First Time Home Buyer

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To the Buyers of Our House

Welcome to this house, this lovely wonderful house that still feels like mine even though it is yours. Even though the rooms are now empty of everything but paint, as though I have traveled back in time twelve years to when my husband and I were just beginning the life we build in this space, imagining the years ahead with no idea what they would hold. (They held so much joy.)

I wanted to share with you a few things about this house, things that are too wordy or too silly to share through the mediator that is our realtor. Things that probably don’t need to be said – you will either find them out on your own, or they won’t matter to you one iota. But things I want to say. 

I’m sorry for all the things that are wrong – it’s an old house, and it has creaks and cracks. The windows are draftier than I’d like, and I wish I’d replaced them five years ago, for you and for us. We tried our best to keep this house in good condition, and we tried to fix the things that we would want to be fixed before we moved our family into a new house. It’s amazing how you live with something for so long and it becomes invisible, or just a thing you accept as you accept the bad with the good in anything you love, like how your spouse snores when he has a cold but refuses to take cold medicine or how your best friend gets so maudlin and depressive when she watches a specific movie but still insists on watching that movie once a month at least. These little flaws are so glaringly huge now that we are turning this house over to you, and I hope they seem less huge to you, or that they disappear quickly beneath all the good this place has to offer.

Our refrigerator, as you know from the disclosures we posted, is “functional but quirky.” It probably needs to be replaced, but I couldn’t bear buying a new fridge when this one does the essentials of what a person needs a fridge to do. It holds a lot of food and it keeps things cold and it looks very lovely in the kitchen. But it is a little quite needy. I don’t envy you the mornings you’ll find the meat drawer adhered to the bottom of the fridge with ice and have to remove large chunks with a butter knife and your hands. Will I miss the little musical chortles, as the fridge asserts its presence in the household? I don’t know. 

The back door sticks a little, when it’s humid.

The oven is quite slow to heat. Everything will take longer to cook than you think it will. Especially the Thanksgiving turkey. (ESPECIALLY THE TURKEY.)

The carpets are old. They were old when we moved in. We tried to take care of them, but – as you’ll note from a few bright pink splotches that no amount of scrubbing can remove – we wanted to wait to replace them until our child was old enough not to ruin new carpet, and we have not yet reached that age. Perhaps these carpets will last until your kids are that age. (Do kids reach that age? One can hope.)

These may seem like a lot of problems, but for me – and I hope, soon, for you – they are outweighed by the joy this house has brought us. 

Can you hear the echoes of laughter and singing? There have been so much of both these past dozen years.

I love the big sliding glass doors in the living room, through which you and your children can watch this little pocket of nature. I’ve always marveled that so many creatures amble through the yard in our urban-edge-of-suburban neighborhood. We’ve seen opossums and raccoons, skunks and groundhogs, innumerable deer and squirrels and rabbits. There’s a chipmunk who likes to come sit on the step and contemplate the world. A red-tailed hawk that will alight on the top of the swing set and contemplate the chipmunk and its many options for dinner. Cats will wander through, sometimes yowling for some action. Very occasionally, the neighbor’s dog will escape through the hedges into this yard – a sighting which always filled my child with delight. My daughter and I spent the bulk of her first three months in front of these windows, looking outside at the grass and trees and sky, naming all the wonderful things in the world, watching squirrels tumble around in the grass and regard one another from gravity-defying positions on the trunk of the enormous backyard oak.

The primary bedroom in this house is enormous. Believe me – after looking at dozens of houses, all much bigger than this one, there are few primary bedrooms that rival it in size. The closet is vast. The ceilings soar and it had ample room for our king bed, a dresser, a couch and two armchairs. It was big enough for our whole family to gather in on lazy weekend mornings. Even among all the furniture, it can comfortably sleep a small child (or two, I assume) who won’t return to her room after a nightmare. 

I will miss the light coming in through the bedroom’s east window. The way the glow suffuses the dormer first, while the rest of the room remains drowsy and dim.

You will, I’m sure, want to choose your own paint colors. But in case you like the ones we picked and painted ourselves – my husband up on a ladder, carefully filling in the walls up to the peaks of the ceilings – there are cans of paint in the basement. My daughter’s room is painted in February Frost, the softest shade of lilac. How carefully we chose that color, how deliberately we picked the furnishings and artwork for her room. The dormer is the perfect size for an armchair and a lamp, for reading Goodnight Moon and I Am a Bunny and all the exploits of Curious George. When your kids inevitably, too-speedily get older, as mine has, that space is the perfect size for a desk and chair, for schoolwork and coloring and LEGO building and playing with dolls. 

