Pickle juice.

Text message I tried to send: Pickles looks exhausted.

The message, auto-corrected: Pickles is jaw baskets.

Yes, indeed, she is jaw baskets.

On houses and hopes

I went through a lot to get my house.

I ended up in a lawyer's office after my first attempt to buy a house backfired badly.

The thing is, though, I love my current house. I think it was always meant to be mine, and I think that's why I went through what I did before I found a house.

I've had long weekends over the past two weeks. I toyed around my house, fixing "up" ie, de-crapifying my back two bedrooms. I tinkered around here and there, put my Christmas decorations up, and re-arranged my furniture.

I looked around my kitchen and thought, holy crap, I have a kitchen.

I have a living room.

I have another living room.

I have another living room that I'm using at my bedroom.

My bedroom and bathroom combined are bigger than my first apartment.

Holy crap, guys.

Holy crap.

My brother's old house was bought by a rental company, and they're now advertising it for rent. As I told a friend the other day, that's the problem with hometown and the housing market. The houses in the affordable price range - $80,000 to $150,000 - get snatched up by rental companies and aren't available to buy for the little people like myself.

The people I bought my house from sold it to me because the only other offer on it was an all-cash offer from a guy who had rentals. The previous homeowners wanted someone to live in it who would own it and love it as much as they did.

I will not stay in this house forever. But when I decide to sell it, it will be sold to someone who loves it and who will respect it just as much as I do.

I've brought dogs home to this house. I've cried over boys in this house. I've sweat in this house, I've bled in this house. This year, better things will happen in this house.

I'm pretty sure 2017 will be better than 2016. I'm pretty sure that 2016 and 2015 both sucked really, really bad things, but I'm certain 2017 will be better.

I know 2017 will be better. I know it, just like Lorelei knows when it's going to snow.*

*I had to put a Gilmore Girls reference in there. Ps, I HATE LOGAN. DAMMIT RORY, MAKE BETTER DECISIONS.

Personal preferences

I'm almost a year into this home ownership thing.

I'm slowly learning what I like and don't like, little by little.

What I definitely don't like: Words on my walls. Pinterest is becoming a nightmare to look at. I don't want have 'Hope' or 'Dream' or 'Wish' on my walls. I also certainly don't need it on my pillows, either.

Teamwork makes the dream work?

Oh, please.

What I do like:

These bookshelves (I like House, too)

And this DIY light

Houses

The other night, I fell asleep with my bedroom window open.

It was a little cool for it, but I decided to go for it anyway. I think one of the definitions of happiness is falling asleep on a night listening to the wind chimes on your front porch.

My dogs and I slept really well that night.

There are things about my house that I don't like. I can never keep shelves free of dust. I have to open two doors to let the dogs out. My fence stinks.

But, there are also things that I like about it. I love how cute my oldest dog looks on Saturdays as she strolls out into the living room, looks at me, yawns, then goes back to sleep beside me for a little bit.

Pugs, as it turns out, look really adorable in old houses with beautiful woodwork.

I'm still learning to get used to the weird house noises, especially at night. Last night, my blind dog started throwing a fit and barking.

I heard whatever she heard, too. I told her she was a good girl. She went back to sleep.

I have no idea what the noise was that we heard.

I might be in my 30s, I might have a full-time job, a paid off car, and a mortgage under my name, but I still get a little creeped out at sounds at night.

Don't get me started about walking through my house when it's dark at night.

This is not my dog, but I thought it was funny.

And baby makes three. Kind of.

I've been wanting another dog since I bought my house back in May.

Penny the Pug needs a friend. More specifically, I thought she needed a friend her size, that way she can have a chance of winning.

When your buddies are Collies that weigh 60-80 pounds, you can't really win in a game of tug-of-war. I mean, Penny tries, but she really needs a buddy her size so she has a level playing friend.

Yesterday, I got some really good news. My adoption application for a Pug rescue group was accepted. They called my references, my veterinarian, and I was given the go-ahead to adopt a Pug.

A girl!

She's pretty cute. I'm going to get her next weekend.

Two Pugs. Can you imagine two Pugs?

Two!

Always meant to be mine.

The process could not have been more frustrating.

It started on Saturday. My Dad and I went to get a sander, went back to my house, and started to get to work. The room I wanted to work on in particular has a wood floor that’s been painted green and white in a checkerboard pattern.

Maybe the previous homeowners played chess on the floor?

