Love/Hate

I love my house.  I hate my house.  No, no, I love my house.  Argh!  I hate this damn house.

We bought our house fully aware of it's flaws.  The bathrooms have not been updated since it was built in 1935 and the kitchen had a partial upgrade sometime during the late '50's.  It's a diamond in the rough.  But we fell in love with it's charm, character, history, perfect location and massive backyard and fantastic potential.  It's our forever house.  I have visions of at least one of my children getting married here someday.   When we remodel, we want to do it right, and it will be amazing.

We've been planning our remodel since we moved in two years ago.  I never thought it would take us this long, but you know, life gets in the way.  We hired an architect, fired and architect, hired a new architect, got approval from five of our neighbors and finalized our plans.  The city building and planning department seems to be moving at a snails pace.  Then the stock market fell apart and we are tightening our belts and not feeling so secure about things right now.

I'm frustrated.  I can't stand my kitchen.  It's dark and cut off from the rest of the house.  The oven burns everything I try to cook no matter what I do.  The drawers don't shut properly and the paint is chipped.  Don't even get me started on the bathrooms.  Ugh.   I sometimes feel like we live in a tent, the windows are so flimsy.  There is a huge hole in our living room ceiling where water dripped down from a leak in the master bathroom shower.

I know that we are lucky to even have a house that we are not at risk of losing (knock super hard on wood).  We are lucky to live close to a public school that we are happy to send our children to.   We are lucky to have enough space inside and outside for our family of five.  And we are lucky to have enough space to host our family and friends for holidays and birthday parties.  I know all this.

But this house and it's 73 year old quirks are starting to get on my nerves.  Today the plumbing betrayed me.   After three of us used the toilet, it decided to clog and overflow.  My downstairs bathroom flooded, which is right off the kitchen.  It was a seriously nasty flood if you know what I mean.  I put some towels on the floor and raced out the door to get the girls to tennis lessons.  When we got home I got out the plunger, held my breath and plunged the heck out of that old, stinky toilet.  It was not pretty.  I fixed the toilet, but I couldn't bring myself to clean the floor yet.  I think I need a hazmat suit.  Anyone have one I can borrow?  

For now I just shut the door and told the kids not to open it under any circumstances.  I went upstairs to change my clothes and when I came back down Lolly had taped this up on the door.

It made me smile.

For more background on our lovely home, go here.  Be sure to read parts 1 and 2 as well.

Panic Button

Mr. Mint travels for work.  A lot.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for single parents.  Being all things to all people 24/7 is draining, emotionally and physically.  Lately he's been gone quite a bit.  

When my twins were infants I would be paralyzed by fear when he was out of town.   It was so hard for me to make it through the day knowing that no one was coming home to give me a break at the end of the day.  I had elaborate routines for bathing, feeding and rocking my two infants to sleep.  When they woke up in the middle of the night, both crying, I would sometimes call him in his hotel room just so he could hear what he was missing.  But mostly I would call so I could yell some not so nice things into the phone.   

Over the years I've done plenty of bitching about his travels and the strain it puts on me and the kids.  He's missed teacher conferences, I've had to flake on my book club and it's not like we're taking fancy vacations with all the miles he has racked up like we did before the kids came along.  The reality is that he loves his job and he's good at it.  His job allows me to be at home with our kids, it gives us good health insurance, cute shoes on our kids feet and a house that we love that is walking distance to an award winning public school (something very rare in the SF Bay Area).  For all that I am grateful.   So you can call me a whiner, but don't ever call me an ungrateful whiner.*  

Now that Lolly and Frostine are in school and Gloppy spends one night a week with my in-laws, Mr. Mint's trips, while still annoying, are not the huge source of anxiety they once were for me.  I have my routine with the kids.  I get at least an hour or so to myself during the day.  The kids can occasionally entertain themselves for a short time and are old enough for drop off playdates.  I eat healthier since I don't eat two dinners, one with the kids and one around 8pm with Mr. Mint after the kids are in bed.  No one is around to ask me "why do you watch this crap on TV?"  I get the whole bed to myself and I don't get woken up by any snoring.  I've come to accept that his trips are part of our life and I need to deal with it the best I can.

