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Bye-bye, Home

June 23, 2008

Today I finished up the last little chores at my old house, gathered up all our spare keys, and took home all the towels and fancy soaps and the candy jar from my home that I’m selling, due to close a bit later this week. 

That’s a good house, and it was a little sad today, taking my last stuff out.  I remember when we first bought it, all the terrible orange sponge painted walls, the pink vertical blinds, the nasty carpet, the lawsuit-waiting-to-happen stairway and deck on top of the roof.  The scary dark kitchen.

I remember digging out the clay sewer line to replace it, being hip deep in my front yard with my hat and a variety of shovels.

I remember taking a sledge to the kitchen, learning to make eggs and toast on the barbeque, and discovering it was when the mini-fridge coils touched the gas line, the house power shorted out.

My father taught me how to use a table saw when we built new kitchen cabinets on the back porch.  I remember renting a concrete mixer, hauling 20 bags of quick-crete into the yard, mixing it all up, building forms for concrete countertops on top of those newly built cabinets.  Most of all, I remember my husband wheeling the first load of concrete into the kitchen - my father and I both stuck our shovels in, stopped, and he looked up at me and said, “Are we really going to do this?”

Yup Pop, we are, and we did.  And they turned out beautifully.

I remember painting a random series of horizontal stripes of varying colors and width in the hall bathroom.  Not my finest idea.

That’s the house where I learned to change a light fixture, to install blinds, to install doors, to paint and stain and finish, to build with wood, to lay flooring and baseboards.  To pick paint colors and lay gravel.  To dig long, deep trenches.  To snake a drain.  To troubleshoot a swamp cooler.  To destroy a kitchen and tear down walls.  To tape and texture drywall.  To hang a microhood and install a dishwasher.

It’s where I learned not all walls are square, not all floors are level, and that there are solutions to both.

Bye-bye, home.  I’m going to miss you.

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