The Dark Gloomy Spring of Our Discontent

When last we posted on BabySpace, our intrepid heroine was preparing her house for sale. The water heater was replaced and the basement floor stripped down to gloomy dark concrete. All that remained was a litany of picky awful chores before the house was revealed to the world.

Well, we did it, but not without more loss of funds and some serious psychological trauma. Truly, it's been too painful to write about. A simple repainting of a corner of our home office turned into a major project requiring new paint on the walls, ceiling and doorway. Ron and I tried to do it, but the project dragged on for weeks until I finally brought in two seriously weird guys to throw a little paint around. Meanwhile another guy installed carpeting and tile in the basement and Barry returned to replace our dryer vent.

The night before our home's debut on Sunday, March 4, Ron and I worked like dogs all day and were relaxing around 11 p.m. when I decided to put some cute towels in the basement's half-bath. I went downstairs and promptly stepped into a huge puddle of water. Apparently the washing machine had had a nervous breakdown and leaked all over the laundry room and into the half-bath. Ron and I gloomily mopped up the puddle, vowing never to own a home again.

The next day we gussied up the house some more. Then, one hour before the open house, while Benny was napping, I realized the upstairs toilet had been bubbling for a while. Suddenly we were in crisis mode again, because we couldn't make it stop. Ron nearly tore the thing apart, then considered turning it off, when finally, 20 minutes to the open house, it quit bubbling and we could grab Benny and flee.

The open house went well, so I went on to the second tier of picky to-dos in March. Nothing was easy. I needed to get the shades in the dining room cleaned, for example. But these aren't ordinary shades, these are fancy-linen-paneled shades with cute tassels, purchased by Crazy Phil, our home's former owner. I talked to two drapery stores and a dry cleaner before someone could tell me what the damn things were called (Roman shades). Then I visited two cleaners before I found someone who could deal with them. Apparently these shades were custom-made and cost hundreds of dollars. They certainly cost a pretty penny to clean. And the cleaning guy was kind of nuts, cornering me when I came to get the shades and talking about how women in labor shouldn't use drugs and sick people should Just Welcome Jesus.

With the house finally in order, we addressed our sadly neglected yard. We spent hours in late March raking leaves and spreading mulch and pulling up a few early-bird weeds. Ron repaired the winding path in our backyard and brought in rocks and dirt to fill up Lake Leuty, a puddle that appears whenever we get a lot of rain.

The front yard looked really good, with dozens of purple and white flowers popping up everywhere. I was very proud. We enjoyed the spectacle for three days, then an April snowstorm fell on us and wiped out everything. All our flowers are dead. I had to dig Benny's winter coat and scarf out of storage and I still haven't found his hat. Temperatures have been in the 20s for more than a week. Today it's 40 degrees and I'm pathetically grateful.

So the house has been on the market for about a month now. Lots of showings, sometimes twice, but no offers yet. I yearn for warm, sunny days and monied home buyers who don't like flowers anyway.