There's a Bar within Stumbling Distance!

We spent our first day fiddling around with the house today. We are starting to feel it sinking in. Ownership. Nesting. Territorialism. Disbelief. Any confusion which I ever had regarding why Home Depot is a successful company is long gone.

I feel the need for a real job very acutely now. I need tools. I need appliances. I need materials. The stove works, but it's a rattly old hunk of shit. The cedar siding needs to be stained. The deck is structurally sound, but a whole truckload of new wood sure would look nicer. Our back yard is a forest; some stone-paved paths and a gazebo back there might be nice.

Actually, I'm just in a period of overwhelmedness right now. My job situation remains a steady source of misery, but a house doesn't really change that. It just provides an opportunity to be preoccupied by it. A lot of what we are doing right now is actually pretty cheap. Lindsey is scraping the popcorn acoustic stuff off the ceilings, and I'm fixing stuff (a wiggly deck board, a barely attached mailbox, removing a pile of half-rotten firewood under the deck, some sketchy door hardware, a furnace air filter that was so old that it had deeper shag than the carpet, an exterior light fixture which apparently hides a wasps' nest behind its dangling facade, et cetera). I'm no carpenter, but I think I can surpass the workmanship on the guest bathroom's vanity. The hinges are the hardware equivalent of Britney Spears. They wiggle, and they will probably fall apart soon.

We will do a bit of painting as well. It seems that our predecessor entrusted the painting of all the trim in the house to a seven year-old spastic. The closet door in the master bedroom is either an original and very valuable Jackson Pollock painting or just a hell of a sloppy door.

But those are cosmetic things. The furnace is brand new, the water heater is rather new, and the roof is only four or five years old. We have 1/3 of an acre of woods to call a back yard. A lake is less than 100 yards from our door (ducks included).

AND....

There is a bar, which has good beer on tap, within walking distance. I enjoyed a Highland Gaelic Ale this afternoon. I am very, very pleased about that. We have one of the less impressive houses in a very nice neighborhood. Given time and a couple of bucks, it will be a hell of a home.