I have had two gins, and while I am soberly aware that alcohol is not a long-term solution to anything, I will say that it can take me from panic to non-panic in a pleasingly efficient way. I wanted to find a Dorothy Parker quote I remembered about how people may say many bad things about alcohol but no one denies how effective it is at relieving anxiety, but when I tried to look it up all I found were articles about her unfortunate relationship with alcohol, and that is not quite the note I wanted to strike, so let’s move on. Unless you know the quote, in which case sing out. Perhaps it was not Dorothy Parker? But I was pretty sure it was.

Paul is walking on the treadmill, which is right next to my computer desk, so there is a steady THUMP-THUMP-THUMP sound affecting the composition of this post. We had intended to put the treadmill in another room, but it turned out the charming old ceilings were charmingly low in the intended room, and anyone over 5’10” walking on the treadmill in that room would bonk their head charmingly with every step. Paul is in sock-feet for some reason and he keeps scuffing his socks with a scrape-squeak noise against the treadmill belt; and also he is stepping unnecessarily heavily/loudly, the way it seems to me that men are socialized to feel free to do and women are socialized NOT to feel free to do, and right now it seems to me that this whole situation is an excellent argument against marriage/society in general and men in particular, so perhaps I should revisit my claims about the calming benefits of gin.

Where was I? Oh yes. So, while I am Tipsy Swistle, a lovely version of myself who thinks “Well, why not give the kitchen floor a quick mopping after I do the dishes? It’ll only take a few minutes and it’ll look so much better!” and “Let’s get the coffee pot set up for tomorrow morning so when we wake up we can just press start!” (and also while I am feeling so bolstered by your extremely bolstering variety of comments on the last post), I feel able to make a list of some of the things I like about the new house, to help balance earlier posts. The main downside of doing this is that I don’t see how you will be so patient with my whining/complaining/lamenting/mourning after seeing the list.

• Paul and I now have our own bathroom/shower. In the old house, we and the three littler kids mostly shared one bathroom, and the two older kids mostly shared the other bathroom. It didn’t feel fair (especially when one of the older kids left for college), but that was the way the house was arranged and that was what mostly made sense. Now Paul and I have our own bathroom off our bedroom, and so we never have to deal with kid clothing left on the floor, and the whole sink-counter is for OUR stuff. And in the old house, there was an unsolvable (APPARENTLY) problem of everyone using my bath towel as a hand towel because it was more convenient than using the actual hand towel, so my bath towel was always damp, and that was super annoying as well as exasperating (WHY?? WHY WOULD THEY ALL DO THAT?? Why would they even WANT to dry their hands on SOMEONE’S BATH TOWEL??) and caused me to simmer in resentment, and now that no longer happens and my towel is dry and crisp every morning.

• Also, we have an extra half-bath in this house. Our old house had a full bath and a three-quarters bath; this one has a full bath, a three-quarters bath, and a half-bath. The half-bath is right off the kitchen, which is not ideal, but it is fine—and I’m grateful to the previous owners for adding it (even though there seems to be a weird plumbing issue that makes the downstairs toilet gurgle and drain whenever the upstairs toilet flushes) because otherwise we would always have to go upstairs to use the bathroom.

• I enjoy the feeling of walking from one place to another in this house. It is a big weird house, and it was hard to figure out at first but now I get it, and I like the feeling of knowing how best to get from one part of it to another part of it—and even the feeling of very occasionally going the wrong way, because it reminds me that the house is big and weird, and theoretically I love big weird houses, even though right now the bigness is one of my primary stressors. I like when I need to bring something from one place to another place and I have to sort of LAUNCH OUT on that journey.

• White trim. Home fashions come and go with the phases of the moon, but my old house had medium-dark wood trim everywhere, and medium-dark wood trim is currently out of style, and all the in-style wall colors look right with WHITE trim.

• Many of the kitchen cabinets have shelves that slide out like drawers, and that is indeed very handy and nice. There are also some large shallow drawers perfect for things like plastic wrap and tin foil and baggies. For 17 years I have had my plastic wrap and tin foil and baggies in a narrow deep drawer, and it has resulted in a mild but steady discontent: nearly always needing to dig the roll I want out from under other rolls, and scraping my hand on the sharp cutting-edge of the boxes, and then a roll ends up just sliiightly angled so that it catches the lip of the drawer and prevents me from opening the drawer until I sneak a hand painfully into the drawer and push the roll down. Now everything is in a tidy single-layer row of well-behaved little soldiers.

• We have a view of a portion of river—or at least, we do when it’s winter and the deciduous trees have shed their view-blocking bounty. I am anticipating how interested and invested I will be in my daily view of this river: how happy I might be each winter when I can see it again, how I’ll monitor on a daily basis whether it is frozen/thawed yet, what birds are on it, etc.

