My wife and I have been in our ‘new’ house for four years. I guess that means it is not really ‘new’ anymore. (Of course that is a perspective thing but that’s a debate that I wisely will not touch three sentences into this thing.) As I glance over my shoulders right now and try to give the place the ‘ first time outsider’s look’ I realize, yeah, definitely not new anymore. It’s certainly not old and rickety but you can tell folks have lived here a bit and it will likely only become more ‘lived in’ as time goes on. (Of course that is a prospective thing but that is a debate that I also will wisely not touch five sentences in.) Four years of my wife and I clunking and clacking, flipping and flopping, pooping and popping around here has broken the place in just right. Oh course we have assistance from our four little furry ones that act like they are doing us a favor by letting us stay here. Animals seem to have a way of speeding up the wearing in process. (Of course that is a perception thing but…)
Although there are several different builders in our subdivision, it still has the expected repetitious controlled environment feel as you drive around. The last few vacant lots are just being built on this summer but the real giveaway that the complex is less than five years old is the greenery. None of the thin trees that line the curvy roads and front yards are over about 12 feet tall. At least my backyard abuts the Army Corps of Engineers land that surrounds a local lake. The land inches behind my property line is thick with tall and wild untamed local flora. Unfortunately the untamed local flora might be pretty to look at but it is not good at staying on its side of my backyard fence and I have to constantly pluck wandering weeds, remove rouge roots and rake drifting loose leaves. Oh yeah, and did I mention the insects are not good at staying on their side of the fence either.
The streets of the Queens New York neighborhood I grew up in were lined with huge centuries- old stately sycamores. The trees were so big their roots pushed up and rearranged the sidewalk squares below them making an uneven mess that, if you did not pay attention to, you would find yourself stumbling like a drunk taking a roadside sobriety test.
The fact that the sidewalks occasionally looked like a pile of Triscuits on a fussy baby’s highchair tray was not the most dangerous part of the hybrid sycamores. That award goes to the ‘itchy bomb’ seed pods that drop every fall just about the same time of year children have to walk to school again. I assume it still happens today but when I was a young mischievous kids would constantly throw these appropriately nick-named dense ping pong ball sized pods at each other. When ‘itchy bombs’ are rubbed directly on your skin they make you, well, quite itchy. Having been a complete geek-a-sauras, I was the target of many an itchy bomb attack. Nowadays, as I recall all this, I think about how dorky I must look as I sloppily jog past the local kids at the edge of the complex waiting for the school bus and wonder maybe it’s a good thing the trees here are still small and itchy bombless.
My wife and I bought a lot in this neighborhood after she fell in love with one of the builder’s models. She liked the spot because we are in that border area where the city meets the country. You are relatively close to everything but still feel a bit like you live in a small town. At the time it was a good compromise for a small town Iowa Girl and a Big City Guy. Of course in the four and a half years since we built the place the city seems to have caught up to us and we drive through construction site after construction site on the way home every night. I think that ultimately will work to my advantage if we can stay here long enough for the City to sprawl its way up here (but that is a prospective perception about perspective and…)
The interior decorations in the house are definitely appropriate for us. My wife and I are very comfortable living in a busy house with a 16 foot wall covered in funky clocks, the brightly painted silver wall, the even brighter painted red wall with 12 odd square silver face masks, the two colorful mobiles hanging from the kitchen ceiling, the giant wall covered with multiple sized black and grey squares and the wall with large stainless wavy frames holding 18 pictures of odd looking New Yorkers from the 1970s but it can be a bit overwhelming for unsuspecting visitors. We enjoy people’s reactions when they get the tour for the first time.
I recall sitting with my wife in the model home picking out interior options to go into our house. We decided to postpone a few things because we did not like their price and selection they offered on some things. The problem with doing that is that it is so easy to put things off after you are already living there. The cheap carpet we had them install, we had every intension of replacing from the start. We even put money aside for it but you move in and settle down and suddenly days turn to weeks, weeks to months and months to years.
We finally recently (I know, it was last fall, ‘perspective’ blah blah blah) got around to tearing out the scary carpet and installed cork floors. Now for over a year we have visited numerous big box home improvement store, lumber yards, warehouses and home boutiques shoppes in search of a deal on granite kitchen counters that would match all the crazy colors we have in the house.
A couple of weeks ago we stumbled into a scary warehouse type store in a crappy part of town near the only good Cuban restaurant in Dallas. They happened to have exactly what we were looking for at a great price. I don’t think they were used to making sales because they kept trying to play lame salesman tricks on us. They tried to use the ‘car dealership’ move of putting us into a small secluded room to close the deal but the small room had no air conditioning. It was stifling hot in seconds so my wife and I kept walking out. I don’t think making people leave is the desired result of the little isolated room trick.
Our sales person kept dancing around the price having us fill out various forms before springing the final total on us. We had already figured it out and it was considerably less than all the other places and under our budget but he kept acting like he expected us to walk out. When I did eventually ask if he could do anything about the price he left to talk to his manager for a very long time. Again, a very unnecessary sales technique for us, but like a customer service representative working a phone bank in India, he had routine and a script that he stuck to and nothing was going to deviate him from it. He proudly came back to tell us he knocked $9.00 off the price. That’s right…. He scored us a big 9 dollar savings. Not $9.00 dollars a square foot, no, $9.00. Later on he topped himself and took $3.00 of the $40 jug of overpriced sealant we bought too. I was waiting for him to offer us the ‘undercoat’ like the desperate car salesman in Fargo.
We set up an appointment to pick out the actual slab of granite they were going to use in our house. On a very busy Tuesday afternoon we took some time to drive to a nasty looking industrial area on the other side of Dallas but they gave us the incorrect name of the highway exit and I got us hopelessly lost. Stressing over time my wife got rather unhappy with the situation but things only got worse in the warehouse when we found our half dozen choices were bound together with rope making it virtually impossible to see what each one looks like. When we quickly decided between the two visible slabs, the woman helping us had gotten engrossed with a personal phone call and made us wait about five minutes in the 100 degree sun before we could tell her which one we wanted.
Tension was thick when we got back into the car only to discover that something was wrong with my Mini and we needed to find a gas station fast. The car made odd sounds and registered that I had no gas even though I had filled it the day before. Trying to get out of the neighborhood without ending up back on the street that I got us lost on originally proved to be a difficult task. I finally ended up going the wrong way up a one way street next to salvage yard when I spotted an elusive service station down the road. The car ended up being fine and we ended up being fine but I think my home is improved enough for a while. Hmmmmm, but I sure would like a new back porch.
Mr DVMP's Blog 