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and slightly more
2006-07-05 - 8:23 p.m. Click back for more of the same -- Anyway, we're naturally panicking about the money. On the one hand, I think it will eventually be okay, we're replacing a lot of stuff (wiring, plumbing, furnace, crumbling plaster) that we'll probably be happy enough about later. Huge sums of money are flowing out, but then we should be good for a while. On the other hand, it's not like we were rolling in money to begin with. I'm pretty sure we never should have signed on for this trip to Spain, although I'm glad we're going (providing we don't go bankrupt), and I think we probably decided to do too much at the beginning -- we could have waited on the fireplace, for instance -- Anyway -- the good thing about T is that he gets this (S does not). T is all finished with the upstairs, and he decided for us that we could survive with simple shelves in the closets, and we can improve them later. He gets that fir is okay for the kitchen floor, and that we can actually paint the bedroom floors that also have fir, and they'll be fine (nice, even.) Meanwhile S is still talking about carpet, or the fact that we might as well keep going and put oak down. (It would be a savings!) We went to the city last night to visit friends for a 4th of July barbeque. They've just recently (a little over a year ago) bought an enormous Victorian in a great neighborhood (sort of a famous SF neighborhood). It's absolutely gorgeous -- three stories plus a basement, all the original woodwork, fabulous redone kitchen with the expensive kind of cabinets and marble countertops. I don't know how they possibly afforded it (it is funnier than ever, now that we are all nearly 50, to see who can afford what. we're sort of in the middle, which is comforting), although I suspect wealthy parents, who do in fact have a sort of pied a terre on the third floor. As the evening wore on, I realized that a)they were not the fixer-uppers of the house. One family owned it forever, then sold it to another family who fixed it up and in turn, sold it to our friends. And b) although the fixing up was glorious, our friends were sort of living in it with the furniture from their previous, much smaller house. As Gail said, all the boxes are actually unpacked but we can't get rid of them because they are our furniture. The table in the glorious magazine quality kitchen was some kind of wierd modern thing that clearly did no belong there at all. And yet, one could eat from it! So that, and T's closet simplification, and the idea of just painting the floors sort of made the idea that the house won't be perfect when we move in completely reasonable. We'll keep our crappy old futon couch and worn yellow chairs. It will actually be kind of nice. Eventually, we'll replace them, but for now it will be just fine -- good even. And what a huge relief to be spending no more money on that, at least. Phew. Simple simple simple. OKay -- now I've got a million things to do ....
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