This Old House

Aislyn is all set with the vaccine. She was very brave. The Rite Aid pharmacist didn’t have much of a bedside manner, but at least he wasn’t all snippy and judgy like the Walmart pharmacist, or tech, or whatever she was.

I thought I might clean Desmond’s room today, so he can have friends over, but I think it may be too hot. It’s 95 degrees right now, and his room is not air conditioned and it’s on the only sunny side of the house. His window doesn’t allow for air conditioning. It’s a crank window.

A couple of years ago, we spent $200 on what we thought was a windowless air conditioner but turned out to be just a really ineffective swamp cooler. It’s in the basement.

We looked into putting an AC in his wall, but it turns out it would cost tens of thousands of dollars. We just don’t have that. My therapist recommended a mini splitter for a couple of thousand. We need to look into it.

There are things we didn’t really worry about or think of when we bought this house. We fell in love with it immediately, and nothing else mattered. It’s been a good home, but there are some things I’d change if I had the power:

• Desmond’s hot room
• The driveway is too narrow to park the cars side by side. So when Derek parks behind me on his office days, we have to “flip cars” so I can get to work the next day.
• The backyard is basically a narrow strip of ground, which drops off sharply into the woods, but the woods is actually a bunch of broken trees that are too dangerous to explore. We said we’d put up a fence, but we never did.
• There’s a crawl space behind the dining room wall where small animals get into to both live and die.
• The ceiling in the dining room is falling apart in one corner from water damage.
• There’s a deck off the dining room, but no stairs to the backyard from it.
• The Trex railing on the deck off the master bedroom is broken in one spot, making it unsafe for the kids to be out there.
• The door to that deck is jammed shut, anyway.
• The whole house is full of old timey boob lights.
• There is no outdoor lighting at all.
• Because of the age of the house (1890), the floors sag. In fact, I was nine weeks pregnant with Aislyn on our first walk through and I got vertigo going down the hallway. It wouldn’t bother me except it’s hard to put furniture flush against the wall.
• We think the studs in the wall are metal; not wood, so it’s hard to hang stuff securely.
• Aislyn’s room and the stairs are carpeted. I lived with ugly, dirty carpeting for like 16 years before moving here.

On the other hand, it stays cool downstairs all summer because we’re mostly in the shade, the color scheme is perfect, most of the house is hard wood laminate or poured concrete, we have a giant flatscreen with surround sound, huge upstairs bedrooms, a walk-in closet, an office nook, and we’re a 5-minute walk from downtown.

And most of the issues are probably fixable.

And it’s home.