As you may know, untitledhusband and I are in the process of building a new house. Our Poltergeist house, if you will. This project is so out-of-scope budget-wise, this house may very well be the end of us, which would make the whole Poltergeist prophecy quite appropo.
Alas, there will be no in-ground pool, which will make the midnight mudwrestling a little difficult. Whatever will the corpses in our backyard do on Saturday night, besides braid each other’s hair and do Mary Kay facials? If this house does in fact do me in, you can rest assured that I would make it my afterlife’s ambition to hang out in the walls and squirt out orange marmalade and tennis balls at obnoxious visitors and anyone selling magazines door-to-door. That includes you, untitledmother.
In a few years, our mortgage will be a comfortable fit (pay raises, end of daycare, etc.). But for now, it’s going to be tight, people. Save-your-soap-shards-to-make-a-new-bar-of-soap-with-that-soap-press-you-bought-on-sale-from-Lillian-Vernon tight. Stuff-pillows-with-dryer-lint tight. Weave-rugs-out-of-grocery-sacks tight. There I go, busting out all of untitledmother-in-law’s money-saving schemes. How fucking kind of me. Yeah, that should ensure my seat on the express shuttle to hell.
To give you a barometer of how over-budget we are, we’re spending about 50 percent more than we set out to spend on this house. I know, I know. But if you could only SEE what we’re doing in our master bath! I’m positively in love with my bathroom tile. I plan on rolling around naked on it every morning, after I light a candle to celebrate our love. Now, when I’m writing about my obscene mortgage payment in a couple of months and the fact that shrimp-flavored ramen noodles taste like yeasty gym crotch, remind me of the ingnorant exuberance I’m demonstrating right now.
Part of the building process involves meetings. Lots of meetings. Meetings to pick out everything from your kitchen cabinets to the flusher handles on your toilet. Yeah, they make different ones. Oil-rubbed bronze toilet flushers. Brushed pewter toilet flushers. Ergonomically enhanced toilet flushers that give you a reach-around. Someone, somewhere is designing the flusher handles to toilets, people. When asked to select my preferred handle, I flat out refused to pick one. “Just give me the el cheapo,” I said. With people dying in the Middle East and Haley Joel Osment driving a 1995 Saturn, I should not have my choice of flusher handles, for fuck’s sake.
The El Cheapo! No, no, no! When it comes to the plumbing that sends your, um, POOP to the hinterlands, never, ever skimp. Trust me, you don’t want that to come back and haunt you–or overflow onto your beautiful tile.
Me, I paid thousands of dollars to re-do our master bath in the States so that it wouldn’t have ANY tile in it. I had all my tile torn out. Why? Because if I couldn’t afford to pay someone to keep the grout clean, I didn’t want to deal with the tile.
The irony–shortly after creating a grout-free bathroom I moved to Belgium where the whole country is wall-to-wall and up-the-wall tile. I’m having a grout attack.
Ummm… At first I thought, “go with the handle that give you a reach around!”
Then I thought: “but think about where your hand was right before it touches the handle. Do you really want a reach around from that filthy thing?”
And so now I’m kind of undecided. But thanks for giving a whole new dimension to the dirtiness of a reach around. :^)
I say good for you, untitled…keep Haley Joel’s economic sense in mind and always go El Cheapo. Except for those sex toys, of course (please reference home party post)…quality only.
I say go for the power assisted john. We replaced our avocado green model a couple of years with a vacuum assited toilet. It cost about three times what regular toilet costs, but it was the best money we ever spent. It can handle ANY size poop, and wads and wads of toilet paper.
We’re adding a master bedroom and bath this fall, and we’re going to get another one.
I say go with a nice renaissance pull chain.
Make sure you have major suckage.
Then get a matching bidet.
So why DOES Haley Joel Osment drive a 1995 Saturn? I read that little blurb a few weeks ago and still don’t know the answer. It is sick that this question burns in my mind daily when so many horrific things are going on in the world. Alas, I just can’t get past it!