(snippets of my side of the conversation)
M: Hello? It's Marla. Remember what we talked about a while ago? What you promised? It's time. (getting excited) And I have a question. I have a little extra money, and can I get you to do a few other things while you're here?...And, what about doing my...Really? That's all? Oh yes please, do that too!
...
M: That's sounds wonderful. (pants a little - just a little) Could you... would you...use Crème Brûlée on them?
...
M: Really? You can do it this Saturday? And that fast? I'm impressed! I'll have the cash ready. I'm really looking forward to this! (Trying not to squeak with excitement.)
...
M: See you then, Jim.
(Hangs, up, looks around, feels the butterflies in her stomach.)
Well, five years after moving in, it has happened.
I no longer qualify for having the world's ugliest kitchen.
Jim and Jimmy did it for me again.
Last fall, the porch was fixed up, and since then, the house must have looked like this horrible trash palace cowering behind a beautiful garden. Kind of like we lucked into the garden, like we didn't deserve it, because Hey! Who would have that bizarre blue as a porch colour, mixed with some raw wood and some leftover brown windows if they could help it? Get you priorities straight, people! The windows in the house have been getting replaced one or two at a time, as we can afford it. The living room window, one of the more decent (and working) windows, will be one of the last to be replaced, so the fresh beige new ones that really open and close and can be cleaned really easily (although I don't do it often, natch), mixed with the old chocolate brown and blue trim combination downstairs, in conjunction with the patchwork porch, created an eyesore like no other in the neighbourhood. The two nice upstairs windows were like twinkly blue eyes above a rotting smile. In fact, the whole house, over the years, has been getting a makeover; but with a toddler, mostly what we can afford and feel like doing right now involves paint. And while I hate to contribute to the beigification of Toronto, I have my reasons for choosing it. Being sandwiched in between oh so tasteful neighbours with money up the wazoo was a consideration, but so was the fact that sometimes, the important thing is not the material, but the living.
See it?
Because it was:
It was just the wrong blue. Very, very wrong. Badly done, and wrong. It was worse than it looks in this picture. It was.
And now, with the taupy colour? All you see is garden. A living, creative, beautiful thing that gives me and those who look upon it great pleasure. The house is just a backdrop for something wonderful.
And speaking of wrongy wrongs, the stairs!
I have not been able to choose a carpet for them, let alone find someone to carpet them in said carpet for under $400. And I am sad about that, but...
A coat of Crème Brûlée means I can now at least just wipe them clean. They don't make my heart sing, but they also don't make it cringe in disgust.
But, you know, there's more. The kitchen!
When we bought the house, we thought there was just a lot of cosmetic stuff to fix up, and the inspection supported that theory. The important and exceedingly expensive components like the roof and furnace are fine, but well, the cosmetic stuff would be like troweling makeup into the creases of an octogenarian's face trying to make it as smooth and unblemished as a teenager's. Not going to happen. This centurion house needs to be dermabraded. Actually, it needs to be flayed and have new skin grafted onto it, but that's also not going to happen (see; Toddler, born February 25, 2004). So, we're going to settle for painting things so we just can't see them any longer. You see, if we could live five years with a kitchen that looked like this when we bought it:
We can live with a lot of things. For a while, we just stopped seeing the colours. How the heck does that happen? It just does. You only turn on the lights when you need to. You hang pictures to cover as much paint as possible. You buy stuff that you like to look at instead. You have friends over and pay attention to them, after making excuses for the hideous pre-existing decor. We just have lots of neat stuff, and we're busy, and well, there's that toddler thing again. You know - all of the reasons I had Steve install a dimmer switch in our bathroom after Josephine was born - mood lighting for naked mommies is a good thing. Mood lighting for ugly kitchens is a great thing.
Our home was owned by a woman who was depressed, It had been in her family for ages, and she'd lived in it for sixteen years. She'd gotten deeply into debt. Her son, whose anger management issues are apparent from the fist-shaped holes punched into walls, lived in the basement. His son, about two years old, lived here too. The baby's mother had committed suicide (NOT HERE, THANK ALL THE POWERS THAT BE!), and for years, the owner had an alcoholic boyfriend living here. He did a lot of the renovations. That's too bad, because he sucked at them. The combination of his almost comical ineptness (Crazy Joe was written on ALL of the light bulbs, and pizza boxes were used for drywall in some places) and her bad taste (the decor equivalent of a sweatshirt with bonneted geese on it) means that Steve and I have had some serious undoing to do.
