Back When I Made Spiderweb Cotton Candy

I had forgotten that I used to have a spiderweb harvesting stick.

The trailer we rented when we first got married was full of spiders. We'd have to walk from our bedroom across the living room to get to the bathroom that worked, and the webs would spring up across the living room overnight, and I'd walk into them.

I found the stick picture while searching my Pictures folder to find out what me and Joe were doing on this day in history six years ago. On July 14th, 2007, we were fixing the place up; Joe was working on the floor, and I was raking leaves. We'd be married and moving in a month later.

The cast-iron woodburning stove against the front door added extra security.

Raking in progress! How exciting!

And below is a nice picture of the moldy-carpeted rotting-wooded broken hot tub I later pulled the carpet off of with the back of a hammer. The tub was never used for anything but garbage and storage, especially after the water pipe under it burst and had to be sealed off.

It wasn't the type of place we ever imagined ourselves living, but it was ours. (Kind of.) And despite the mice and the spiders, and the mystery of HOW ARE THESE WASPS GETTING IN (they had a nest in that yellow rectangular stove vent next to the little window,) I haven't been more attached to any of our other homes.

From My Comfy Place

We're still living in our hotel room with no definite time to expect to move into our house. We've been in this room for - wow, for 33 days. That's long enough to get settled in; last week, I got back to the room after a long night of class and midnight Wal-Marting and got this instant relieved "finally I'm back" feeling usually reserved for places we actually live. It was weird...and, at the same time, comfy.

So. The house we're buying didn't have a kitchen faucet. Now it does. (The faucet has been riding around in the trunk of our car.) It was our first for-the-house buy. I'm pretty excited about the built-in soap dispenser!

I can't help but think how I would have felt about spending perfectly good money on a kitchen faucet back when I was still getting an allowance, or when we were just starting out. Actually, we did have to buy a faucet back when we were just starting out. Our first place was a trailer from like the early 80's, and the last tenants hadn't taken good care of it, and the faucet was gross. When things get gross, I wash them; if they don't survive the washing process, well, they were too gross to keep anyway. I tried to dismantle the faucet to clean it. Boom, new clean faucet.

A few weeks ago, when no one was there, we visited the house we're buying and trespassed in the back yard. We saw BABY GRAPES ON THE GRAPEVINES. (When we visited again last week, most of them had been eaten by things in the yard. :(  )

Also in the yard was A TREE WITH FRUIT ON IT! I broke off one of the fruits and took a bite out of it and discovered that it was a pear!

So hopefully by the time fruits get ripe, the grapes won't all be gone, and the pears will actually taste good and also not all be gone. And hopefully by that time, we'll be living there to find out.

Almost Home

My family's lived in the same house since I was 6 years old. By the time I moved out at age 18, we'd shared a lot of life there. It was ours. We knew the history of every wall and floor and space: The place in the hallway where I'd accidentally shoved part of a toy up my brother's nose; my sister's old bedroom that I'd snuck into one night to put glue on her face while she slept as revenge for an incident no one remembers; the exclusive resort of My Parents' Bathroom where I've only ever taken two showers in my entire life; the painted-over splatter of red dots on the kitchen ceiling where we kids had flung milky Apple Jacks off our spoons at breakfast one morning. I'd return home after a visit to Pizza Hut or whatever, and walk in, and be like, "I know this place" without even knowing I was feeling that.

It wasn't until Joe and I got married and moved into our first rental home that I found out that your stuff being in a place doesn't make it home. Those walls aren't yours. Tired of looking at that imitation wood paneling? Too bad. Your dog locks himself in the bathroom, scratches paint off the wall next to the door, then gets explosive diarrhea and smears it everywhere, including on the owner's nice curtains? After you clean it up, it's time to be worried about angry landlords while you go buy can after can of paint until you finally match the color of the ruined spot.

Renting is begging someone to let you give them money so you can stress out about keeping their place pristine for months and months while having very little control over your surroundings. Renting is when you don't know where you'll be in a year. Buying, on the other hand, is paying thousands of dollars of hidden costs just so you can paint some walls. What a deal!

We weren't planning on buying. We're going to be here for three years, and the rule on buying a house is five or seven or more years. But when we saw that we didn't have to spend $150,000+ to get a decent house and that we'd get a return of thousands of dollars when it was time to sell, we started looking at listings.

And so I'm sitting in the recliner in this hotel room where we've lived for the past week and a half waiting for the last of the paperwork on our house.

I get tired of being cooped up in here. I spend my time reading about tile backsplashes and siding estimates and how much it would cost to move a toilet across a bathroom. I also watch a lot of HGTV, with this infomercial that comes on ten times a day, yelling "PICK A POCKET HOSE!." I'm ready to get out of this room, get into our house, and see what it's like to wake up to a feeling of stability and a day of getting paint in my hair.