The Thing Itself

So what is the deal with the new house? I have made passing reference to it as I’ve talked about the big move, the settling in and whatnot, and yesterday I extolled the virtues of our front porch and front door (conveniently neglecting to mention that the front door itself is red, while the rest of the house including the garage door is white and green) but I haven’t spoken much about the building qua building.


Presumably the weight of the fact that we went ahead and bought it at a time when it was absolutely impossible to unload the old townhouse, thus double-mortgaging our dear sweet lives, indicates that we like the house very much. I’ll spare you the room-by-room verbal virtual tour, but I’ll try to hit some of the highlights (which, as always, may very well end up saying more about me than about the domicile):

- It has a two car garage, which is another one of those things I took for granted growing up, then got used to living without, and now am appreciating anew. For the first couple weeks there were so many boxes in the garage we couldn’t actually park in it, but we’ve managed to clear at least one car’s worth of space, so my wife has been utilizing it for its intended function. She, for the record, has never had a garage, period, but she’s taking to it like an old master.

- It has a den with a wood-burning stove, but again, we’re experiencing utilitarian lag because we haven’t dared light a fire before we get a professional chimney sweep out to the house to peer up the flue and make sure we won’t inadvertently burn the whole place down.

- It has a nice main floor layout with the foyer/front hall leading to the kitchen, which opens into the dining room, which gives on the sitting room, which connects back to the foyer. The baby especially approves of this configuration as he can run in big looping circles through those various rooms (where we tend to spend most of our waking at-home hours anyway) pushing a truck or toy vacuum or somesuch.

- It has a multi-level deck out back which hasn’t been used much by us due to the constant snow. Should be gnarly in the summertime, though. There’s also a fenced-in dog run, and I think there’s a shed (or so the set of keys we were given would imply) but I haven’t set foot there yet.

- It has a finished basement which is currently doing absolutely nothing for us except serving as storage space. (The pirate bar remains in the garage until I can lure some people out after the spring thaw to help me carry it around through the yard and in the back door.)

- It has three bedrooms upstairs, and two bathrooms, and the bathrooms have windows allowing natural light, which is yet another of those weird little things you take for granted until you start living in apartments and non-end-unit townhouses where it’s simply not an option.

All in all, very much what we were looking for and we are pleased to be drifting from “wow, did we really buy this house?” into “this is our home now”. (Also, this is our home forever, presumably, since we have vowed by all that is holy and awesome to NEVER. MOVE. AGAIN.) It’s far from perfect, of course. It’s hard to heat a house that big, and Virginia’s been in an extended cold snap ever since the blizzard, so we’re shivering through the nights a bit. The dog run is a great idea in theory but the mesh has come loose enough that our mutt can slip right out as he pleases. There are at least four different yet comparably unsightly shades of orange or red on various walls throughout the main level, all applied rather slapdash if I do say so myself. The upstairs hall bath and third bedroom also boast bad paint jobs in the form of botched dual-tone sponge technique. The stairs apparently believe themselves to be installed in a Victorian Haunted House attraction and creak with theatrical volume any time they’re climbed. The coat closet and linen closet and baby’s closet and one basement storage closet have folding doors. (I … I just don’t care for folding doors, is all.)

But of course, all of those complaints are fixable. When the chimney is duly swept we can light fires and warm up a bit, and when the weather gets nicer I’ll repair the dog run. The painting is the most mentally wearying, because the process is not difficult but is time-consuming. We’ll need to prime the walls heavily to cover up those dark reds and sponged blue and greens, and then we can paint, and only then can we hang things on the walls and set out our knick-knacks and truly make the space feel inhabited. I know we’ll get there, I just wish I could make it all already done with a wave of my hand.