Home lessons - part 1

Over the course of our marriage, Jason and I have lived in two apartments, three houses, and a couple of temporary hotels and/or furnished apartments during moves. Each of these has taught me something about being a homeowner, something I didn't know 11 years ago when I first went out on my own. Here are some of the lessons my homes have taught me:

1. When you strip off ugly wallpaper, at least 50% of the time you are going to find a wall that's so nasty you'll wish you'd left the ugly stuff up.
2. That's where sponge painting comes in handy.
3. Even if the house was built in the 1950s, that doesn't mean all the wiring is up to date ... there's always the chance that somebody's uncle Guido came in and "helped" add some new lights, using technology that was state of the art at the beginning of (last) century.
4. When you are trying to buy a house, almost every house in your price range can be described as having one or two unfortunate traits in common. For example, when we bought our first house, we were in the "shag carpet and/or waterbed" price range, because almost every house we looked at contained one or the other (sometimes both).
5. That thing living under your deck may not be a bunny ... it may, in fact, be two adult raccoons and six kits, all of which have to be dragged out screaming and crying before being euthanized.
6. Just because your yard looks level when you buy the house doesn't mean that it is. We hauled 19 bags of leaves out of our first backyard, and found out one corner was almost a foot lower than level, and we hadn't noticed before because that's where all the leaves had collected.
7. Need to sell a house? Call on St. Joseph for help. It worked for the lady who sold us our first house.
8. And if that doesn't work, call my mother and get her to give you a transplant of one of her friend Grace's ostrich ferns. Twice we've planted them, and neither time have we stayed in the house long enough to see them the following spring.
9. When you use the wet/dry vacuum on the "wet" setting, it's important to a) empty out the dry stuff first, and b) remember to empty out the water afterward. Otherwise, a few months later you'll realize, So THAT'S where the smell is coming from ...
10. Paint the trim first, then paint the walls. If you make a mistake it's easier to wipe latex paint off of the trim than it is to wipe oil based paint off of the walls.
11. Textured ceilings are evil. Practical for the builder, I'm sure, but evil for the homeowner, who gets stuck trying to shave off the bumpy bits so they can install crown molding, and has to be extra careful when painting near the ceiling because there is NO way to get paint off of the textured stuff.
12. Install a chandelier by myself? Rewire a chandelier? Patch huge holes in the wall? Relight the pilot light in a gas water heater? Singlehandedly rip out 400 square feet of carpeting and install most of a laminate floor in the same day? Yes, I can do that.
13. My dad can reglaze old windows while standing on a ladder in the steaming sunshine. Not that he wants to do it again, but it's good to know that he CAN.
14. Yes, it is possible to shoehorn a powder room into a space that is less than 3 feet wide, but it's a bitch to paint it.
15. Ivy is evil, and Virginia creeper doubly so. The best way to rid the world of evil is to douse it with Roundup, wait a few weeks until you have tricked it into thinking you've forgotten about it, then go in and rip its weakened little tentacles out, one by one. Curse the day that ivy was invented. Then take a spade and turn over all the earth where the evil used to live, ripping out any roots you uncover while doing so. Then hoe all the turned over earth, ripping out any roots that rear their ugly heads. Curse whoever planted the ivy in your yard. Plant your replacement plants, ripping out any existing roots you find (trust me, they're there, so keep ripping). Put down mulch, then use at least double the recommended amount of Preen. Be vigilant for the next, oh, forever, about ripping out the returnees. Curse the day you decided to rip out the ivy in the first place.
16. Or, forget all of the steps in #15 and just move. Works for me and cleaning the oven, which I have never, ever, done, not once in 11 years of adulthood. There are benefits to moving every couple of years, you know.
17. If the disclosure sheet on the house you're planning to buy mentions that the basement gets "a little damp in heavy rain," what that actually means is that when you get the first heavy rain of the spring, you're going to spend all of the storm in the basement with the wet/dry vac, trying to suck up the water that's flowing from one corner of your basement toward the pile of cardboard boxes you haven't unpacked yet. I've about come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a dry basement. The International Space Station probably has an area the astronauts consider their basement, and I bet it's got water issues, too.
18. Floors will squeak loudest in all of the locations where you need to walk to put a sleeping baby to bed.
19. If you paint two walls of your bathroom and look at the drying paint and say, "huh, I really don't like that much," for god's sake quit painting and go find a better color. You are not going to like your minty fresh bathroom any better two years later, and it will be even harder to convince yourself to repaint it at that point.
20. If your house is 95% hardwood floors and 5% hard-to-clean wool area rugs, guess where the cats will puke 90% of the time? We're on our second can of carpet cleaner, and that's all been used one 2-foot square at a time.
21. Nobody ever paints the tops of the trim around doors.
22. The expensive streak-free paper towels combined with the expensive streak-free window cleaner really does mean you don't end up with streaky windows.
23. Just because you can get the mattress through the door and up the stairs doesn't mean you can get the box spring up the same way.
24. Sometimes one person or one family is the catalyst needed to pull a whole neighborhood together, and when they move away the neighborhood drifts back apart. I am not that person, but I know her, and I was privileged to live across the street from her for more than a year. We miss you, Joy.
25. All it takes is one person painting their living room red, and the rest of the neighborhood follows suit. There are five or six of us on our street now ... I'm such a trend setter!

Oh, there are so many more, but I think this is getting too long for one post. If I remember, I'll post on this again later. In the meantime, what have you learned from your homes? Talk amongst yourselves ...