Of all the rooms, the kitchen is the worst. I can see it :
Crazy Joe gets drunk and said "Hey! Let's take a good-sized room with a high ceiling, and build a box filled with ugly fluorescent lights on the bottom, but I'll just eyeball it, and there'll only be lights on two sides, but one of those won't work!"
Then the lady said "Great idea honey! Then let's paint it a dark olive green, but the higher ceiling part should be teal blue. Hey! Use the leftover paint from the front porch! After that, I'm going to stencil stuff all around the room in a really thick oil-based paint on top if it. Crookedly!"
Then Joe said "Only after I strip all the woodwork and don't re-finish it! Then stencil on THAT too!"
Then the lady said "Be sure and slop paint everywhere! Don't use tape!"
Oh, and they had many many such conversations, I'm sure. Like about how she'd never really clean anything, and isn't just using forty-hundred stick-ups a much better idea?
And in that one picture above? Where the young and positive me is on my knees in what is the formerly greenish-aqua mud room? Cleaning poo off the floors? Actual poo? There was poo all over the floor in there. Old, dried dog poo. But now the mudroom is one of the places I keep my fun stuff - my best thrifted finds, my flea market treasures, and I'd painted that ages ago because it was easy. That room was one of the triggers for wanting the kitchen to at least have a coat of fresh, bright paint. We can't afford to do much in there, as really, it doesn't even deserve to be renovated, with its floor that slopes a good three inches and the need for better duct work and insulation...but the kitchen is such an important room. It deserved a little something after all these years, and when I made some money by renting out some of my vintage cowboy stuff to a movie that's filming in town, well, it was time.
This house has been a butt-kicker to live in, because everything that had been done to it for the two decades prior had been done so badly. Now, we can't do everything we want to, but we can do a little. And sometimes a little is a lot. For us, the house is just the container for us and our stuff. Our home is with each other, our stuff is just stuff. But it's good to show it a little love, as the rewards are great.
My kitchen is now brighter and happier, and while it's not and won't be the kitchen I dream of having in my writhing, moaning, "Oh BABY, I want this fridge GIVE IT TO ME and this oven OH PLEASE YES BABY" kind of pornographic appliance dreams...wait...I need a minute to collect myself...there... it's my dream kitchen in that it finally feels like ours. It was the last room in the house that had remained cloaked in the dismal colours of a sad woman. She's happier now, wherever she is, I'm told by my neighbour who is in contact with her. In fact, she's dating a plastic surgeon and has revamped herself as well.
But I remember now that phone call, the one we only heard about. Wherein she called our realtor and told him that she wanted us to have the house, because we seemed like a nice young couple that her neighbours would like. She asked him to tell us that if we wanted the house, we should submit an offer right away, as another was coming in and she was under duress to sell. We thought about it, and decided to. We were on the road, but we started the process, stopping in little towns all along the way to fax back and forth. We were taking a trip to Atlantic City, where Steve won the closing costs on the slots. It was serendipitous. In fact, in pulling out the old photos above, I saw the date on the faxed listing, which I keep in a notebook full of ideas. On it, the first day we saw it - August 14, 2001. How timely.
When we took ownership of the house, one of the first things Steve did, almost as if he was compelled to, was to walk around with his best guitar, singing Buck Owens' "Love's Going to Live Here".
Oh the sun's gonna shine, in my life once more
Love's gonna live here again
Things are gonna be the way they, were before
Love's gonna live here again
Love's gonna live here
Love's gonna live here
Love's gonna live here again
No more loneliness, only happiness
Love's gonna live here again
I hear bells a-ringin', I hear birds a-singin'
Love's gonna live here again
I hear bee's a-hummin, and I know the days' a-comin'
Love's gonna live here again
Love's gonna live here
Love's gonna live here
Love's gonna live here again
No more loneliness, only happiness
Love's gonna live here again
Love's gonna live here again
And so, while I am so very happy with the new paint jobs, I am also happy that I had cause to remember, that just as it was five years ago when we bought the house it's the living inside it, not the material, that matters. Now we have Josephine in it with us, too - and who knows what might have happened if we didn't choose this home?
Love really does live here, and thanks to Jim and Jimmy, the sun is really, really shining in my kitchen today.
This house is just a background for something wonderful, but I'm grateful for the chance to like it a little more.
Happy Anniversary, Home.
