No, the post title is not the title of a new book—though it might make a really fun spoof. I have had hardly any time for even thinking about writing. You see, Hubster just woke up one day and said, “I need something sportier.”
He was talking about a house.
Okay, technically, that’s not what he said, but Maxwell Pig’s line somehow seemed to fit the moment, because his sudden action on a desire he’d been vaguely harboring for a few years was, you know, sudden. Being the cautious one, I implored that we take things slowly. We were talking about a big commitment financially, emotionally, physically… We bought our first house over twenty years ago. It doesn’t seem like that long, but I did the math, and it’s true. We put a lot of work and a lot of love into updating it, and there were still projects and hopes lined up—including the addition of a garage (which one really needs in northern Utah). My youngest daughter grew up there. Having moved around quite a bit when I was young, I dreamed of buying a house and living there forever. Like Hubster’s parents. Like his grandparents. And probably their parents…
We looked at several houses to get a feel for the market. Or at least that’s what I thought we were doing. Then BAM! We were making an offer and putting our first house on the market. All in a matter of days. It wasn’t ready. *I* wasn’t ready. And yet there I was, sorting through our two decades of accumulated stuff, packing and giving away and throwing away. Not only did we not want to bring useless stuff with us, but we were downsizing a little. Bye-bye to my craft room. Bye-bye to the guest room. Bye-bye to Hubster’s never-finished-photo-studio.
“Eww,” was the word of the day. The week! I’d have been so embarrassed to leave my house in that condition! It took Hubster and me four hours to clean the top half of the kitchen, including the microwave and the kitchen sink. Then we discovered we’d missed a cabinet. Yikes. Mostly, I just wanted to cry. I’d just spent the last couple weeks packing and cleaning our old house, and now I was going to have to deep clean the new one. I’d expected to have to wipe things down and make it “my” clean, but not to this extent. Thank goodness for my sweet sister in law, who bravely and unselfishly tackled some very nasty bathrooms—and still managed to keep her sense of humor.
A neighbor loaned us his covered trailer so we could start moving the boxes and smaller things while saving most of the furniture for the weekend and the much-needed manly and muscular help. We fit a lot of stuff in that thing, which we hooked up to the little pick-up truck my father-in-law so graciously loaned us. Our only serious mishap was “two” theme: two flat tires, (nearly) two hundred bucks for new ones, and two hours of sitting on the expressway. “Could have been worse,” Hubster said. “Could have been raining.”
True, the cleaning scenario could've been worse. You could've had to clear out a basement full of bodies.
And, "I need something sportier," is a pretty hilarious way to begin a house hunt.
Bodies… diapers… herds of dust bunnies… Thanks for encouraging my imagination! Yes, I am glad to have avoided those. Glad, too, for the invention of steam cleaners and heavy-duty cleaning solution (though my fingers are still recovering from the latter).
Zoom! Zoom!