Our house is a very, very fine house

All I can see in this photo is our spotty dead lawn.

If you know anything about me and my family and our lives in the last six years, you know that our hate for our last house is well documented. I won't go into it here (you can read more here) but I mention it only because anything I could say that I hate about our current house is nothing compared to the mold demons, plumbing gremlins, and other supernatural forces we battled for four and half years at 710 E 3950 N in Provo. We would have probably burned it down to cleanse it if we hadn't finally found a buyer.

You might even say it would be blaspheme to even mention that I am in any way dissatisfied with our current home of two years. Because I love our house.

But. We have a little roof leak that only acts up in the winter. I'd like to fix that. I'd love to have the 6 ft tall window replaced. The heat cracked it because I left the 1000 degree BBQ grill next to it for too long (read: at all). Little annoyances compared to the old house.

But. Seriously. I hate our yard.

Here's a confession. It's probably my fault. Maybe when we moved in, if I had the money to fix the automatic sprinkler system, I could have salvaged the sparsely seeded lawn. I could have used a hose to water, weeded more frequently, fertilized, nurtured, aerated, and so on. But I didn't. When we moved in the lawn was dead. And the following spring I got really excited for a month to resurrect it. I tried the standard things and, for a second, they worked. But, sweet Odin's raven, I could not get the sprinklers to work the right way or on time. And I didn't have the energy to come home from work every day and move the hose around like some hose-mover person. So, by July it was dead. It's been dead by July every year.

It is the ugliest yard in five square miles.

"Wah. Just be more like Chris Clark. Haven't you seen his lawn?" I have. I love it. It feels like silken strands of heaven when you touch it. He works hard to keep it that way. But I'm pretty sure his sprinklers work and if they didn't he'd probably know how to fix them. So, while I'd love to have his yard, I need to take baby steps. First, learn to fix the sprinklers, second, fix them, third, tear out all the grass and re-sod, fourth, water and care for the lawn into celestial glory.

We have plans for the yard. We'll get there. But it's probably more fitting that we fix the leak and the crack first. Until then, it will sit there, dead, and spraying thistle and dandelion seeds onto everyone else's yards. Sorry, Edgemont!

some problems

We moved into our house ten years ago, and it's home now. We keep flirting with buying some amazing mid-century thing somewhere and making it really 60's chic, but there aren't any on the market. Plus, we like our neighborhood and I'm super attached to my yard. When we bought the house it was going to be just a stepping stone to something more awesome and bloggy, but then Lady Life told us that we were Brady Bunch bound in our 1970's split level, and we have accepted this. We have grown where we were planted. Our desert has blossomed as a rose. And we like it now. We love it. Except I wish it was bigger and the kitchen didn't suck so bad.

My wife Lisa, who is the same exact age as our house, has done a beautiful job making a silk's purse out of a sow's ear. The house in no way resembles the orange shag-carpeted poopstorm we inherited in 2003, but it's been a methodical, step-by-step process done mostly by us, our mechanic Mike Sappington, and a lot of tears. Tears and blaming. Why can't she sow curtains? Why can't I build new shelves? Why do we pay people to fix things for us? (Answer: BECAUSE IT'S WORTH IT)

So we're in a good place with our house. But there are a few things that are so horrible and awesome that they bear documentation. Here are three:

 1. Starry, Starry Night! When we did our initial walk through of the house I immediately noticed these sparkly popcorn ceilings. These would be the first to go, I swore. Hey ho! They are like the last to go. We tell ourselves that they are retro and cool again, but that's mostly if you think that asbestos is cool and retro. Truthfully, I don't even notice the popcorn ceilings anymore, and that's a problem: every person who walks into our house does. And they are horrified. Please don't tell me that these are easy to fix. I don't want to spray them with a water bottle and walk along with a scraper. I don't have time and my arms will fall asleep and it's going to be cancer fumes everywhere. No thank you!

2. Cutboard Island! Dude, don't get me started on the kitchen. And seriously don't get Lisa started on it. This is the cutting board - the original 1974 cutting board - which has never once been used by us a cutting board and has since fallen into a horrible depression right above the dishwasher. Sometimes if we have guests in the kitchen I sit on this thing. Not to hide it; there is no hiding it. But because it's springy and centrally located for conversation! But be careful! A spider lives in there and crawls out all the time. For reals. As you can see, I painted it gray a few years ago to at least match our walls. But now it just looks like the sewage treatment plant. Bon Appetit!

  

3.  Clatter Clatter. This pots 'n pans cupboard has almost singlehandedly ended my marriage. Several times. It's not an anomaly either. All of our cupboards look like variations of this. There used to be a center shelf but it broke. And I've tried to fix it but I can't. I've tried! I painted it white, but now it's all scuffed and horrible, and the inner wood doesn't match. But the real tragedy is how we have to lump all of our pots and crap in there and hope that they don't fall over and open the cupboard door. For real, you have to hurry and shut the door before all the pans roll back out. Lisa hates this cupboard. She hates me whenever she uses it, which is daily. It's been a thing.

So there you go, fat cats! We don't have those fancy RC Willey granite counter tops or IKEA kitchen cabinets, and we have death in our ceilings. So what? Our home is filled with love! And spiders.