• I have mentioned having my own little sunporch room (it was part of the bargain I made with Paul, who wanted so badly to move to this big weird house), and it is a very nice little room and I very much enjoy it. It is a four-season heated sunporch, a little cooler than the rest of the house in cold weather but not MUCH cooler. It is not large, but the smallness makes it feel cozy and manageable. It is big enough for a recliner and a side-table and a bookshelf and a mini-fridge. And it has built-in cabinets, which I use to store snacks and other things that are only mine. And it has a wide sill under all the windows, which I use for plants and decorative items. I put an electric throw blanket in this room, for when it is not quite warm enough, and a regular non-electric throw blanket too, and a framed photo of my wine-and-appetizers friend group, and a set of three little Hello Kitty items I have from childhood, and I am still working on it but in short it’s shaping up very nicely in there.

• The floors are gorgeous. Hardwood, and we had them refinished, and they are just beautiful, and I notice them all the time. They are not the wide-plank kind you sometimes find in old houses (the seller told us they refinished and flipped the wide-plank boards as long as they could, but finally had to replace them), but they’re very pretty.

• Excellent Christmas-decoration potential. The retro big-bulb Christmas lights that looked kind of tacky in our 1959 development house look super awesome and charmingly vintage/retro in this house. And I think colonial-style houses (as this one is) (you probably understood that from context, without that clarification) look especially gorgeous with a candle or wreath in each window, so there’s that to think about for future years.

• HUGE kitchen island. The kitchen design is actually inferior in many ways to our old kludged-together kitchen (we get in each other’s way more in this new kitchen, and the sink/stove/refrigerator are not set up well in relation to each other), but there is a GIANT kitchen island and it is lovely. It collects allllll the clutter, of course. But it is still lovely for all sorts of things. We had the kids’ friends over to decorate gingerbread houses (i.e., graham cracker houses), and there was room for eleven people around it, no problem, we weren’t even bumping elbows. It was also PERFECT for my wine-and-appetizers group: we had room for ALL THE APPETIZERS and ALL THE WINE, and room for all of us to stand around the appetizers and wine!

• I don’t know if it will last, but being in a new house has led to some new chore routines. I had the kids helping me before, but moving to a new house was like hitting a reset button for chore-assigning. I feel less like I’m The Kitchen Drudge, and more like part of a Clean-Up Team. Okay, the main part of the Clean-Up Team. But still.

• I don’t know if it will last, but we eat more often around the table, and that has been nice for change/variety, even though I don’t see it as a Required Family Ideal. Plus, it helps make sure the table is regularly cleared.

• In exercise news, I go up and down stairs so many more times per day, and also I walk to more places, and I walk with the kids to and/or from school. Plus, just walking around the house in a normal way is much further than walking around our old house in a normal way. The move resulted in me finding my long-lost FitBit, so I can see the clear difference in steps.

• The previous homeowner left behind all the custom curtains, and I like almost all of them. One room has black-and-white toile. Another has gold-cord-trimmed green/gold/wine tapestry. Another has a plain beige you’d think would be boring, but they seem perfect for the room they’re in, and the fabric looks so cozy/nice/quality, and the shape of the curtains is pretty.

• There is a ton of storage space. I am overwhelmed right now with where to put things because few of the storage spaces correspond to what we used to have, and not all of the storage lines up with the kind of storage we need, and a lot of the storage is unheated space up a teetery flight of stairs—but there is still quite a bit of it. This past weekend I unloaded all our cocktail glasses and wine glasses and shot glasses and vases and out-of-season mugs into the cabinets in the bonus kitchenette, and there was still room left over.

• Have I mentioned the bonus kitchenette? In the room we’re currently using as a sort of sitting room / library, there is a little corner kitchenette/bar. There is just enough room for one person to stand in it. It has some cupboards, a small sink, a dishwasher, a small microwave, a little bit of countertop, and room for a mini fridge. It also has shelves for wine/liquor, and ceiling racks for suspending wine glasses upside-down over your head.

• Pretty views out most of the windows. We’d looked at another large old house we liked, but the land all around it had been sold off and used for condos, so the views out every window (including in a large gorgeous sunroom with floor-to-ceiling windows) were Packed With Condo. Not the case at our house.

• A really nice amount of pretty sunlight. Let’s see how I feel about that in summer—but in winter, it is really nice, and heartening. Most of the day I can find a sunny place to sit.

• Our bedroom is nice and warm. The heat in the house is very irregular, but our room is toasty even when we close the heating vents. It gets a ton of sun during the day, which helps. (Again, let’s talk again in summertime.)

• We keep being pleasantly surprised by how many zones/areas there are in the house. When we had the kids’ friends over to decorate gingerbread (graham cracker) houses, kids broke off in groups after the decorating was over, and there were THREE groups of friends hanging out in three different parts of the house, but Paul and I still had a living room to sit in, and Rob could still sit at his laptop in the dining room, and we could barely even HEAR the friend groups.

