Our House Is A Very, Very, Very Fine House

So, we bought a house! And that is exciting. And now we live in the house! And that is exciting but also terrifying. Mainly because I have watched too many episodes of Criminal Minds, which has caused me to have a minor heart attack each time I hear an unfamiliar noise.

The first month of home ownership has been weird. Mainly because most of our days are spent going through the house wondering aloud, “HOW COULD ONE FAMILY BE SO DIRTY?” And we’re not talking about us (thankfully), we’re talking about the previous owners, who I am sure were lovely people, but man, they did not clean well. To clean the hood of the stove, we had to use a razor to scrape up all of the collected grease. It was incredibly disgusting but oddly satisfying, like when you finally extract that blackhead you’ve watched grow. Yes, that is a gross analogy, but so is scraping up years of accumulated and solidified grease, dirt, and tobacco.

On the plus side, now we have a super clean kitchen. For the most part, anyway; there always seems something new to scrub. It’s incredible.

It’s also interesting trying to redefine yourself in a space that someone else designed. An apartment is different; you get standard, run of the mill cabinets, closets, and outlets, but in a house, you inherit the aesthetic of the owner’s before you. I have more outlets than I could have ever dreamed possible (which is amazing, believe me, there are no complaints), but they are all in weird areas (the ceiling, the center of a wall, etc.), and most frustratingly, oddly designed cabinets.

Doing the big stuff is easy – patching holes, painting, cleaning – that requires little thought beyond choosing the paint and cleaning supplies. But redefining a customized space to suit your needs is tricky. I’m trying to figure out the best layout of our things, which inevitably raises questions, such as:

• Where should the utensils go?
• Do we separate the spices from the baking items?
• Why aren’t the cabinets tall enough to fit my rice container?
• Where do I put my cookbooks?

It’s all a mystery, and because I am such a perfectionist, it means that our things have been moved many, many times over.

At least Evrill loves the house. The first day that we brought her here, she hid in a closet the entire time, shaking because all of the fire alarms had dead batteries and were chirping like mad. It was quite an event: we ran around the house looking for every possible alarm and ripped them down as fast as we could. No matter how thorough we thought we were, there was always another alarm that we had somehow missed. Now, she enjoys being queen of her castle – there are just so many new places for her to lie down!