If you are thinking of buying a house, make sure the bathroom grout isn’t leaking water through the old-school non-waterproof drywall, least you find your house leaking shower water through the exterior siding due to a poorly constructed bathroom.
Yay! Home ownership is most awesome!
1. Yesterday I started painting our basement. It’s been beige for far too long, and after spending a gajillion dollars on paint samples, I made myself choose between a grey-blue shade and a bright, tropical blue. Basically this versus this. We were going for a look like the picture below from Allison Wonderland (via This is Reverb):
Let me tell you, it does not look that cute. It looks like a Smurf exploded in our basement. I was hoping when it dried I would like it more. I don’t.
2. I woke up this morning to the entire freaking world covered in a blanket of snow. WTF, Kansas City weather stations, a warning would have been nice! I hate the cold. I’m moving to California.
3. Check out this fun hair tutorial I found on Hair Thursday. I normally use my straightener to curl my hair, but I always end up looking like a grown up Shirley Temple.
I covet her haircut, and am thinking of copying it, but for now, my hair has beachy waves and I’m pretending I’m laying in a chaise lounge listening to the ocean. Oh, and I’m drinking a pina colada…one that’s more pina then colada, if you know what I’m saying.
Because I sure don’t have a clue what I’m talking about.
4. I get to go to a grown up bar tonight and have sophisticated drinks with a friend/client. Har har, Kansas City, look out! It is the grand return of Megan Martini! I will be the one in the big orange boots with beachy waves in her hair. Breakdancing is a real possiblity.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Tired of hearing about my political views? Well, lucky for you, you’re not the only one (Hi Abbie! I love you!), so I figured it was time to get cracking on showing you all what has consumed my being for the past few weeks.
Here is a house tour video Trent shot, ala MTV Cribs. This was before I painted my kitchen orange and my bedroom yellow. At the end you can sort of see what it all looks like today, with tools littering the floor and Lucy’s crayons all over the kitchen. And of course, all Lu cares about is seeing herself in the camera viewfinder. Hence the contact repetition of “Please see it?” or “I wanna see it!”. Ah, such is life.
Oh, and one more thing…
Last week, after I signed my life away to the bank funding my mortgage loan, we finally got ourselves together and started moving several carloads of crap from one side of town to the other. One of these days I will write a post describing this strange transition, how you can feel like you’re in a different country when in reality you’re only 40 minutes away. Not only are we changing addresses and zip codes, we’re changing states. We’re leaving our urban lifestyle for suburban bliss. On Sunday, Trent even mowed the lawn at the new house, which wouldn’t seem like a big deal except at the old house a guy named Rave brings his lawnmower to our house in his broken down van and charges $15 to mow our patch of a yard.
So right now we are living a life in limbo. Half of our stuff is at the new house, half at the old one. I pack my car up with junk everyday and take it to the new place over my lunch hour. Most of the non-essential living items have made their way to the suburbs. Things like photos in frames, books, albums, paintings and extra sheets. This past weekend Trent’s wonderful mom, step-dad and sister came up to Kansas City and helped us paint a few rooms. I now have an orange kitchen and a yellow bedroom, which makes my mother shudder, but makes me very happy. I can’t wait to start living there.
Most of the essential living items are still at the old cottage, preventing us from staying at the new place full-time. Beds, cribs, cookware, tables and giant server racks are still waiting patiently for this weekend, when we will stuff a U-Haul full and leave the cottage for good. This makes me a bit sad. I am excited to move, much more excited than I was a few weeks ago, but it is still hard to leave my old life behind. Our old house hardly looks like the place I love, as it’s covered in boxes and spots of white spackle dot the walls where art was once hung. It is bare and cold, but there are still whispers of my life there. I can still remember pacing the creaky floor, holding infant Lu close to my chest, praying that she would sleep. I remember decorating my first room, our bedroom, while Trent was away on business and his horror when he realized I’d bought mosquito netting to cover our bed. I remember the morning I awoke to flowers and a proposal. I remember birthday parties with friends, walking down to the Plaza and stumbling home in a drunken stupor. There is so much to recall, and so much to be thankful for.
Last night, after filling the car with another load of stuff (this time, toys from Lu’s room), Lucy and I sat our on our wonderful front porch, playing in her sandbox. Lately, she’s been very clingy to me, as her life has been turned upside down. Each day she asks me where that painting went or why her toys are gone or who broke her bookshelf. We try and explain that we’re taking all of these things to the new house, and she usually says okay and moves on. Yesterday, as we sat outside on a cool October night, like we have many times before…when I pregnant with her, when she was an infant, after she learned to walk and now, as a kid that seems smarter than myself on most days…she came up to me and whispered in my ear.
“Mama, you happy!”
Indeed.
I bought a house on Tuesday. Yup, we did it. Even with the financial world crumbling around us, we still found a way to get a loan and find a place we like and sign a bajillion papers until…dun, dun, dah! We’re first-time homeowners.
And how did I react? Well, Monday night Trent and I decided to say goodbye to our wonderful old house. He with bourbon, me with a glass of wine. Now, I should’ve thought twice before I took a sip, as I’d been feeling a bit off all day, but I had just assumed it was nerves. So I sipped my wine and chatted on the phone with a friend and watched Heroes. Then, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, I began feeling pretty damn crappy.
Then I threw up for five hours.
So my house buying experience wasn’t all kittens and rainbows. The next day I literally drug myself out of my sickbed (Trent still claims our room smells like death), showered and somehow managed to sit through an hour of initialing and signing papers without any major incidents. Afterwards, instead of, in Trent’s words, going over to the house and “christening” each room, I went back to my teeny rental home, climbed back into my bed and slept for 14 hours.
So if you were wondering why I hadn’t posted for a few days or are pissed because I haven’t called to share the news, know it’s because I’m on a liquid diet consisting of Gatorade and Sprite, and thanks to my wonder-flu, I missed two days of work and am now terribly behind. Oh, and I also have not moved one box. Not one.
Stay tuned for tales of moving with the Peters Family! There shall be arguments over hiring movers versus borrowing some guy’s truck, hurt backs, paint fume inhalation, hopefully concluding with three happy people and one ecstatic dog pooping all over her huge backyard. Don’t go anywhere, you won’t want to miss it!
