We just watched Isle of Dogs and it was one of the most Wes Andersony things I’ve ever seen. Not appropriate for little kids, but good for older ones. There were some scenes we all went “URRRGGGG” about, like cutting up still-alive seafood, and pulling out something stuck in someone’s head (the person in question was okay) (both times) (and all animated, not real-life). Dear heaven. But really good, especially if you like Wes Anderson films, which I mostly do.
Also a good movie for warming hearts toward dogs, which brings me to my next topic. A lot has been happening here. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but Paul and I have been casually house-hunting for a couple of years. Nothing formal. Nothing decided. More like, let’s just scope out the sitch, just for fun. Just going to Open Houses or whatever, and then saying, “It’s nice, but not enough to motivate me to want to move” and/or “Sure, it’s good, but I don’t feel like I WANT it.” Subscribing to emails that let us know about new properties listed in our town. Etc.
We have lived in our current house for 17 years, and we bought it because in five months of searching, with me increasingly pregnant with our second child, it was the third of three houses in our area our agent could show us in our one-income range, and one of the others had water damage and only two bedrooms, and the other one had three bedrooms but an open concept (toddler access to EVERYTHING) and a terrible rickety add-on and the kind of stairs where a child could slip between steps and no real yard. So we bought this one, which had a terrible kitchen and an appalling bathroom and was so smoke-damaged by improper woodstove ventilation that you could see the outlines of what used to be on the walls—but it wasn’t about loving the house, it was about choosing the only sensible/possible thing that came along, and this one had three bedrooms and a good yard and potential for building stuff into the unfinished basement. And good thing we did, because I think we were the actual literal last people in our area to buy a house before the housing market went WHOOSHING up, and then soon after that there were condos selling for what we paid for our house, and then there were condos selling for half-again more than what we paid for our house.
Anyway, this house has served us well, thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of my Handy Supreme dad who, when we got Surprise Twins, added two small bedrooms and a multi-purpose room and a bathroom to the unfinished basement, and replaced a bunch of the squirrel-gnawed 1960’s windows that used to get a thick layer of ice on the INSIDE of them every winter, and knew how to replace the outlets that started SHOOTING SPARKS (!!!) shortly after we moved in, and quietly transferred over from his house to our house a bunch of shelves he’d built, and so forth.
And the thing is, now I DO love the house. But I didn’t mind Just Looking at other houses, because I felt like we didn’t get our fair share of Looking back when we WERE looking, and looking is fun. Here is the problem: Looking eventually led to Finding. But now that it has been Found, I have had multiple panicky weepy fits about Not Wanting To Move, Why Would We Want To Move, I Love This House, I Planned To Die in This House or Else in a Nursing Home Directly From This House, etc., combined with Wanting The Other House and daydreaming about the other house and so forth.
It is an OLD house. It has horsehair plaster walls, which I had never heard of. It has a barn; Paul says there will not be mice, because the barn does not store food, but Twitter confirmed what I thought, which is that old barns Have Mice. It has a loft so large I would never have to throw anything out; I could easily store a fully-decorated-and-assembled fake Christmas tree if I wanted to. I could store a Toyota if I wanted to. TWO Toyotas. THREE.
The house is big. The house is old. The house has a steep driveway, when we specifically did not want a steep driveway. The house has weird bedrooms, where two of them can only be accessed by walking through other bedrooms. The house has some of those weird old-house closets that aren’t even wide enough for a hanger; they would basically fit a broom and dustpan, nothing else. The house has two or three (I lost count) Weird Old Little Rooms of Uncertain Usage (to be converted to SWISTLE LAIR((S))??). It is the kind of house where you open a door and there is another room, and another room, and two more rooms, and a little staircase off that room, and a loft off that staircase, and a barn off that loft, and another room off the barn, and you lose track of what is what and what is where. (This is what I have claimed to love/want.) There are not really enough bathrooms for the number of bedrooms, but we are used to that and it’s a half-bath more than what we have now; and the electricity has been updated so there are lots of outlets. Also there is central a/c, and a kitchen island that could double as a guest bed. It is within walking distance of many things it would be nice to be in walking distance of, such as a park and a library and a charming shop I never go to because the parking is impossible.
Here are my biggest concerns, which are two sides of the same concern:
1. We will move, and we will hugely regret it. We will THINK we will know what we are getting into, but we are accustomed to 1960 House Problems, and this will be 1820 House Problems, and we will be so sorry. Any new house comes with a batch of Unpleasant Surprises, but this will be more like The Money Pit, with hysterical laughter and a bathtub falling through a floor and us basically being in way over our heads and now we can’t get out and we can’t sell it to anyone else because no one else is as foolish as us.
2. We will move, and we will hugely regret it. We will THINK we don’t want to live in this house anymore, but it will turn out it was the perfect house for us, and we will miss it SO MUCH. We will PINE for it! But it will be too late! Someone else will own our dear little house!! We cannot have it back!! They can do anything they want to it!! I had a literal nightmare about this.
We talked about it many times and I cried four times and then we got pre-approved for a mortgage in case we decided we wanted to buy it. Paul, who has been my boyfriend for 23 years, does not try to talk me out of Fret Fits. Instead he tells me Stories. In this case, here is the Story he told me: “We will not sell our old house right away. We will keep it for several months to get it ready to sell. And if we hate the new house and wish we hadn’t bought it, we can move back. It would be an expensive lesson—but we would NOT be stuck forever in a house we hated, and at least it would let us get all the floors refinished and walls/ceilings painted.” (The floors have needed refinishing for a decade. The walls/ceilings have needed repainting for about as long. But how do you get that done when you live in the house?)
There is virtually no chance we would actually move back; that would be a story like when people get divorced and then remarry a few months later. But this is just a Story. It is for comfort. The purpose is to Soothe, not to Solve. It is a Story I can tell myself when I am panicking. It works. A fear of Not Getting the House has creeped in, and is nudging aside the Fear of Getting the House.
But he wants to move more than I do. And he wants this house more than I do. And so I have made two Bargains. First bargain: if we move (to ANY house), we get a housecleaner every other week, so that the house stays clean and does not descend into the grubby clutter that makes me feel as if it’s too late to hire a housecleaner. Second bargain: if we move (to THIS house, which has an invisible fence and a dog run), I get a Dog Option. We don’t necessarily get a dog—but I get the OPTION to get a dog, with limited veto power on his part in regards to breed and/or particular dog. I have wanted a dog for years, and he has said no to a dog for years—but it’s possible that I only say I want a dog because I know he’ll say no. My new friend Morgan ran into this with begging for a cat: it was safe to do so, because she knew her husband would say no, so she begged and wheedled for years in comfort. But then one day he said yes, and she didn’t know WHAT to do. So I didn’t bargain for a dog; I bargained for a dog OPTION. I get a dog if I want a dog.
My terms have been accepted. We’re looking at the house again tomorrow.