Archive for the ‘Misc. Griping’ Category

Apparently, when you have worked in the job market for a long period of time, you are suppose to develop a certain set of skills called, “soft skills”. One of those soft skills that folks like to tout most often is their aptitude to communicate, finesse if you will, with their fellow human beings. “I’m a people person,” they will happily cheer at a job interview, their smile on the verge of giving their face stretch marks.

It’s silly really. Of course you’re going to tell a perspective employer how wonderfully you get along with everybody. Saying, “Generally, I think most people, co-workers especially, are pretty much soul-sucking wastes of time and I would prefer to be left alone,” isn’t going to present itself in a positive light. So everyone lies instead, saying how much they just love communing with their fellow homocapians.

When you have to resort to a service job (something many of us are resigned to in this icky economy), that “people person” moniker becomes imperative. No one really wants to “serve” anyone. If they say they do, they’re either lying or were ignored as a child.

My fall-back job always tends to be “customer service”. I have no idea how this happened because I don’t consider myself a people person. Left to my own devices, I’m basically surly and a little bitter. Ask my husband (Don’t worry. He’s Scandinavian and expects as much). Yet somehow, I cared enough about the crap jobs that I was being paid for to be credited with “really caring about the wants and needs of the customer”, which actually wasn’t true.

To be honest, most of the time I was simply tolerating whatever person I was accommodating in order to get them to leave as soon as humanly possible. “How do you get people to leave you alone? Give them what they want.” That’s been my adage for service jobs, heck any job, period.

Writing is a job, and even with that, I have to mingle. I have to call people and convince them to have Author Events. Then I actually have to show up at these events and be witty and engaging and answer questions. I have to sell my books and serve my readers.

I suppose I could pretend to be a writer, like the ones portrayed in movies. They hide from the world in some remote location and just send their faceless editor their long-anticipated manuscript. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen in real life. No one truly works alone, unless they’re the Unibomber…or a blogger, and the pay usually sucks.

A warning to all men: never leave a stubborn woman alone when she’s got a bug up her ass.

So, if any of you actually read through my tirade, Straight American Men and Relationships, you know that our first attempt to shove our queen-size box spring up the stairwell of our old-new house was shot to hell, as were all of my expectations for the bedroom it was suppose to go into. So we slept in the downstairs bedroom with the weird layout, and no privacy from the rest of the first floor instead. And I was trying to make peace with that. Really, I was.

Well, a couple of days ago, I dug out some gardening and decorating books to do some soul soothing (those are my fun, selfish hobbies), and I saw a bedroom I liked. It had mocha brown walls. It wasn’t the perfect shade of calming grey-blue that I had upstairs, but it was pretty. So I walked the book into the dreaded bedroom, and I tried to picture mocha brown walls.

It didn’t work. The room used to have 70’s brown paneling (the only room in the original house without plastered walls except for the remodeled bathrooms) that had been painted with a thin layer of beige, so you could still see the stripes from the paneling through it. I would be painting brown paneling that was now beige, back to brown again. Ew. I tried to work with the stripes, saying, “Well, I could clear glaze every fourth fake board so it would look kinda cool…” but in my gut, I knew it would be a lot of work that would never make me happy.

“Your bedroom’s upstairs,” the mule in me complained. I turned and looked at the stairs. The opening seemed deceptively large. I reran the first attempt through my head. Hubby had been at the top pulling, and I had been pushing from the bottom. The box spring had wedged under the trim on the second floor railing and the ceiling on the first floor. I wondered, if I angled it the other way….

And that was it. The bug was officially up my ass and I was pissed all over again. I yanked the mattress out of the way, up-righted the box spring in front of the stairs, and began the slow, arduous process of pushing and pulling back up again.

It wasn’t a smooth transition. I had to rip a shelf down when the top got stuck in an alcove in front of the stairs. Then I had to rip a plastic cover off of the bottom of the box spring when it got stuck on a tread, but I was slowly climbing, and I was way further than the first attempt had been.

There was just enough give to get past the first piece of trim under the upstairs railing, but on the second I got stuck. I could pull the box spring out of the way, but I wasn’t strong enough to pull the box spring up at the same time. And it had to come up now; it was beyond a point of no return.

I had no choice. I had to call the husband. “Say,” I chirped pleasantly, “you got ten minutes to come home from the office?” (We live in the same town our business is in, so I knew it wouldn’t be a big deal).

The cheeriness made him immediately suspicious. “Uh, oh, what did you do?”