Anyway, I was excited to start on this room. Except we ran into one little slight problem.

The sander didn’t even touch the paint on the floor.

And then my shop vac didn’t work. And then I went to get another shop vac and got a ticket in the process (oops).

It was not a good day.

It turns out that the sander we got worked really well for the other small bedroom in my house. We got that room ready to go, all nice and smooth, and took the sander back.

At that point, I wasn’t planning on staining. The wood was beautiful enough that I just wanted to varnish it.

There’s one little catch. I decided to have a party over the weekend.

Meaning, there can’t be two queen sized beds and box springs in my kitchen, there can’t be kitchen chairs in my bathroom, and there can’t be nightstands and dressers blocking my hallway.

Once we got another sander, the process went a little smoother.  It was still frustrating. I mean, what color do you think sawdust is from a green floor?

It’s all over my house.

Not to mention, I ripped six sheets of sandpaper with the second sander. I was angry. I was angry enough that I didn’t want to see that stupid sander again, so I hauled it out to the curb next to the truck I was using.

I thought I could lift it out of anger. Get out of my house, stupid sander! I never want to see you again!

The thing is, though, that I couldn’t lift it.

So I sat in the back of the truck, by myself, watching the cars go by. What people in the cars saw was a very sweaty woman in her pajamas covered in sawdust. Just, you know, hanging out until help came.

That was also not a good day.

But let me tell you about the day that was eventually good.

I went to a paint store to get stain the next day. I took a sample of laminate with me because I wanted to match the color (in the rest of my house, the previous homeowners put laminate on top of hardwood.).

I thought I picked out the stain color perfect. But they wouldn’t let me buy it. They told me they were going to custom mix the color for me. They said they’d call when the stain was ready.

A few hours later, they called and I went to look at the stain.

It was beautiful!

I went home and started staining.

I started in one corner of the room. After a small section was on, I stopped and looked at it. I wasn’t really impressed. But I kept on going, and when I got about a third of the room done, I stopped and looked at it.

It was beautiful. Like, I wanted to weep.

I love wood that has a slight hint of red in it. The stain they custom made for me matched what I wanted perfectly.

It’s so beautiful, I can’t believe it’s mine.

My house buying process was messy. But when I was staining and seeing the potential in my house, I kept thinking something.

This house was always meant to be mine.

Pretty, right?

Getting to work.

Look at those pretty floors!

The other bedroom. Pretty!

Same shot as above, put with stain.

Ta da!

Pretty.

My momma taught me better than that.

I used to think all of life's problems had an answer.

When you're little and you can't figure something out, you ask Mom. She can fix anything.

In grade school, middle school and high school, teachers gave you problems that always had an answer. If you didn't know, you asked, and they helped you figure it out.

In college, professors did the same thing. If they didn't know the answer, another student probably did.

It's a little different in my grown-up professional life.

I'm starting to realize -- no, I've known this for quite a while now -- that no one else has the answers to my problems.

I have to decide what to do. And for some of questions, I don't have an answer.

I don't understand why houses, relationships, promises and other things fall through. I don't understand why I can't just make one single plan for my life and have everything happen on time the way I want it to.

I don't have the answer for these things when they happen. And that's really frustrating sometimes.

I've been told more than once that my expectations aren't reasonable. That makes me giggle, because I honestly expect things to be 100 percent successful. And then when they fail, I get shocked and upset every single time.

I don't like failing. Failing, and not having answers, are both really frustrating things.

-----

I looked at houses in December, a day after my other one fell through.

I was heart broken. I cried so much I didn't think I could cry any more. At the time I thought, you know what? I'm not going to let this break me.

I'm going to kick some grass over that shit and move on.

I moved on to a much better house. If you can't tell, this house business means a lot to me.

I can't even describe how much it means to me. It bothers me when other people have what I want and don't treat it with respect.

House, I will do you right. I will fix you when you break.

I promise.

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On a happier note, I get the keys to my house next week. Due to my philosophy of hating spending money, I'm pretty sure my closet project is a go now.

Hooray! I'm looking forward to taking a hammer to the old closet and tearing the crap out of it.

House therapy!

Major life problems

The house I'm in the process of buying is more than 100 years old.

It's 115 years old, to be exact.

I love some things about it, and other things I want to change immediately.

The thing, though, is that I can't make all of the changes right away. Sure, I can tear off wallpaper and rip up cat carpet, but the rest of the changes are likely going to happen gradually over time.

