Well, it's about time.

I always find it amusing when something dawns on me all of a sudden. One day, for whatever reason, clarity slaps you upside the head and you go "Oh my God, I never said thank you!" or "Oh my God, Alex's crib rungs are all dusty!" or "Oh my God, that is my ALARM going off!"

The sort of thing I'm talking about falls more into the dusty rungs category, but at least in that I'm not alone. Todd had the blinders clapped onto his face too. See, we live in a charming little house that needs a lot of little things done, but we sort of closed ourselves off to them because it was orignally purchased to be a rental. See, with rental properties you tend to want to keep everything a little more bare bones because the more money you put into fancying up a rental, the greater the likelihood of the renters absolutely trashing it. I speak from experience.

But when Alex was born, I wanted to work part time and in order to do that we had to downsize, somewhat drastically (good bye three bedroom, 2.5 bath, hello two bedroom, 1 bath), in order to keep things budget friendly. Hello, new house. And like I said, if you're going to spend a ton of money fixing a place up, you more than likely would want to spend it in a house you intend to live in for a goodly amount of time.

But there were things that needed immediate attention. The backyard, for example, used to be a literal dust bowl. Add a dog that loves to run around, and that means the house turned into a dust bowl. We have repainted all the rooms finally, we got the kitchen sink re-painted, and Todd patched the gaping hole in the hallway where there once lived a light fixture, upon which poor Todd would whack his forehead several times throughout the course of the day. You can imagine the ferocious victory with which he wrenched that sucker (I myself did something similar to a towel bar in the shower after hitting my hip against it all the time). Todd also recently scraped away all the junk that was hanging out in the caulk around the tub and repainted it. He also used a razor and scraped all the soap scum off the tile. By the way, that is the only way to take care of that problem.

When Todd went hunting, I repainted the front walkway and porch slab and my GOD it was such a face lift for the house. Before it was a faded red, painted over with a chipped and faded sage green. It looked horrible. But it was one of those things that we never thought about. The front yard is basically a hot mess anyway, and since the front door area gets constant sun beating on it, it's like a convection oven. Not pleasant. Best to just block it out of your mind.

But I'm delighted to report that it totally got Todd fired up to fix up other things. He's painting the back patio today, for example, and this holiday weekend we'll be painting the exterior of the house, if everything goes as planned. And that's very exciting stuff! If you can believe it, we opted for all that manual labor instead of a family camping trip. So, yeah, we're putting time and money into the old girl, but I figure there are some things that are just worth it, and Todd and I are two of them. It's worth it to get rid of the eyesores, to live in a decent place, and leave it for a future tenant. If they fuck it up, fine, because I won't be living there anymore.