• The ceilings may not all be of ideal height, and they may not be even, and they may be cracking fresh cracks with every passing day, but they are not popcorn ceilings. I didn’t know I was supposed to dislike popcorn ceilings until I watched HGTV in the waiting room three times a week while William got physical therapy on his knee a few years ago. But now that I have been taught to notice, I notice. Our old house was built in 1959 and had all popcorn ceilings.

• I may have to think twice before hanging up anything on the horsehair plaster walls, and they may be bristling with fresh cracks with every passing day, and the paint may already be peeling a little in the bathroom, making me nervous that it was painted quickly and not correctly—but at least they are all freshly-painted in colors I find pleasant! And all the trim and all the built-ins are painted in a pleasing vintage-looking white.

• Cool doorknobs throughout. Some of those cool old cut-glass ones, and some cool old ceramic ones. Wobbly, of course, but we won’t dwell on it.

• There’s a propane fireplace in the living room and I love it. I just love it. It is pretty, and it is easy, and it is cozy, and it is relaxing to gaze at, and it is warm, and it makes it possible to have one room extra-warm without having to increase the heat in the whole entire house. (The propane fireplace is one of the things Paul would like to remove. I will resist yea even unto death.)

• OUTLETS FOR MILES. Sure, it turns out some of them were wired backwards by an amateur who thought he could just do this for fun—but bygones. (I can say “bygones” in that peaceful way because we found out about the wiring/outlets at the inspection, and the seller agreed to give us a credit for them all to be fixed.) The point is that if I am in my personal sunporch room and I want to plug in an electric throw and also a phone charger and also a reading lamp and also a glitter lava lamp, I can. This was not typical of the old houses we toured, some of which had verrrrrry sketchy/sparse electrical situations.

• The cats, after an initial period of adjustment, seem to LOVE it here. They were having some territorial disputes at the old house; this house, with more square footage and more separate areas and lots of alternate/escape routes, seems to help with that quite a bit. And there are still more areas we can open up to them if we put cat-flaps in some of the doors. Plus there are so many sunny spots. Plus they can hear the mice in the ceiling and they find that mentally stimulating.

• Heat-lights in two of the bathrooms. I love them. Perhaps one bathroom fan makes unendurable squealing noises and both bathroom fans vent to the attic instead of to the outdoors (??? WHY ???), but at least there are heat-lights!

• There are Interesting Details EVERYWHERE. Our old house was the kind that gets mass-produced as part of a large neighborhood, and everything was standard and builder’s-grade. This new house has been around for two hundred years and has been altered a number of times, and there is a ton to look at and admire and wonder about. Ceiling height varies considerably. Window height and style varies considerably. Some doors have interesting old locks, and we have a big box of jumbled keys. A number of rooms are a step down or a step up from other rooms. There’s a back stairway. There’s an old room that used to be the kitchen but is now a laundry room with a bunch of very useful old kitchen cabinets. There are bricked-up fireplaces. There are a few old built-in cupboards around the corner from the recently-updated kitchen. There’s an ancient peeling cabinet in the mudroom, with an ancient herb-grinder in it and some more-recent herb-drying dowels over it. There’s a weird little hallway between two rooms, and in that hallway is a sink and mirror. There’s a door in our bedroom closet that leads to another room. More than one person, upon touring the house, has said some version of “Now my house feels so boring!” Boring is not something I have minded about our old house, but interesting is fun in its own way.

• Good neighborhood situation. We’re on a busy street, which is not ideal, but right behind our house is a whole network of interesting and not at all busy streets. Lots of people walking dogs, hardly any cars. Lots of hills and little deadend streets and pretty wooded areas and an interesting mix of older/newer houses to look at, and an official walking trail through one of the pretty wooded areas. Plus we’re within five minutes’ walk of the center of town, with restaurants and a bar and the library and the post office and the place William works and some interesting little shops. And if I need to be in two places at once, the kids can walk home from school by themselves (it still makes me Very Very Nervous because I am not used to it, but in time I hope to be completely blasé).

• The driveway is hellishly steep and, right now, in the wake of a new move and the aftermath of discovering that a dusting of fluffy snow keeps me from driving up it and that I can’t really use the garage either, feels like a personal rejection by the house of me and of my minivan—but the driveway is LARGE. You don’t have to worry about having a lot of friends over (as long as it’s not winter): there is enough space for the cars. And it doesn’t snow year-round. And one day I may not be driving a minivan. And I might be able to do something about the tires in the meantime.

• China cabinets, plural. Long have I wanted a china cabinet, and now I have TWO. One is a corner cabinet in the kitchen, which I will use to display pretty things such as my pink Pyrex bowls, and the mug I bought because it was so beautiful but it is so uncomfortable to hold. The other is a more practical cabinet tucked away where no one sees it—except someone coming and going from a personal little sunporch room. I have put my grandmother’s china in that cabinet, and so I see it every day instead of once a year when I take it out for Thanksgiving. And there is plenty of room for more pieces, if I want to add some.