you!

Phew, it’s been a crazy week. How crazy? I haven’t taken a picture in more than a week. Can you imagine? Truth be told, I’m not actually sure where my Nikon is right now. I think I saw it last on top of an empty bookshelf that belongs in the dining room but is propped up in the corner of my bedroom.

My house? Is a disaster. We are on a zealous mission of decluttering, updating, painting, packing and reorganizing. You know how they say it’s always darkest before the dawn? Yeah. It’s very dark at my place right now. There is a glimmer of hope that once the freshly painted walls dry (damn humidity) and we push all the furniture back against the walls, and put things back on the shelves, and get the stuff all back in the proper rooms, it will probably look pretty damn good. Although when I sat on the filthy floor last night – the same floor that I had polished to a shine about five days before – and looked at the chaos around me and nearly wept for the immensity of the job of putting it all back together? Yeah. Dark.

And also? Painting half the main floor and 1/3 of the upper floor of a house while also trying to declutter while also wrangling three little boys? In a word: challenging. In six words: what the hell were we thinking?

Before we tore the house apart to make it paint-ready, the place was actually starting to look pretty spiffy. We got the windows washed, and took down the ugly blinds in the kitchen that we should have replaced seven years ago. We put new drawer pulls on all the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen, and removed six metric tonnes of useless bits of paper that had been accumulating on counters, shelves and corners throughout the house. I threw out five vases I haven’t used since we moved in and six travel mugs that smell like pee but that have been living in a colony on a high shelf. I filled two garbage bags with old bath toys, bottles with an inch of coagulating shampoo, expired skin creams and other pleasantries from beneath the collective bathroom sinks of the house. And I filled a big box with (shhhhhh, don’t tell the boys!) a ridiculous amount of kids’ meal toys, loot bag crap, dollar store diversions and orphaned bits of toys and games.

One of the hardest thing to part with was my collection of old magazines. I didn’t mind so much parting with the five-year-old copies of Today’s Parent and Chatelaine, but the ten year old copies of Astronomy and Sky and Telescope were tough to part with. And the circa 1997 collection of Sympatico Net Life magazines were entertaining as hell to read — the Internet has come a long way in 14 years, baby! Why was I keeping them in the first place? Well, because I had been keeping them at one point, and once I’d started, I just kept on keeping them on principal. And I wonder why I have clutter issues.

I tell ya, even if the deal with the new house falls through, now that we’ve cleaned up and gotten rid of most of the crap we’ve realized we’ve got room for another family of four in here — and the place will show like a model home!

Here’s my gift to you: an idea that is so elegant in its decluttering simplicity, I am kicking myself for not doing it five years ago. We picked up one of these storage cases that stores 320 DVDs or CDs. We filled it up — and then we (gasp!) threw away the boxes! No more rows upon rows of CD jewel cases or movie boxes, just one little black case about the size of a case of pop.

We’re still working on the final details of the house we’re buying, so I can’t tell you too much more about that just now — but it’s looking positive enough that we’re going ahead and listing our house this week if all goes according to plan. Know anyone in the market for a lovely three bedroom, three bathroom end unit in Barrhaven, walking distance to schools and across the street from a playground and park? Freshly painted and soon to be clean as a whistle. Send ’em my way, wouldja?

In today’s episode of The Great House Adventure, our heroine is drunk on sleep deprivation from lying awake nights listening to rampaging thunderstorms and wondering if she’s not leading the family off a cliff with her home-buying impulses.

Despite the sleep deprivation, I’m determined to stay relatively zen about this whole experience. It *will* all work out in the end. If it’s meant to be it will happen. Breathe. Those of you who know me well are either rolling your eyes or rolling on the floor laughing, I know, I know, but dammit, I don’t have to be crazy obsessive woman about everything, do I?

Yesterday was a long day, and today promises to be longer. So far, I’ve got inspections set up for the well ($450), the septic system ($400) and the building inspection ($450) on Thursday. I made an appointment with the bank for today. I gave the offer information to our real estate agent — another $1800. I called the guy who washes our windows every couple of years and was delighted to only have to fork out $130 to him. Sheesh, that’s chump change! Beloved spent the day cleaning and in the evening I pruned the front yard and, erm, took down the Christmas lights.

I called and e-mailed quite a few real estate agents, and made an appointment with the one who impressed me the most. He’s coming today to check out our place and give us some advice on what will get us our best ROI on selling the place. I think we’ll paint the boys’ bedrooms, and our dining room, and the hallway up the stairs. Note to self — gotta call painter today. And we’ll meet with the bank and hope they don’t fall off their chairs laughing when we ask for their money, and I need a strong education in bridge financing.

