The Never Ending Story

Back about six years ago, we bought the house we are living in. Six? Seven? I'm honestly not sure as I'm horrible with dates. I should ask my step-mom, she writes down EVERYTHING. She can tell you when our litter of kittens were born, when I had my tubes tied, when and why Dean got his first round of stitches, probably even when I last made meatloaf. But I digress.

We bought an old farmhouse. It has great bones. That's about all that doesn't need some work. I'm serious. The people who rented before we bought it had no respect for the house. AT ALL. The original and beautiful hardwood floors have paint on them. Actually, everything had paint on it when we first moved in. And not properly applied paint, in case you were wondering.

One of the bedrooms on the main floor was painted in the most nauseating shade of Pepto-Bismol pink. Complete with a badly painted castle on the wall. The other bedroom on the main floor had a black and white city skyline motif, complete with the Batman symbol. Upstairs, the smallest bedroom had virulent colored hand prints, signatures, senseless quotes, and what looked like Rorschach tests all over. The other room was a vomit-inducing shade of pink/purple/mauve, with lilac trim. Sense a theme here?

It was also filthy. Not your everyday filth either. I'm talking right up there with Hoarders filth. As in, we rented a dumpster and filled it three times. No they didn't take their shit with them. They up and left for parts unknown.

Anyway, the point of all this is...this house needs lots of work and TLC. I'm fairly certain when we finally get it all done, one of us will expire the very next day. It's really going to take that long. Why? Because we decided we're going to do all the work we possibly can ourselves. It's cheaper that way, and this stuff doesn't come cheap. And there's always something to buy that's more important than household cosmetics. Like buggies full of food and an endless supply of new shoes for the teenagers that insist on growing.

The first thing we did, after the massive clean-out and sterilization was to blitz through and paint everything white. I've now decided I despise white walls at a level that is unnatural and quite possibly unhealthy. They are boring. They are lifeless. And they show every speck of dirt, glob of dog slobber, smear of whatever is on my kid's hands that must always touch the walls, and every gut pile of every swatted fly and spider to ever have the misfortune of entering through the door that never gets shut. Yes, I scrub and clean, but it's like it's some sort of haunted house where whatever splotch of evil-induced blood is removed comes right back the next day. It gives me nightmares.

I have had a mental list of all the things I want to do to the house. Some of those lists even get written down. Then the list gets lost, and I forget all my great ideas. Last night, about 1:00 am (thank you insomnia) inspiration struck. I'll find an app, get it all written down and saved on my phone. Voila! I finally settled on Tasks+. One of the drawing points in the description was that it was intuitive. Pfft! If it's intuitive, shouldn't it know exactly what's in my head and transcribe it verbatim? Apparently not.

Anyway, I now have a nicely organized list of what I'd like to get accomplished this summer. Realistically, I'm going to have to quit the job that's going to pay for all this just to get it all done. It might be worth it to get rid of the harvest gold and avocado green linoleum that's still in my kitchen.