Pass the Ibuprofen, Please

So, what's up with your house?

My house? I don't know. It's turquoise. We live there. I'm trying to forget how much we owe on it and how much work needs to be done. What do you mean what's up with it?

Wasn't this blog supposed to also be about buying a fixer-upper starter home with yard work and decor and being Suzy Homemaker and all that? Not just goofy stuff your kids say? What's up with your house?

To quote the great Liz Lemon... Blerg.

Owning your own home isn't nearly as much fun as people try to make it out to be. I'm going to come right out here and say, "Hey, people, what's the attraction?!" I think people rave about home ownership because Misery Loves Company. And this is coming from the person in our family who has selfishly avoided doing any of the yard work. I also haven't drained the boiler, sawed through the kitchen cabinets, or installed any cat doors. Mike's done all that. (Although, in my defense, I did Murphy's Oil Soap all the hardwood floors, scrub the grime out of the fridge/freezer and off of all the cabinets, and do most of the unpacking. I'm not exactly sitting around eating bon bons and watching Oprah, OK?!) But still, it's kind of a bummer spending your Saturday watching the kids AGAIN so your husband can trim the hedges - after you spent the whole week scrubbing toilets and mopping floors! What day can we set aside for lying on the couch, eating bon bons, and watching Oprah???

So anyway, we moved in, did a lot of fixer-upper-ing, plateaued in terms of how much crafty homeowner projects we could stand - I think I remember myself saying, "I don't even give a CRAP about (fill in the blank) anymore" several (hundred) times - and then we've kind of been letting things lie around undone for a while. But we're kind of anal retentive type people, and those undone things started to mess with our minds after that while, particularly that blue painters tape all around the perimeters of the upstairs bedrooms and landing - most particularly in the girls' bedrooms, especially since Kate is now mobile. That blue tape was really starting to irritate. So this past weekend, Mike took a day off work and we dropped the girls off at Camp Gram and Grandpa in New Hampshire and we painted that dadblasted, frickafrackin', craptastic, primed-but-never-actually-painted wood trim in the girls' bedrooms and part of the landing. Two days and that was all we were able to complete because it takes so infernally long to paint trim and our eyes were going blind from the super white Polar Bear paint.

Disclaimer: OK, so we also did some shopping (LL Bean! Borders! Yippee!) and went out to dinner TWICE - two nights in a row, which is probably a record for us since we NEVER eat out anymore. And for one of those dinners we even went out with some of our FRIENDS (I know, it's true, we really do still have some friends, seriously.) and didn't come home until 10:30! PM! No joke. And we did sleep in both days - until 9:00! And then we ate donuts for breakfast without anything nutritious to go with them. It was wild.

So we didn't exactly just work ourselves down to the bloody nubbins or anything. (What was I complaining about? Oh, yeah...) Still, seems like you should be able to get through more than just the trim in 2.25 rooms in a whole weekend, but sadly, no. And that cabinet in the upstairs hall that needs to be mounted to the wall because it's tall and narrow and tippy still isn't secured and therefore cannot be filled with all the junk in the cardboard box in the corner of our bedroom. And let's not even talk about the grody carpet in the basement that we talked about ripping out. But... there's always next weekend. There will always be next weekend. And there will always be more projects hanging around just waiting to fill up next weekend so that the only bums warming our couch are tiny and wearing a Sesame Street diaper and Dora the Explorer underpants. Blerg.