“It’ll only take ten minutes,” I promised vaguely.

So he came home, surveyed my craziness with his usual stoicism, and then said, “Well, you got it up a lot further than last time. What do you need me to do?”

He pushed from the bottom on my command while I did the pulling, and all those TV dramatizations of birthing babies inevitably filled my head as I was yelling, “Push!…Push!…That’s right!…Almost there!…Just one more!” When my husband did his final grunt and the box spring emerged from the opening, I simply couldn’t help myself. “Congratulations! You just gave birth to a box spring. It’s a queen, so, it’s a Girl!”

Yeah, he thought the joke was lame too. I don’t really care. I have my bedroom back, and the downstairs office is coming together nicely. I crushed the ass bug, for now.

Original Date: November 7^th, 2011

It seems like the Hubby and I have been house shopping for a long time. This would seem a rather normal thing to do, except that the houses we choose to look at are rarely normal. There’s a couple reasons for that.

The first is our mutual sick affection for broken-down pieces of crap properties. Where other people cringe and hope they don’t lose their lunch (like the place with the pile of dressed out deer carcasses rotting about twenty feet from the house), the hubby and I look at each other and say things like, “That’d be a good place to put a garden in. Look at the nice Southern exposure (as we shoo away flies).

The other is we are both afflicted with Lutheran Cheapass Syndrome (we’ve tried to start a foundation to find a cure, but none of us want to pony up the start-up capital). This means we are obsessed with finding the next great bargain. Instead of bragging about how much we had to fork over for something, we smugly mention offhandedly how little we had to pay for a particular item.

Still that doesn’t mean we don’t have any standards. I have lost track of how many times we have looked at an “updated” property some flipper (a far worse affliction than LCS if you ask me) got their hands on before we showed up and just shook our heads at the “improvements”.

So, out of sheer venting, I would like to share some advice to anyone thinking of “updating” a property that they own in preparation to put it back on the market. If I offend you with my opinion, it’s not my fault. You have a disease. Admit your affliction and put down the nail gun.

My Advice for Flippers (you poor things)

-Knotty Pine is wrong. It’s a 1990’s solution to 1970’s paneling, and it’s still wrong. It’s not cute. It’s not “cabinny”. Its’ dark and ugly, and every potential customer is going to come in and say to themselves, “Uh oh. What are they covering up?” Nobody wants an entire room that looks like the inside of a horse stall. Learn how to sheet-rock. Continuing on the pine tangent, a stained 1×4 board nailed around a window is not trim. It tells a potential buyer that you’re too cheap to get real trim and you’re either too lazy or stupid to learn how to use a miter saw (even someone with LCS knows this is a bad idea).

-Don’t paint old trim. It doesn’t “neutralize” or “brighten it up” anything. I don’t care what the DIY shows say. People who buy old houses like the old trim. If they want to paint it, let them do it after you’ve cashed their check.

-Don’t rip out the original kitchen cabinets. Fix them. Unlike the cookie-cutter stock cabinets you’re planning on picking up at the big-box home store, someone lovingly custom-built those cabinets to fit the floor plan of your kitchen. Again, people who buy old houses like original cabinetry. If you are too incompetent to re-hang cabinet doors and put in new tracks for drawers, then hire someone for a day to do it for you. It’ll still be way cheaper than new cabinets that your buyer can look at and know exactly where you got them from.

-If you are going put in new windows, make some effort to match the style of the old ones. Don’t cheap out and get sliders when the original windows are double-hung. That’s not cost effective. That’s ugly.

-The only room you are allowed (in my opinion) to remodel from original is the bathroom. If the fixtures are oddly colored with bakelite tile glued to the wall and ugly linoleum, by all means, make some changes, but do it right. Respect the age of the house. Beige tile and oak colored wood in a house that was built before 1978 is not respectful. Do the research. Google the year your house was built and click on the “images” filter. Chances are someone with more design savvy than you already remodeled a bathroom just like yours.

-Lastly, just let me say in a nutshell: “Less is more.” Honestly, it is. Old houses are like old people. They have character. Every wrinkle relates to the experiences they went through. It’s about history. Invest in maintaining the structure. Modernize what really counts like efficient H-vac, proper insulation, updated electrical, and good gutters. Invest your sweat equity in keeping what is already there in proper working order. People who believe plastic surgery is better than aging gracefully aren’t shopping for old houses, they’re buying new. Know your target market. Gripety Gripe Gripe Gripe.