In case you do not know me very well, I have a pretty severe case of No Patience. I don't want to wait to make changes, I want them to happen now.

Now.

NOW!

(Please note, I don't even own the thing yet, and I'm already thinking this.)

Speaking of owning the thing, I went to the bank today. This is the second time I've filled out house paperwork, and as with a lot of other things in life, it's a lot less scary the second time around.

I signed papers for about 30 minutes today and had to promise the bank that I'm not a terrorist (true story).

Now that the process is moving forward, I can start thinking about my major life problem, which is the point of this here blog post.

The house is old and beautiful. It has beautiful wood trim and other woodwork in the house. My major life problem comes in here: All the cool kid designs nowadays call for white trim.

I'm not going to paint beautiful old trim white.

You don't paint wood, people! You just don't.

My challenge is making the house cute, like a young(ish) person lives there, and not like grandma lives there (no offense to grandmas).

How do you make the woodwork pop, in a good way, without it looking old?

Hmm.

I like blue and green paint for some of the smaller rooms. But for the main living areas?

Who knows.

When I watch the home renovation shows on television, I turn my nose up at all of the rooms and houses with white trim.

I've taken to Pinterest to solve my major life problem. I created a board specifically for paint colors that go with wood trim, and another board for photos of pretty rooms in old houses.

Pinterest is amazing, people.

Here are some pins I like so far.

I LOVE THIS COLOR!

A little love.

It could be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

When I first walked in to the house I just bought, my jaw dropped. I walked around in awe and I didn't want to leave it.

It has a spiral staircase, an upstairs bedroom that could be a cute craft room, a basement that's not totally creepy, and possibly the most beautiful woodwork I've ever seen.

The house was built in 1900. Holy beautiful, Batman!

The homeowners actually lived in it and took pretty good care of it. It wasn't a rental property, which is important.

I was kind of in shock that I could actually afford it. I went home after I walked through it the first time and crunched the numbers.

Hey, it could actually work.

Sign me up!

I didn't even try to have a poker face. I loved it instantly.

My home buying process has been kind of messy. The word messy might actually be an understatement. There was a house in my price range with a hole in the basement wall big enough for a tiger to hide in. Then there was that house that shook when my Dad jumped up and down in it.

Sigh.

Then there was one with a bad roof, a cute one with a bathroom floor that was about to cave in, the basement with the creepy rape room, the knob and tube wiring running rampant in this town, and one house that probably had dead bodies hiding in it somewhere.

House hunting in my price range is rough, let me tell you.

Then there was the house I tried to buy and backed away from, which involved lawyers, anxiety medicine, and vacationing out of the country with possible legal doom awaiting me when I got back.

Ha, ha. I don't think I've ever done anything the easy way in life. Why start now?

I don't expect something perfect, but I wanted to find something livable. A good roof is important, a few bedrooms would be nice to grow into, a designated craft room would be nice, and a fenced in backyard for my fur child is ideal.

This house was the best one I've seen yet. Through all the messiness over the past few months, I can definitely say the wait was worth it.

I have a beautiful house!

I don't mind tackling a few projects. Carpet needs to be ripped out of one of the bedrooms. I'm not a cat person, but I can smell cats a mile away.

Ew. That carpet has to go.

I'm hoping there's wood underneath. If that's the case, I'll sand that bedroom and the one beside it, then stain the floors to match the rest of the house.

As much as I love the grandma rose wall paper in one of the bedrooms, that's probably going to go away, too.

I'm also going to take down some really, really ugly 'closets' and see if I can make it look better. I call them 'closets' because, really, they're just atrociousness that someone tried to paint to look normal.

You can't hide atrocious. You just can't.

Could I (and by I, I mean my Dad) bring the washer and dryer upstairs, and hide it in a closet in one of the bedrooms?

Hmm.

Like I said, I don't mind projects. That spiral staircase could use some love, too. With some cleaning and a little love, this house is going to be a pretty amazing place to live.

Hooray, I have a house!

My realtor sent me a text message yesterday morning that was pretty cool. She said she wanted to visit me in a year to see what I've done with the house.

I've been waiting years for a house to pour a little love into. This is really the only thing I've wanted since college.

Hooray!

(Bonus points: My realtor knows my family pretty well. When I went in to sign the papers, she told me stories about my grandparents, who died when I was young. It's cool hearing about them because I don't remember them. Small world, right?)