The back deck gets impossibly hot in the afternoons – the sun shines directly on it. But the yard itself, with its abundance of trees, is cool in the shade. The hedges and trees make it feel like a private oasis. I hope you fill the yard, as we have, with shrieks of joy from running under the sprinklers, with iridescent bubbles and bursting water balloons, with the thwack of a badminton racket hitting the shuttlecock, with songs sung while swinging, with astonishment and awe as fireflies pinprick the dark with their bright signals. 

The basement walls are red, yellow, and blue – a bold choice, I know. (And not ours.) But they grow on you. The basement itself doesn’t feel like a basement. It’s not damp or dark or creepy. It’s hosted many hours of imaginative play, overseen the conception of thousands of artworks, housed so much laughter. 

In the autumn, the tree in the southwest corner of the yard bursts into the most brilliant yellow. You can see the leaves, even now, beginning to transform. I won’t get to see its exuberant celebration of fall this year. But you will, and I hope it fills you with happiness each day until the leaves fall. 

The driveway and the sidewalks out front are perfect for chalk. Rainbows and body tracings and elaborate games of hopscotch. 

The ice cream shop is just the right distance away for a leisurely summer stroll. As you walk, you’ll pass through the school parking lot – that’s where my daughter learned how to ride her bike; maybe your kids will learn to ride their bikes there too. We spent so many hours there, circling and circling the lot. The sports field is great for running and cartwheels and games of catch. 

Keep an eye out when you drive past the school. People don’t always stop at the stop sign, even though they should.

Make sure you buy a lot (no, a LOT) of candy. Our little cul-de-sac gets a ton of trick-or-treaters. Hordes of them, surging around the block in waves. And it’s such a safe, limited trick-or-treating path for your own little ones. All the neighbors held back special treats for my daughter and she felt emboldened to go up to their stoops by herself to ask for candy.

When it snows – and it will – know that the neighbors don’t bother shoveling the sidewalks. It’s not ideal for dog walking, or accessibility, but on the plus side, there are massive hills of plowed snow for climbing and sliding down. The front yard is perfect for making angels and snow sculptures. 

I know we mentioned this briefly in the list of things we love about living here, but our neighbors are truly one of a kind. Don’t think that they are intrusive or nosy – in fact, they are very good at keeping to themselves. I prefer to think of them as aware. Many of them have known each other for decades, have raised their children together. I think they want to be involved, but won’t push. It took me many years and one effusive, extroverted child to do more than smile and wave in passing. But now these kind, generous, lovely people number among my friends. S texts me long missives about her life and is interested in the minute details of mine. F has the kindest, gentlest manner, lets my daughter walk her dog, and notifies her when tadpoles have arrived in her backyard pond; she’s offered her recycling bin if we need it, her house when our power has gone out, her car when we were filling ours over and over with boxes. L is an expert gardener who shares her fresh grown tomatoes with my daughter, who taught her to love green beans and broccoli, who lets her pet and brush and pamper her dog, who always has a gentle smile and a kind word to share. R and his wife bought Girl Scout cookies every year and offered to give Carla rides to school any time we needed it. T attended my child’s school events in the absence of a grandparent, took me out for breakfast, brings us homemade cookies, runs the neighborhood block party and is irreverent and sincere in equal parts. G and C gave me baby gifts when I was pregnant and suggested babysitters when my daughter was small and C threw her arms around me when she learned we were leaving. Everyone – everyone – knows my daughter by name, keeps an eye out for her as she rides her bike, lets her join in on family games of cornhole in the front yard, welcomes her affection for their dogs (or cats). They are your neighbors now and I hope you build the same kind of relationships with them. 

We planned our family here. We brought our baby home to this house. In this space, we’ve watched her grow and flourish. We have been so happy here. We hope the same will be true for you.

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Times I Cried Watching A League of Their Own

Carla and I have been working our way through some of the family movies you suggested. So far, we’ve done Freaky Friday, in which I think Lindsay Lohan is excellent. Bend it Like Beckham which was more relationship-heavy than I remembered (and, dare I say, sort of boring?). Newsies, which has a banging soundtrack, and to which Carla said, “Why aren’t there any girl characters?” (She’s not wrong; by my count, there are four total women in the entire movie.) 

Most recently, we dove into A League of Their Own. I started crying pretty much right away. I don’t recall it being a tearjerker, do you? The tears welled up so often that I started making a list. (Um, mild spoilers if you have somehow not yet seen this absolute masterpiece of a movie.)

