A Girl...

Whistling While We Work

You wouldn't know it from the drag of my feet and the sag of my shoulders that I spent numerous hours this weekend not fixing up the house but loop-dee-dooping through errant commas and underlining the names of various newspapers (italics!) while Simon drilled holes through the floor into the basement and ran one hundred feet of wire through the walls and strung multicolored paper lanterns across the backyard. Strung lanterns? Yes. To augment the effect of the tiki torches, of course.

For my part, I organized the closet (albeit somewhat cursorily*, as we need first to solve the problem of the eighty pairs of shoes and their want of a permanent home in lieu of the cardboard shantytowns they now inhabit), and I also unpacked all the books (I didn't even try to count how many boxes) and lined them on the shelves just so, in a sort of beseeching apology to my OCD, which was not at all pleased to discover that there are six pieces of furniture in the new library (three bookcases, a small couch, and a table), each sporting a different color of wood (or, I'll admit, wood veneer).

Aside from trips to Home Despot, Ikea, Cost Plus World Market, and two open houses in our neighborhood (we're addicted), we spent the entire weekend at home, fixing things up and paying the bills (i.e., the aforementioned freelance editing project). By the time we hopped into the hot tub last night with a bottle of wine bearing Simon's last name, we had art on the walls, rugs on the floors, and the kitchen at last in full working order. Simon also has his music room set up (almost) and pimped out (completely and utterly); when you turn on the light switch at the bottom of the stairs, it ignites the rainbow lights behind the drum kit, the white twinkle lights strung around the room, the laser machine affixed to the ceiling, and, of course, the multicolored desktop disco ball. He refuses to call it a "man cave," preferring instead "recording studio," but COME ON. Is that a beer in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

We're going at this thing full throttle, and with every passing hour I pat our collective self on the back for not buying a fixer-upper. The house has foundation issues and some termites under the front porch, yes, but it does not need new appliances or floors or windows, and even the paint jobs are fine for now. Why is this a good thing? Well, aside from the fact that we don't have to gut, demolish, or blowtorch anything, or wash dishes in the bathtub while the new sink is backordered, having a "finished" house allows us to spend our hard-earned cash on other things. Like shaggy bathroom rugs and hummingbird feeders and sweet white corn on the cob and tiki torches and paper lanterns the colors of the evening sky.

A few more on Flickr (public).

*That's "cursorily," not "cursorially," as that would mean "in a manner not unrelated to running."