But lately when he's been gone I've been paralyzed by a different kind of fear.  The fear of rapists and murderers.   Our house is big and echoey when all the kids are in bed and I'm downstairs by myself.   There are a lot of windows with what I consider not very secure window locks.  You can't see our house from the street and it would be easy for someone sinister to walk up our driveway and peer into our windows without any of our neighbors noticing.   Then I watch shows like Dateline and Primetime Crime and my mind starts messing with me.  I start picturing that hunky, witty Chris Hansen narrating the story of my demise.   He'd talk about how my kids slept through all the horror and they'd probably show this photo since it's the only one I have of me with all three of my kids.

 

My sister would talk about how happy we were on that vacation and how she will never let my kids forget their mother.  Then they'd show this photo while Chris interviewed my grieving husband and Mr. Mint talked about what an amazing mother I was and how my kids are in therapy.

I get stuck on the couch because I'm too afraid to turn the lights off and walk upstairs.  Then once I do finally make it upstairs, I stay up way too late reading because I'm afraid to turn my bedside lamp off.  I'm sure the murderer is watching my bedroom window waiting for me to turn the light off and fall asleep so he can attack.   

So all you bad and evil people out there I want you to know that I sleep with this next to my bed.

See that blue button?  That's the "panic" button and it will bring the police straight to my house.  It only takes about 2 minutes for them to get here.  I know this because Gloppy pressed it once while playing with my keys.  There were two big, strapping policemen with hands on their weapons coming up my driveway in what felt like milliseconds.  So if you're thinking of targeting my house and my family, move right along.  I've got a panic button.

*Wow.  How's that for a paragraph full of run on sentences.  Do they give blogger awards for the most run on sentences in a post, because I think I might have a shot.

Home Sweet Home: Part 3

Just in case you are interested, Part 1 and Part 2 of this story can be found here and here respectively.  

So at some point (hopefully soon) we will move out of our house for 8-10 months to give it a facelift.  Unless you're Paige Davis, who really wants to hear about someone else's remodel anyway.   I mean do really care about the first architect we hired and then fired after he wasted about 3 months of our time.  Do you want to hear about how we went and hired the same architect that designed our San Francisco house and how we should have just done that in the first place because he is awesome.   Who gives a flip about how we had to stalk five of our closest neighbors to get their approval to add a couple of windows and "pollute their yards with light" from those windows.  You don't want to hear me whine, whine, whine about how we should already have hired a contractor by now.  Bitch, bitch bitch about how I wanted to be moved out and settled in our temporary home by the time school started again, but now I'll be happy is we start before Christmas.

What you really want is before and after pictures.  I've got plenty of before pictures, but you'll have to wait a while for the big reveal.  

Sigh.

Home Sweet Home: Part 2

After much distraction I am finally getting around to writing Part 2 of this post.  So in case you haven't read Part 1, go ahead on over here and check it out.

All right, so we left off with us selling our beloved, beautiful house in San Francisco for a larger "fixer upper" house in the suburbs.  Like I said before, we love our current house.  It has a lot of history and character and loads of space.  But I was miserable the first few months.  I started calling this house the ice box.  The downstairs has high ceilings and it's really hard to heat.  It's great in the summer, but we don't really even need to put the milk in the fridge in the winter.  It stays about ten degrees cooler inside our house than outside.   And the flimsy windows don't help the situation.  I often feel like live in a tent because the windows are so drafty.  And they leak.  We had a particularly windy, rainy storm this past winter.  I am not even joking when I say that 16 out of 20 windows in the house were leaking.  I ran around trying to find 16 towels to stop the water.  

Let me show you a picture of my fabulous master bathroom.

Try to contain your jealousy.  This photo really doesn't show how bright that 50 year old tile is.  Our closet of a master shower had a leak and caused this lovely hole in the ceiling of our living room.

My biggest gripe is my kitchen.  Here is my kitchen before we moved:

And here's my new kitchen.

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see my washing machine.  Every time I use my dryer I have to open the window and let the vent out.   Not such a big deal, but I can't put a load of laundry in to dry and go to bed without leaving the window open.

Despite the big picture window above my sink, I like to call my kitchen "the cave."  The layout of our house is such that the kitchen it totally cut off from the rest of the house.  There really isn't much natural light.  As you can imagine, I spend most of my day in the kitchen either cooking something, cleaning something up or getting someone a snack.   Life was much different in 1935 when our house was built... the kitchen was not the heart of the home.   In our old kitchen, my kids were always within sight while I was cooking.  No they are usually clear on the other side of the house in our living room.  It drives me nuts.   Mr. Mint and I both love to cook and we love to have friends over and cook for them.  My San Francisco kitchen inspired me to cook.  This one... not so much.