  • When Marla’s dad blamed her lack of femininity on himself, because he raised her alone after his wife died
  • When Marla left her dad, who was so supportive of her baseball prowess, but is now all alone
  • When Shirley Baker couldn’t find her name on the list, and then when another player figured out that Shirley couldn’t read and helped her find her name and they all cheered
  • When all the women were so excited to be chosen as members of the All American League
  • When Doris talked about how her boyfriend made her feel less-than because she can play ball
  • When Mae said “they ain’t closing me down”
  • When the Black woman threw a ball to one of the Peaches and nodded to the Peaches in a way that said, “Yes, I know I should be among you and it’s super shitty that I’m not simply because of the color of my skin.”
  • When the stands were full of cheering crowds
  • The first time the Peaches sing Evelyn’s song in the locker room 
  • When the telegram guy comes into the locker room with the telegram for Betty Spaghetti
  • When Dottie sobs with relief that the telegram wasn’t about Bob, and with worry for the potential that the next one might have his name on it
  • When Bob shows up at Dottie’s door and she can’t believe he’s there, in person, alive
  • When Dottie says “Can we just hold each other for the rest of our lives?”
  • When Jimmy gives Dottie the “baseball gets inside you” speech
  • The entire portion of the film devoted to the series when Dottie is up at bat against Kit, and Kit so fiercely wants to win and Dottie is so stoic and unflappable
  • When Dottie drops the ball and Kit’s team wins
  • When Dottie tells Kit the things she won’t miss from baseball and hugs Kit and tells her she loves her
  • When Old Dottie tells Old Marla she lost her husband just that winter
  • When Old Stillwell tells Old Dottie his mom died

I’m pretty teary these days. I always tend to get emotional around Carla’s birthday (although less so the past few years, which I thought was a good trend; maybe “turning ten” feels like such a big deal, it’s bringing up extra stuff?). I cannot believe she’s hitting double digits. I cannot believe I’ve known her for a full decade. I cannot believe she is about to head into her final year of elementary school. She brings me so much joy and fills my life with so much light and love and energy and glitter – literal and metaphorical – and I just want time to slow down. 

Some people try to talk me out of these feelings. It’s good that Carla is growing up. It’s what she should be doing. It’s better than the alternative. And to those people I say: yes. You are right. I am so proud and overwhelmed by happiness that I get to watch this person grow and change and become ever more herself. It is a precious gift and one that I do not take for granted. 

And yet I am unabashedly sentimental about Carla of yesterday. I want to feel unborn Carla kick against my hand pressed to my stomach. I want to cradle fresh-baked-loaf-of-bread Carla in my arms and watch her head loll, milk-drunk, against my shoulder. I want to trail toddler Carla down the sidewalk, stopping as she points out every acorn, every leaf, every ant with wonderment and glee infusing her squeaky toddler voice. I want to watch kindergarten Carla spin in her twirly skirt and second grade Carla slide down a snow-covered slide and fourth grade Carla play her guitar. I want all of these things at once, just as much as I want to see what middle school and high school and college and parent Carla will be like. I can hold both of those things – the joy and nostalgia, the excitement for what is yet to come and the grief for what no longer is – in my heart and I can give myself space to feel it all.

We also watched A League of Their Own on the day we put in an offer on a new house. I could feel it, that this was OUR new house. It has everything we could want – a mudroom! a crafting space! room for so many books! – and more. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood, with kids Carla’s age in houses on either side of the house and across the street (the one thing our wonderful current neighborhood lacks is kids her age). It has walking trails and ponds and a playground. And there are so many dogs, you guys. So many dogs. It’s pretty close to perfect, and we put in a competitive offer, and I had a good feeling we would get it, but then we had to wait. Watching A League of Their Own was as much a way to distract myself as it was exposing Carla to the great films of my youth. So I’m sure at least some of the crying was less about the characters’ situation and more about the opposing forces of wanting something so much while also being deeply afraid of letting go of the wonderful thing I already have. 

Because when we say hello to a new house – a house we want, and love – we have to say goodbye to the wonderful house we live in now.

It’s just a house. But. This house is so inextricably tied up with Carla. With Carla and the rapid passage of time. 

My husband and I decided, here, in this house, that we wanted a baby. I walked from my bathroom down the hall to my husband’s home office and announced I was pregnant. We painted our baby’s room the perfect shade of pale purple and carefully chose art for her walls. We brought baby Carla home to this house. I slept on the floor in front of her crib countless times. I sat with her on the carpet in the living room, pointing out the sliding glass doors to the wonderful goings on in the yard: the squirrels and bunnies frolicking in the grass, the sun moving over the lawn and peeking through the hedges, the leaves of the oak tree shifting overhead. She learned how to walk here, how to ride a bike, how to swing and blow bubbles and do multiplication. This home was our refuge during the lockdown of 2020. It’s housed ten thousand make-believe games, a hundred thousand art projects, countless hours of singing. How can I leave this house when it’s so full of Carla? So full of versions of Carla that exist only in memory and the molecules of these walls?

