Five Days in and I Have a Home Depot Guy

BY bonnie

You know, cause I’ve been there so much this week.

I must warn you now that blogging for the next few weeks while I have six different full time jobs will probably be on the back burner. I hope to fill in those gaps with amusing home improvement stories. Or at least photos of home improvement projects. Or photos of silliness in the home improvement store. Like this one:

Where I practice for when I’m a robot princess.

Or this one:

Where I brought my son’s pillowcase to Home Depot to match paint samples and then got bored of holding it so I threw it over his head and he just went with it cause he inherited my sense of humor.

Or photos of the process itself like this one:

Where we discuss HOW VERY HOT PINK my bedroom was (it’s now primed). True fact: the previous owner (apparently) chose this color herself and then decorated it with all sorts of Jack Sparrow memorabilia.

So, as you can see, this is a shitty cop-out of a blog post. I’d like to write about where I’ve been mentally all year and how that relates to shitty potato chips, or maybe about that one two-parter episode of Welcome to Night Vale which is like a massive metaphor for life in general, but tomorrow I have to start learning about biological psychology (which, the book’s author assures me is the most interesting subject EVER. FACT.) and also I have to paint a lot of walls so I’m thinking it will be more shitty cop-outs for a little while. Bear with me. I’ll try to make it HILARIOUS.

It’s the Middle of the Night and I’m Googling How to Use the Spackle

BY bonnie

For a long time I was completely against owning my own home. Because the thing about renting is that when shit goes wrong, it’s not your (financial) problem. I love that. But something changed at some point. It might have been when the housing market crashed and it seemed as though owning a home might be within my grasp. It might have been that moment when my landlord told me that I wasn’t having a jumping spider infestation in the extra bedroom because spiders – and this is a direct quote – “don’t come in through windows.”

And so we tried to get a house. But it was ridiculously difficult. Lower housing costs just made the lower-priced homes an investor’s dream and the market became rather like great white sharks frantically bidding on seals on eBay.

Shut up. That metaphor totally makes sense.

So for one reason or a bunch – and in hindsight it was obviously a good thing for a few reasons – we never were able to buy a home and I’ve been trapped in this apartment for too long.

Long story extremely short, I own a home now. I mean. I still wish someone else was in charge financially. But if my bathtub is going to have gaping holes in it for more than two years those are going to be MY holes. (KNOCK WOOD. Dear Universe, no holey bathtubs, please, ok? Kthx.)

I’m a strange awake-all-night mixture of excited and terrified. This has been a dream and a hope for so long, but now that it’s here I feel all panicky and I’m wondering why the hell I did this and what the hell was I thinking? I’m told this is actually a normal part of the home buying process. If that’s the case, then I have to respectfully ask why realtors can’t prescribe Ambien or some sort of sleep aid. Because this sleeping like Edward Cullen shit is for sparkly-ass vampires, not for single moms who have to figure out how to install vertical blinds tomorrow morning. I mean this morning.

I get the keys in a few hours now. I plan to buy my kids lunch and eat it on the floor of the new apartment. And then make a master to do list for the next few weeks. A list which will include things like: fixing up an apartment, painting, cleaning, packing, moving, cleaning, starting school, and coming up with a homeschooling plan for the next school year that actually starts in only two weeks. OK. Now that I’ve written that out I can see how overwhelming it is. So, Brain? All the more reason TO GO TO SLEEP.