Things That Make Me Happy in the House

It’s been a difficult time emotionally, us moving into the house. Aside from our worries about how much money it will cost to renovate it and then to keep up it, moving into the house cements the fact that we’re no longer on the road in a real way. We’re not just staying in an apartment while we figure things out, now. And I don’t mean to imply that we know exactly what we’re doing yet, but we are in the house right now, that’s for damned sure.

For me (and I’m sure for Tracy even more), it drives home the feeling that we’re trading experiences for things. Yuck, double yuck. So, there’s been a lot of sadness around this move.

In response, I’m writing about the things (yes, they are mere things) that make me happy in the house. This will be part photo essay, part scribblings. Note that, as of today, we’ve been in the house for a full week. Ha! I realize this is a baby list that I hope will grow strong and tall.

iRobot Rosie

A Roomba is among the many things we found in the house when we moved in. She (I’ll get to why she’s a “she” in a sec) had been in a long-neglected closet with a shelf that had fallen on top of her, so probably overlooked. There were so many items left, though, that surely this was on purpose? In any case, we’re claiming her. We bought a charger online, learned about her ways through trial and error, and voila, we have a lovely robot vacuum now.

I named her Rosie after the Jetson’s robot cleaning lady. Not only does she provide us entertainment as we watch how she navigates the room and deals with obstacles and gets Banjo slightly worried when she drives in circles around her food dish, but she vacuums under the bed. Rosie, I am grateful we found you and breathed new life into you.

Stairs

I know, I know, these are going to be exhausting at one point, and maybe, if we live here long enough, I won’t even be able to use them. But right now they are a thrill to me. I can walk around upstairs for ages in the mornings, opening drapes and puttering with what needs organizing. Then I walk downstairs, and look! There’s a whole nother world I can putter around in, there, too!

As for carrying things up and down all the time, I can’t laud my own idea enough, to keep my market basket on either of the two landings and always take it up and down with me and put away whatever’s in it. I am brilliant.

So Much Space

I’m used to having to put every single thing we own away in a bin after using it, then having to look for a bin (sometimes several) to find the next thing I want to use. Here, I have so much space that I can store things not crammed into bins like Tetris items but on shelves where I can see them and not have to move something else to get to them.

Plus, I can display things! Not that I have a lot to display, but still. Maybe one day I will.

Misc Items

I can take a bath in a tub where people’s feet don’t stand every few days. Never in my life have I had that luxury. (I’m still having to take baths to deal with my restlessness as I tweak my meds, but that’s okay, it’s not where I also stand with dirty feet.)

I have a fairly sturdy walk from the bedroom to the bathroom in the middle of the night, unlike in the trailer where I had to step over Banjo. I still have to step over her here, plus the floor is especially unlevel right in my midnight path, but those are all an improvement in the sleepy bathroom trip experience.

A Washer and Dryer of My Own!

The setting looks miserable, but believe me when I say I do not care—I am thrilled with these two machines. For one thing, they are fancy! There are so many freaking dials and settings and programmable doohickies. I guess I could download the guides for them, but so far it’s been fun learning by trial and error. For another, the washer’s top is glass, so I can watch the washing magic happen! There’s also a timer to tell me about when my laundry will be done!

It’s like a miracle down in that basement, so much that I totally love it down there. Yes, I use a box for a trash can and another box for a shelf and boxes for a carpet. One thing we have a lot of is boxes.

I’m in the process of cleaning all the cobwebs out of the basement with the machine vac Tracy bought at an estate sale (it’s a full-house basement, so there are a lot of cobwebs). I also took the ancient drapes down and washed them, then tried to put them back up with more than thumbtacks and tape, which was among the previous mounting methods. I LOVE IT down there in that creepy basement with my new (to me) washer and dryer.

Hacks from Living in a Small Space

We sure are good at figuring out how to live in this weird house, so far. For example, the room in the back is kind of a mud room, so I’ve been hanging up our multiple hanging storage doodads from the trailer.

There’s a strange room beside it that might hold a stacked washer and dryer if we renovate, so we turned that into a coat closet by adding an adjustable shower curtain. Tracy’s in the process of other hacks, as well.

My latest hack resulted in me figuring out I can have a workout room! This is the guest room (for now, at least), and I’d put my yoga mat in there thinking until the weather warms up that might be a good place to do yoga. Well, we bought these cool interlocking mats for the basement to go in front of the washer and dryer so I can drop clothes and not have them be immediately covered in cobwebs and 100-year-old bits of mortar. But, look! The mats are gonna be stellar for working out on top of!

So, the guest room is for real now a workout room. If we renovate, we’ll need this to be the living room, and after that we’ll buy a real bed for guests and put y’all either downstairs in the new bedroom or upstairs where our bedroom is right now. Whatever, look! I have a workout room! With a box as a table, but hey, that’s my decorating mojo right now.