Letting go – even when it is a good thing, even when it is the way things should be – is so hard for me. Maybe it is hard for you, too. If not, I envy your ability to leap across the gap to the next thing, confident that you will find footing on the other side. 

As always with anything: Things could change, things could fall apart. As it stands now, we close on our new house in July and will likely move in August or September. This will be Carla’s last birthday in this house, the house she’s lived in her entire life. I am so excited. I am so sad. I hold both of these feelings at once in my heart.

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The Kitchen Mystery Revealed (+ Giveaway Winner Also Revealed!)

The day before my parents were to arrive, I decided to begin some deep-cleaning projects that should really only be started when a person has many, many days in which to make a huge mess and then slowly restore order.

But perhaps you understand the intense and gripping panic of not wanting your mother to open the door to your pantry and think, “Has my child never thrown a single thing away in her life?”

Tidying the pantry was indeed one of my projects. I began by throwing out all the expired food. (We had a bag of chia seeds that puzzled me; have I ever used chia seeds? Turns out they expired in 2016.) Then I re-ordered the shelves, so that the breakfast foods that had migrated onto three shelves were now neatly arrayed in their own breakfasty area. Then I got rid of things that I knew we weren’t going to eat, like the box of fennel seed crackers my mother-in-law donated to us earlier this fall. Then I consolidated things: two boxes of Ritz crackers could be combined into one. Two tins of oatmeal could also be combined. And we had a jar of couscous that was only a quarter full, and two boxes of only recently expired couscous that I could add to the jar. 

First, I opened the jar and gave it a sniff. We haven’t had couscous in awhile. The jar smelled distinctly stale. 

It was such a little bit of couscous. I tossed it into the sink. Then I ran the disposal, just for good measure, and moved along with my day. 

Finally, the pantry was clean and neat – so clean and neat that even my husband remarked upon it when he first saw it. But that was later. After. 

At some point, I went over to the sink to wash my hands. The water didn’t fully drain, so I pressed the switch to run the disposal. 

A geyser of couscous flecked water erupted from the non-disposal side of the sink, getting couscous and who knows what other bits of old food all over the counter, the window, the little corner draining board where we set the Scrub Daddy and dish brush. Ew.

But then… the water didn’t drain. It simply stayed in the sink. I ran the disposal some more. You need to run water while you’re running the disposal. The sinks continued to fill with couscousy water. 

I have no idea why the Scrub Daddy remains so CHEERFUL.

At this point, I understood.

While I know (from bitter experience) that you cannot stuff potato peels, carrot peels, onion skins, celery, or other undigestible food matter into the disposal, I had forgotten that couscous is not a small dry grain that can be easily ground up by the blades of the disposal. It is a PASTA, that EXPANDS when it is wet. 

I had broken the disposal. Right before my parents were to arrive. For Thanksgiving, a holiday during which my disposal does A Lot of work. Cue hyperventilation and tears. 

Immediately, I called the plumber. In a tear-choked, panic-strained half-sob, I explained my problem and that I had guest coming the next day, please send help! The very kind dispatcher said they could put me on the schedule for tomorrow or the next day. As though there was a choice. TOMORROW, I said. 

The Scrub Daddy continued to grin up at me, taking far too much enjoyment from my pain. My sinks were unusable. Even for hand-washing. They were disgusting, the water in them cloudy, bits of food and couscous afloat. 

I opened the under-sink cabinets and that’s when I discovered the leak. Water was oozing out of one of the pipes and onto the bottom of the cabinet.

I removed everything to the counters.

Even in the midst of disaster, the urge to blog remains unrepressed.

Fortunately, the leak wasn’t a big one. It was just… a gentle ooze. I cleaned everything and then stuck a towel under the pipes. 

Then I wandered aimlessly around the kitchen for awhile, texting my husband. 

This is exactly the kind of text you want to receive from your spouse while you are AT WORK and can do nothing about it. Probably you will be shocked to hear this, but I may be a bit dramatic at times.

He wanted me to remove the fluid from the sink… but… HOW?

The panic was beginning to subside. A bit. So I googled. And found a video where some other poor idiot had messed up his sink and was now recording the fix for posterity and clicks. It looked… doable. Gross, but not impossible. Simple, really. You just disconnect some of the pipes from one another, clear out the clog, put everything back together, and you’re good to go.

