halloween scrooges

It’s our first Halloween in the house—our first ever chance to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters…and we’re hiding out in the basement with the lights off. Yeah, we could have bought candy and played the friendly neighbors, but I got our mortgage bill in the mail today. Now that’s incentive enough not to run out to Target to buy Snickers.

super mario has stolen my husband

Okay. So, I humored Matt. I let him cut up a perfectly good couch because he promised it would be, as he said, "awesome." I helped him lug it to the garage, made him dinner, and even provided a little encouragement. A lot of good that did. It's now a week later, and half of the couch is in the garage while the amputated arm sits in the basement awaiting a reunion. Unfortunately, Matt is far too busy to complete his couch project. Why you ask? He has rediscovered Super Nintendo. After buying a few parts from ebay, his SNES is again functional, and he is determined to regain his Mario prowess. It's a little sad.

dry towel anyone?

My bathroom is the land of the perpetually damp towel. For some ungodly reason, there is only one small towel bar in it that will barely hold a hand towel, let alone two bath towels. I have no idea how families have lived in this house for the last 65 years without going insane. I decided to take matters into my own hands and bought a few hooks for the door. I figured it would be a smart and easy solution. I guess this is just another lesson in how house projects are never easy. I woke up today ready to go and spray painted the hooks to make them more rust resistant. Lesson one: don't spray paint outside in the fall. I should have known this, but being an optimist, I assumed that the leaves would magically blow away from the drying hooks. Wrong. I had to paint them about 4 times to try to cover up the smudges I left after digging leaf after leaf out of the wet paint. After a few hours of drying, the hooks were still gooey, but I was anxious to get the job done. I summoned Matt and his drill. He positioned the hooks, marked them off, and drilled two holes...right through our bathroom door. It turns out that the center panels on our old doors are very thin. Now, instead of having three handy hooks on the door, we have two holes that are clearly visible from either side. Nice. I guess I'll be living with damp towels for a bit longer.

bang bang shoot 'em up

I really shouldn't joke about this, but what can you do? We have lived in our house for exactly one month. We thought the neighborhood was safe and cute. There are kids on skateboards and families with baby strollers everywhere. Good thing kids tend not to be out past 9:00 because last night we got caught in a low-budget episode of NYPD Blue. We were just coming upstairs from a rowdy game of Super Mario 1, and we heard this awful sound. I was in the bathroom, and Matt was closing the curtains. I thought a plane was crashing, but I wasn't even close. Two cars were chasing each other down our quaint, quiet street, and the second car stopped on our corner and shot at the first car 4-5 times. I just kept thinking to myself: Are you kidding? One month in the house, and we already have gangsters or druggies or whoever shooting at each other on our corner? Great. I guess this is why people repeatedly asked us: "You're moving to Minneapolis? You can't be moving to Minneapolis. What suburb will be you in?" Ha. We spent the rest of the night motionless on our bed with all of the lights off. Welcome to the joys of homeownership.

the couch fiasco

I feel like I’m stuck in a bad episode of The Red Green Show. As I write this, Matt is out in the garage trying to turn our couch into a loveseat. I know how ridiculous this sounds. I spent three weeks trying to convince him to leave the poor thing alone, but he is convinced of his eventual triumph.
This fiasco started when we moved in. He was determined to create a basement den for himself, and our old couch was the focal point of his design. Unfortunately, our house was built in 1940 and features small hallways and narrow doorways. After our families finished helping us move and left for home, Matt and I tried to get the couch down the stairs and into his dream male getaway.
We spent three hours moving it a little bit this way and a little bit that way, but it would not budge. At one point, we had it wedged in the hallway next to the basement door, trapping us both in the kitchen. With our keys out of reach, we couldn’t go out the back door and walk around to the front; instead, Matt had to climb atop a small shelf and gracefully squeeze himself through a small opening to get to the other side. After this incident, I asked him a key question: “Didn’t you measure the couch and doorway first?”
“Well, yeah,” he said without looking at me.
“And how big are they?”
He kept looking at the ground. “The couch is 33”, and the door is 29”.
“Are you kidding?”
We had just spent an entire afternoon trying to force a couch into a door that is 4” too small; the thing that got me is that he knew it was too small before we even started. He finally conceded that his grand plan was not to be and moped the rest of the weekend. In fact, he moped until tonight when he drew a messy line of marker on the couch and started to slash at it with his utility knife.
"So, do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
"I’ll figure it out. Just wait. I’ll figure it out, and it’s going to be awesome.”
I looked around our garage. He had three tools: a utility knife, wire snips, and a handsaw. This should be interesting.

painting a plain room sexy

We finally moved our furniture back into our bedroom today. Two weeks ago, we started to paint it red-a real sexy red. We thought everything was going well; we followed directions precisely and took our time. Ha! After finishing a coat of primer and two coats of paint, we pulled the tape only to find out that the tape didn't want to come off as it was supposed to. Ideally, you pull the tape and it leaves a nice clean line. Instead, when we pulled the tape, it pulled tape off the wall too, creating big, torn bubbles all over the room. It was far from sexy; it was a disaster. This didn't really encourage us, so we continued to sleep in the living room for a few weeks. I had grown used to it, and I figured we had 30 years to finish painting, so I was in no rush. Finally Matt stepped up and started to cut in again, but this time without tape. He used a tiny paintbrush that I pulled out of my watercolor set. It took him days to complete the 3 coats of touchups, but he did it. It's still not the best. There are a few blobs of red paint on our white ceiling, and the tape pulled off some ceiling paint too, revealing a layer of bright white in random patches. We're hoping that our new furniture will cover up the bad spots.