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Things About Our New Home That Make Me Unreasonably Excited

So, as you may have gathered, Kyle and I are ecstatic to be in our new home. The space, the warmth, the pride of ownership -all reasons we adore our new home. But as much as we love our little Sage Bungalow for all the things it is, we love it almost as much for all the things that it’s not.

Also, how weird is it seeing my natural hair color again?

This is what it looks like when you have to empty your entire closet into your living room so that your landlord can try an find the source of the fucking water pouring from the fucking ceiling onto your fucking bed.

This is what it looks like when you have to empty your entire closet into your living room so that your landlord can try an find the source of the fucking water pouring from the fucking ceiling onto your fucking bed.

Primarily, it’s not our old apartment. For you see, our last apartment was a crap shack.

No, it was. A bonafied shit-hole. It was tiny. All the appliances were older than dirt and barely worked. The carpet was vaguely sticky (despite multiple shampoos) and was fraying in multiple places. For shit’s sake, we had to put out pots every time it rained because the roof leaked like a fucking sieve.

And then there was the porch. Not ours, ours was colorfully decorated and delightful. No, I mean the front porch on the first floor, the one belonging to our downstairs neighbors. The one that over the years became covered with shit belonging to the 2-6 people who were possibly living in that 700 square-foot apartment. A hunting bow. Stacks of boxes. Clothes. A fucking corroborator. All of it dirty and broken. Accented by our neighbors themselves, who took turns sitting on the porch and smoking during pretty much every hour of the day and night. A lovely tableau to meet our guests, a message that said, “Welcome to our home! Someone might break into your car!”

So yeah, our last place was a crap shack. But there is a silver lining to having lived in an absolute shit-hole: we get unreasonably excited about things that the average person accepts as a given. Such as…

  • Our washer and dryer doesn’t take quarters! In order to do laundry we no longer have to drive down the the ATM, get cash out, drive to the laundromat, turn the cast into quarters, and then feed $2.50 into the machines to get a load of clean clothes. We just…do the laundry. Put it in, press start, and it just…goes. And we never (knock on wood) go down to the washer to find the floor soak with 1/4″ of water. Nor does it break down, forcing us to do our laundry at work for two months. It just…works. And plays a jaunty little tune to announce when it’s done. But mostly? It doesn’t take quarters!

 

  • We have closets! In our old place, we had only two, and they were stuffed to the gills. Worse, they were long closets with single doors on them, so if you wanted something in the back (say, Kyle’s entire hanging wardrobe,) you had to flatten yourself against the wall and stretch into the dark corner. But now, we have more closets than we have shit with which to fill them. I mean, we have a whole closet just for coats. Nothing else, just coats! Can you believe that shit?! The luxury…

 

  • Our appliances work! All of them! At the same time! The thing about our crap-shack is that most of them worked…most of the time. But there was always something wrong with all of them. Usually at least one burner on our stove was broken at any given time. The dryer might need a second cycle because something didn’t go quite right the first time. Our toilet almost always required a second flush, even if you only peed. Little shit that we totally could have fixed ourselves, but there’s no way we were putting the time and money into a place that wasn’t ours. And sure, if it got bad enough we could scream at our landlord and he would come fix it, but that he wouldn’t bother to come until, say, all four burners on the stove stopped working, or the washer broke completely. Until then, we just had to deal with it. But now, all of our shit works. And if it stops working? We’ll fucking fix it! It’s so great!

 

  • We have a guest room! As in a room, with walls! And a door! As in, not an air mattress the exact dimensions of our living room floor! Sure, our last place called itself a two bedroom, but I called it a one-and-a-half bedroom, because that second bedroom was tiny! It worked okay as an office for the two of us, but there wasn’t room for anything else, especially not guests. So on the rare occasion that we did attempt to host guests, we went for option B, which was an air mattress in the living room. Unfortunately, our air mattress was almost the exact dimensions of the floor space in our living room, so you had to climb down off of the couch onto the bed once it was inflated. Worse, the mattress had to be completely deflated and packed up every morning, because the living room was the only hangout space in the whole apartment. It was pretty much an awful situation for our guests, and we’re super grateful to those who endured it with good humor. But now, we have an actual guest room. Okay, so it’s not exactly spacious and sprawling; there’s still only room for a full bed. But did I mention that it has a door? A door!

 

  • My feet don’t hang off the end of the bed! For the entirety of our two-year courtship and seven years of marriage, we slept on the same full-sized bed that Kyle slept on in college. And it was comfy enough. I liked it. Except the part where my feet hung off the bed. Anytime I slept in the bed by myself I slept diagonally, since that was the only way I could position myself and actually support my ankles. Put Kyle in the bed with me, and it was a bad situation for all involved. But now, we have a queen-sized bed, and it kicks ass! I can actually sleep in it like a normal person, with my feet under the covers!

 

  • I can paint everything! I love color, okay? There’s a reason my hair is fucking purple. Though I’ll admit, I was a little worried at the start about the prospect of painting; I was worried that it would turn out that I’m a terrible painter and the rooms would look like dog shit. But turns out, I totally don’t suck at painting and they totally turned out beautifully, and now the world of color is open to me. And now I want to paint our house ALL THE COLORS. Nothing is off limits, nor is it limited to walls. I’ve also discovered the joys of spray paint, and my goal is to paint until our world is a rainbow of color or I pass out from paint fumes!

 

  • No on steals our mail! Yeah, you wouldn’t think this would be a huge selling point, us living in Saratoga Springs and all, but it was. See, our downstairs neighbor (not the porch hoarders, the one next door,) took in a damaged young woman who may or may not have been her daughter. We called her Crazy Eyes. And we definitely caught Crazy Eyes going through our mail looking for money. The fucking stupid part? She thought to rip open the letter from my grandmother (which luckily contained nothing but a family fudge recipe,) but didn’t think to open any of the credit card applications or the rebate gift card that was sitting in our mail. Look, if you’re going to steal my mail, at least try not to suck at it. Bitch couldn’t even steal our identity right. So yeah, we haven’t met our new neighbors yet. I don’t know if they’re nice or weirdos or have obnoxious kids or clown fetishes. But you know what they aren’t? Mail-stealers.
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