At this point, the plumber texted me. They said something like, “We are going to try to get a plumber out to see you tomorrow if we can.” I seem to have deleted the text, so the exact wording eludes me. But it was not a confidence builder. It implied that I might be sitting here with my clogged, couscousy sinks until well past Thanksgiving.

The possibility of no plumber strengthened my resolve to Do Something myself. 

I gently tried loosening one of the joints in the pipe. The leak intensified. So I went on a search for a container for the water. My bucket didn’t fit under the pipe situation, so I located a bunch of large-ish food storage containers. Then I had a stroke of genius and discovered we had a large aluminum casserole pan (the kind in which you bake food for new moms) in the freshly tidied pantry, so I got that out and set it on the towel under the pipes. 

The pan is the correct size and shape, but it is Very Flimsy.

I turned off all the water. I unplugged the disposal and hung the cord up over the cabinet door, away from any water contact. I figured out how to separate two of the pipes from one another, very slightly, and I was able to drain the water from the sinks by holding the two sides apart. It was hard on my arms, but it really helped control the flow of water. Every so often, I would pour the contents of my aluminum pan into my bucket (it was too flimsy to hold much), and then dump the bucket in the toilet. 

Once the sinks were clear, I reconnected the water and tried running it through the pipes again. The sinks immediately filled up with water and I had to drain them again. Once re-drained, I reconnected the disposal and tried running it. The disposal seemed to be working, but again the sinks filled up. Relieved, I felt confident I was dealing with a clog and not a broken disposal. Surely unclogging a pipe would cost less to fix than replacing the disposal.

But now that I’d had luck draining the sinks, I wondered if I could do more.

Perhaps I could unclog the pipes by myself.

T

My main concern was breaking the disposal/pipes/sink more than they were also broken. So I called my father to see if he thought it was something I could tackle myself, or if I could wait for the plumber.

When you are driving at high speeds on the freeway, getting a frantic call about home plumbing repairs from your middle-aged child probably isn’t ideal. Although who knows. Maybe it was just as entertaining as an audiobook.

His first suggestion was that I use a plunger to try to push the clog along… but that didn’t work. It was clear that I needed to remove the clog directly from the pipes. Communicating by text via my mom – my dad said he thought I could do it. 

Supplies: A wrench big enough to loosen the nuts holding the joints together. A bucket or pan. Done and done. 

He had me sent pictures of the pipes to my mom, so he could figure out which way I needed to turn the nuts. (I don’t know why he wanted to be sure; I kind of thought I would try it one way and then if it didn’t work, I would try it the other way. But when you are asking your parent for plumbing guidance, you do what he tells you.) He told me which direction to turn, and I used my tool to unscrew the nuts. I have no idea if I am using the right terminology at all. I complained via text that my tool wasn’t very effective, and my dad asked for a photo of it. I sent it to him and he told me I was not using a wrench, I was using pliers. But they should probably work. 

And they did.

I got all of the nuts off the joints, I was able to clean out the clog, reattach everything, and run water through the disposal. It took me nearly THREE HOURS from clogging the sink to de-couscousing everything and putting it all back together. But I did it. 

Here’s the text I sent to my husband:

Here’s the text I sent to my mother, who, I will remind you, was a passenger in a car my father was driving, TO MY HOUSE from their home across the country, this entire time.

It is very, extremely satisfying to resolve a problem. Especially, I would wager, when you are unaccustomed to both the type of problem and the methodology necessary to resolve it. It wasn’t easy, but it was simple and the result was wildly gratifying.

And the repair has held ever since, with no additional leaks. Even through Thanksgiving.

When I picked up Carla from school that day, I was so high on my experience – gleeful! triumphant! – that I told her all about the clog and my newfound plumbing acumen. I handed her my phone so she could look at the photos as I talked.

She was delighted by the story. I spared no detail. She was an ideal audience: rapt, full of questions. She loves to help my father build and repair things, so I think she quite enjoys DIY content.

“And I fixed it! All by myself!” I concluded.

“No you didn’t,” she said. “Grandpa helped.”

Okay. Fair. 

Still looking at the photos, she said, “I have one question Mommy.”

Yes?

“Why did you use pliers instead of a wrench?”

Okay, Carla. Next time YOU can fix the clog. 

As you will recall, I introduced this little experience with a guessing game and an associated giveaway. It was so fun to read everyone’s guesses about what happened. So many of you have had similar experiences, and I feel such kinship with you all. Also: I am VERY GLAD it was not mice. 

The winner of the mystery giveaway is Gigi Rambles! Gigi, I will email you for your address. (And yes, you are not imagining that this is different than originally posted — I completely ignored the previous winner’s desire to opt out of the giveaway. Reading comprehension, folks! It’s a good thing!)