Many, Many Windows

This house is blessed with many windows, all over the place. I will need to wash them (soon, too), and figure out window treatments that look good in each room, but right now I’m enjoying buying plants for them, and opening and closing the drapes as a ritual each day.

Look, it’s snowing outside this morning! And, goodnight sunset in the distance. I love the physical motion of opening the drapes to greet the day, then closing the drapes to end the outside part of the day and begin the inside nighttime part. Drapes are awesome.

A Front Porch

Right now we just store on the porch implements to deal with the snow (it’s falling as I type), but oh so soon I will be holding court out there. We have a bin we bought at an estate sale we might put there to use as a giant table (it’s supposed to be used to store cushions in the winter, which also maybe I’ll do). I plan to paint that furniture and maybe put up sheer drapes, depending on the foot traffic on the sidewalk during summer months. What I do know is that I will love that porch.

It’s also super amazing that we can stand there in the snow and rain and towel dry Banjo after her walk. AND there’s one of those handy keypads at the door so we don’t have to carry a key all the time and can walk in and out easily. Woohoo for front porches!

A Back Yard

We’ve had only one great weather day so far (did I mention it’s snowing as I write), but I spent part of that day out in the backyard with Banjo, in a state of bliss.

While she sunbathed, I ripped the rotted cover off the woodpile and examined the wood. It’s in good shape for the solo stove we received as a gift from the truck people who want everyone to get work done to the exhaust system. We would have gotten the work done anyway, but don’t tell them that, because I”m excited to sit outside with our new solo stove and woodpile.

I also pulled a bunch of rotting leaves from down in the tiny pond, and, as I sat with Banjo, birds came to the pond and drank. Wonderful.

Here are a few photos of the tiny pond and forest back there that I took when we bought the house, seemingly ages ago, but it was last fall.

If we renovate, Tracy will have a big shed built where there used to be a garage (zoning won’t let us build a new garage), and we’ll then finish the fence around the driveway and new shed so Banjo will have her own yard where she can terrorize all the neighborhood wild animals that come in to her heart’s content.

She and our sweetie pie neighbor dog, Hazel, won’t share much of a fence line, then, which will give Banjo plenty of time to learn that Hazel’s jumping and barking are not a threat to her. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll become friends.

Buying Things Cheaply

With tariffs going up and down and the world in chaos, it’s a difficult time to have to be buying everything all over again. I very much miss my sister’s luxury house full of items I would have loved to have in this house. (Heck, I miss my sister, but that’s not the point of this post.)

What’s amazing to me is that you can buy so many things inexpensively these days. We have the two ReStores in Madison, one within walking distance, and there’s practically everything you’d ever want there. However, if you are looking for something special, now there’s the internet!

This is one of my new cool rugs. Did you know that these days you can type on your computer: “rugs with horned animals on them” and you get shown rugs you can get delivered to your door! (I won’t touch all valid arguments against this having to do with the environment and big corporations’ greed, etc. I’m just ordering rugs this way because, damn it, I need a lot of rugs in a hurry and I need them to be cheap.)

A screen shot from the rug website of another one I ordered for the living room. Hope this one stays, because it’s going to be a bitch to return the blue and red one.

We also go to estate sales that produce handy things we need and cool things we want, like that lamp up there. (Ignore the rest of the living room, which will be changed if we keep the house.) We bought the furniture for the front porch at an estate sale, as well. We are pretty good at estate sales, and when the time comes to buy real living room furniture, estate sales here we come.

There’s also all the stuff we found in the house, including this giant aquarium. We’re putting it in the basement right now, but if we renovate, after that is all done, I have a long list of procedures I’ll do to get it ready for fish, and I’ll put it in the living room. I can hardly wait.

My Quirky Neighborhood

Also pleasing is how close everything is to us. Within easy walking are restaurants, bars, ice cream places, coffee shops, a music venue, a botanical garden.

On the one beautiful day we had so far, Tracy and I biked to a hardware store and the grocery store, and then I biked to the bike shop and left mine there for a tune-up. In typical Madison fashion, the bike shop is called Bicycle Recycle, whose motto is to keep bikes out of landfills and put them in the hands of everyone who wants one. Tracy bought a bike there in the fall and gave them his.

I’ve already posted this blog post and another filled with pictures of items in the yards of my neighborhood. These people seem fabulous. And during the brief conversations I’ve already had with them, they are.

Thus ends my baby list of things I love about living in the house, a week in. Spring may actually come, who knows. The world may still be in place, at least my tiny corner of it (not if I were living in Iran right now I realize that). And, we might keep the house. So much is crumbling around us right now, but these are the good things.