Also on today’s list: rent a mini-storage place and start decluttering the place. I spent two hours decluttering the kitchen on Sunday afternoon, and if I’d remembered what it looked like before the infestation of 300 cubic tonnes of daily drawings, artwork, receipts, scrawled notes, toys, bits of hardware and the zillion other things that congregate in the kitchen because they have no real home elsewhere and I have a pathological inability to throw things out in case we might need them some day — we might not have thought to move in the first place!

I swear, I will NOT move those boxes in the basement that are still carefully packed from our move in 2003. The packrat in me keens that there might be something wonderful in there, but really? If we haven’t needed it in seven years, it’s probably good to go.

Speaking of packrat, it does occasionally come in handy. I went poking through my files and found the full folder of paperwork associated with the purchase of this house, including the offers and the sale papers, and even the original Grapevine.ca listing. When I looked at the pictures, I swear to god I couldn’t recognize the place. The towering lilac, now nearly 10 feet tall, tops out at eye level. The shrubs that have climbed the fence are knee-height. And the tree that towers over the front yard is but a sapling. Apparently things grow a lot in seven years!!

And with a simple phrase, my throat is suddenly locked up. Because things *do* grow a lot in seven years. Two of my babies came home to this house from the hospital, and Tristan was all of 16 months old when we moved in.

The going is always exciting, but the leaving? That’s still tough…

Did you ever read Stephen King’s Pet Semetary, where dead things mysteriously come back to life?

Yeah, my garden is like that. When we moved in back in 2003, there were two trees — really, barely more than saplings — in the back yard. Not long after, one of them reverted to upright stick status and leafed no more. It took about another two or three years for me to get around to removing the dead tree, which by then pretty much just snapped off when I pushed on it. And then, much to my surprise, another two years after that I noticed that what I thought was a particularly lovely weed scaling the fence about 2m from where the tree used to be turned out to be the crabapple tree resurrected. It was growing WAY too close to the fence, and I should have cut it down, but I admired its tenacity. It’s now more than 20 ft tall, and does this every spring.

A year or so after we moved in, I planted a clematis beside the front door. It lasted maybe a month, and promptly withered and died. I’m kinda used to that. I’ve got about a 50/50 record with gardening anyway, and with so many other living things under my care, once they get into the ground, the plants are pretty much on their own. Thus, the garden of benign neglect.

Just like its crabapple cousin, though, about four years after the clematis died, a mysterious plant climbed the trellis near the front door. Imagine my delight when I realized it was the long-departed and non-since-seen clematis, coming back for another grow at it. It’s currently thriving and covered with fat purple and white blossoms.

I love the things that grow in my garden, and only wish I had more enthusiasm to care for them. I’ve got daisies on the brink of exploding into colour; I’ve got lilacs and peonies and morning glories. Tulips and irises grace us in spring, while lazy susans and coneflowers bloom in midsummer. I’ve got two apple trees, and some wild roses. I’ve got a bleeding heart that has completely taken over its bed, and a honeysuckle that I almost tore out because it chokes out all the other plants, but this summer it finally burst into gorgeous orange blossoms. And all of it? Pretty much does whatever the hell it wants. Every now and then I get out with my pruning shears and fill two or five bags with shrubs that have overgrown their welcome, or daylillies that threaten to take over the yard. But mostly, they have the run of the garden beds.

You know what’s really delightful about the garden of benign neglect? Last year I had a spontaneous appearance of raspberries in one patch that has now spread to not two but four locations around the property. And by “property” I mean our 100 ft deep by maybe 25 ft wide postage-stamp of a lot. And those raspberry bushes are absolutely laden with blooms. They’re going to be producing by the pint in about four weeks, and I’m positively drooling at the thought.

Each week when I haul my ass out to cut the grass, I look around my unkempt and luscious gardens and castigate myself for not taking better control of them. I love the idea of gardening, it’s just one of those things that I never seem to get around to. And now I’m feeling vaguely disappointed that we’ve nearly reached mid-June and once again I’ve forgotten to plant some tomatoes, and the bushel-baskets I rescued from someone’s garden to fill to overflowing with wildflower annuals are still sitting empty in the garage where I first stashed them.

It’s a good thing the garden, much like the children, seem to thrive in a climate of benign and affectionate neglect.