I know I risk sounding like a complete whiner with this post.  I do love this house, really I do.  We have plenty of space for our family.  And we are about to start a major remodel that will update the bathrooms, the windows and expand my kitchen and build a family room among other fantastic things.   

I've lived in this house and loved it for almost two years, but it doesn't feel like home yet.  It doesn't feel warm and cozy.  Everything is in limbo waiting for the remodel.  We haven't hung many pictures, bought any new furniture or fixed the hole in our living room ceiling.    We haven't really made it our own and I'm ready, so very ready.   

The remodel has been a slow road so far.   I'll save that story for Part 3.  

Home Sweet Home: Part 1

We are about to embark on a major remodel of our home.  A 10+ month long, move the family out complete makeover.  I am sure the subject will come up from time to time here, so I thought I would give the back story.  It also fits in nicely with the theme for nablopomo this month.  It's a long story, so this is Part 1.

How we came to own our house in the suburbs is really a crazy story.  We were happily living in San Francisco.  We would occasionally discuss moving to the suburbs, but never seriously.  In the back of my mind I knew we would eventually leave, but our heads weren't quite there yet.   We were emotionally attached to our San Francisco house. 

We bought our house in San Francisco in April of 2000.  It was a surreal time in real estate.  Every house we looked at in our price range was getting multiple offers and selling for way above asking price.  Open houses were like feeding frenzies.   When we finally won one of the bidding wars, we were thrilled.    It was a serious fixer upper.   When our friends found out how much we paid they all thought we had lost our minds.   But we loved the street, the backyard was unusually large for a city house and we saw the potential in that little cottage built in 1912.  We lived there for two years before we turned this:

Into this:

It was a fantastic house, inside and out.  We picked out every light fixture, drawer pull, tile and appliance in that house.  We loved every inch of it.  Our names we carved into the driveway cement.

But Mr. Mint was always looking at real estate, especially in the town we had pegged as our ideal place to move.  In July of 2006, we were having a heat wave.  The top floor in our house was like a sauna.  Mr. Mint couldn't sleep so he went downstairs to his office to tinker around on his computer and check out the real estate listings.   He came across a listing for a house in an ideal location that seemed to call to us, "I'm perfect for you."   

In the morning he showed me the pictures and we couldn't stop talking about it.   They were having an open house on Sunday.  I was driving back home from taking the kids to lunch with a friend and I decided to drive by.  I drove up the driveway and immediately fell in love without even going inside.  The kids were all asleep in the back of the car so I decided to not go inside.  I figured we weren't really ready to move anyway, so why bother.  When I got home, Mr. Mint and I couldn't stop talking about the house and looking at the pictures online.  We didn't even have a real estate agent yet.  It was Sunday and offers were due on Monday at 3pm.

Monday morning I called a friend who had just bought a house close by and asked her for her agents number.  I called the agent and explained that we had fallen in love with the house without even stepping inside and we had probably already missed the boat, but would like to start looking at other properties.  She called me back and said she could get us in that morning if we wanted to check it out.   I called a babysitter, Mr. Mint came home from work and we drove down.  

As soon as we walked in, we knew the house had great potential.  It was built in 1935 and had only had two previous owners.   The kitchen was just what we wanted, a blank slate that had not been updated since the 1950's.  All the original details had been preserved.  When I walked up the stairs and saw the bedrooms I knew I wanted this house.  There were two charming rooms joined by a Jack and Jill bathroom.  Perfect for a set of twin girls.    The master bedroom had a separate dressing room, huge bathroom and great view of the backyard.   

We asked our agent (who we had just met 15 minutes before) what she thought the house would sell for.   We decided to grab some lunch and talk about what we wanted to do.  One hour later we decided to make an offer.  Our new agent scrambled to put it together and present it to the owners.  Ours was the last of six bids presented that day.  We went home and waited for the phone to ring.

When the call came to say they had accepted out offer I wanted to cry.  Half of me thought no I don't want to move, the other half thought it must be fate.   Almost two years later, I can confidently say we did the right thing.   We can walk to a fabulous public school, we use our yard almost every day and there is plenty of space here for us.  I like that our house has a happy history to it.  The family that lived here before us owned it for 56 years and raised three kids here.  One of their grandchildren got married in the backyard.  

Here are a couple of reasons we fell in love with it...

Click HERE for some more photos of what we love about our home.  For Part 2 I'll share what we don't love about this house and why I was miserable for the first month or so.  Stay tuned.