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Charlie Hatton
Watertown, MA
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(Note: Once again, I'm splitting time a bit these days between the pages here and the soon-to-be-remodeled Bugs & Cranks. Since last we danced, I posted an especially dirty piece over there entitled The Green Green Grass of Home (Field).
Well, not so much 'dirty'. More 'soddy'. The filthiest thing in it is the picture caption, frankly. And it's still only PG-13. Give or take.)
Today, the missus and I went to approximately seven thousand open houses.
"All you have to do is find someone with your same tastes, similar needs, compatible budget, and who happens to want to live in your town while you live in theirs. How hard could that be, really?"
We're selling our house this spring -- hopefully -- and for the past couple of weeks, we've been trying to get a feel for the current local market. Because apparently, when you sell your house, you have to also convince someone else to sell you theirs. Seems like it'd be easier to just swap houses, when you think of it that way. All you have to do is find someone with your same tastes, similar needs, compatible budget, and who happens to want to live in your town while you live in theirs. How hard could that be, really?
After five hours of staring at other peoples' spare bedrooms and eat-in kitchens, I'm starting to think the swap idea would actually be easier. I've been on more strangers' doorstep today than a hyperactive encyclopedia salesman or a decade's worth of abandoned orphans. And I'm spent.
The most tiring thing of all, honestly, is thinking about what comes after we find a house. The packing, the moving, the unpacking -- and worst of all, the shopping. Because it's not enough to find a house. Then you've got to fill it. And your old crappy ghetto furniture that you've lived with and loved for years suddenly isn't good enough. Or won't fit. Or doesn't match the drapes that your wife says you have to buy, because the new room needs to be painted to go with the painting. Which you haven't bought yet. And had no idea the room needed, though the missus assures you it does.
And that takes me flashing back to one of the especially painful processes in moving into the current house. Namely, trying to find an effing dining room table. I didn't know we needed a dining room table. We'd never had a dining room table before -- probably because we'd never had a dining room before. I'd never had any issue eating on the couch -- or the floor, or the steps, or the sidewalk outside -- so I didn't know what the hell we needed a table for.
But I was assured, again, that it was a critical component for modern civilized life.
I asked whether we actually had to use the table. For, like, eating and stuff.
Nah, she said. But we have to have one. She said it'd help to make me look civilized. Like how I wear pants on weekdays, and eat chowder with a spoon. Usually. I bought that explanation, so we went looking for a table.
The result -- actually, just a tiny excruciating little sliver of the process -- is described in today's Werind post, If I Never See Another Hand-Carved, Claw-Footed, Sleigh-Backed Mahogany Frickin' Chair, It'll Be Too Damned Soon.
For most people, just the title would be a whole post. Me, I wanted to make the reading a little meatier than that. Not nearly as long as the shopping trip, nor certainly as long as the shopping trip felt, but there are a few hundred words there you hopefully won't find as painful as our table safari.
Especially because we came back empty-handed .
And especially because that table we bought back then is probably ghetto and too big and completely the wrong color now, and we'll have to do it all over again.
There'd just better not be anything claw-footed, sleigh-backed or mahogany sitting in those damned furniture stores. I don't want to smack a salesbitch with a solid pine table leaf. But if I have to, I'll do it.
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