When I saw the tear in the knee of Tristan’s gorgeous new Gap cargo pants, I was more than annoyed. I was disappointed, and frustrated. The boy is hard on his clothes. We hand down a lot of t-shirts in my house, but pants rarely survive to have a boy grow out of them. Even with reinforced knees, they get blown out regularly.

So you know what I did? I went to the notions section of Zellers (something about the notions section makes me think of my childhood Saturdays spent at Kmart with my mom and my granny) and I bought a $1.29 iron-on patch kit. Oh yes I did. Eight patches in four colours, I got. And I patched the knees of those gorgeously soft Gap cargo pants, and a pair of black pants that we got for back to school, and just today a pair of blue jeans, too.

I waffled a little bit at first, I admit it. You can see that some of the patch jobs are more, um, subtle, than the others. The brown one was pretty good at first, but now that it’s been washed a few times, it’s starting to fray around the edges. You really can only see the black one if you’re looking for it. There’s nothing discreet about that dark blue patch on the faded denim, though. But you know what? I reclaim patches on the knee in the name of frugality and saving $60 worth of trousers from the scrap heap. Humility be damned, I’ll admit it: I patch my kids’ pants and I’m proud of it.

My grandmother would be proud, too. She used to take all the stitching out of the collars of my grandfather’s shirts, turn it all inside out and sew it back together — on her peddle-powered sewing machine, no less — whenever the collars started to fray. Now *that’s* frugal.

I’m pretty happy with the newly recycled knees, and Tristan is still oblivious enough to be completely unphased by the patches. At around 15 cents a patch, I think that’s a pretty good investment, too. When did patches fall out of favour, anyway? I’m pretty sure I had plenty of them on my knees when I was a kid. Or that might be band-aids I’m thinking of. Now I’m on a mission. Maybe if I go beyond the notions section at Zellers, I can find some high-end patches. Maybe this is the beginning of a patching revolution. Hell, the next thing you know I’ll be darning socks, too!

Well, maybe not.

Remember in my previous post, when I said about the mouse living in our basement “He is Legion”?

I had no idea.

The mice, they are everywhere. They are in my garage, they are in my basement, they are even in my office, a whole 10 km away from my house. I swear, I am beginning to dream about eight-foot tall towering, slavering mice penning me into a corner… it’s not pretty.

We’ve had some success with the traps. I think we caught three or four in the basement (one of which was triggered while the poor nanny was downstairs, much to her dismay) and one committed suicide by jumping into the recycling bin in the garage. The last remaining trap in the basement has been sitting without being triggered for close to three weeks now — I take that as a good sign.

Meanwhile, apparently my corner of the building is a hot spot for mice at work, as they do some work on the foundation. Last week, I had to call the janitor to remove a, um, full trap from under my desk. No more kicking off the shoes while sitting at my desk!

So while the actual vermin themselves seem to be under control, we keep incrementally discovering the extent to which they’ve wreaked havoc this fall. I told you about the kids’ Halloween costumes, and I also threw out our almost-expired newborn car seat when I found it full of mouse poop.

The very worst part, though? Last week I went into the garage to get my beloved almost-20-year-old Christmas tree, a tree that makes me happy every single year when I put it up, and when I pulled it out I found the bottom of the new-last-year red Christmas tree storage bag speckled with mouse poop. The suckers had chewed right through the bag, then used fragments of the bag as nesting material.

Farkin’ mice!!!

So I threw away the tree skirt and the bag itself, rescued a set of handmade wooden snowmen, and shook the holy hell out of the tree segments themselves. Hardly any mouse poop actually fell off of it, so after agonizing for a few days I decided to go ahead and decorate it. But I’m so mad at those damn mice for tainting my tree bliss! I would have happily used that tree for another 20 years, not least of which because I took a look around and I couldn’t replace it quality-wise for less than $300, and because I have always said that “artificial” trees are an environmentally friendly choice as long as you commit to one and stick with it. I think we might have to get another one for next year, though. It makes me so sad, but the tree is just not the same since the mice got into it.

Needless to say, I’m not feeling at all sympathetic to the mice in the traps any more.

When I was a kid, this guy used to hang on our family Christmas tree, and my mom carefully wrapped him in tissue and paper towels and shipped him up to me the first Christmas I lived away from home, back in 1988.

He’s always been one of my favourites, despite the fact that his fuzz is a little uneven now, and some time in the last decade or two he’s lost the jaunty red ribbon that used to be wrapped around his neck. He still sits in a place of honour at eye-level in our tree, but I can’t help but scowl at him whenever I walk past.

I think this round goes to the mice. Stay tuned for round three…