2003-04-15
Of Clawfoot Tubs and Toilet Caves
I am dangerously obsessed with buying a house right now. Every day, I comb the listings online and email many of them to my probably-bewildered husband. He, in turn, probably thinks, "Is there a big bag of gold hidden somewhere that I don't know about?" Sadly, there is no bag of gold. But I am obsessed. Low interest rates and all that.
Here are my priorities when looking at houses:
1. No ranch. No. I don't care if this style is supposed to be the "new" retro. It is not cute. There is nothing wrong with living in a ranch house, but if given the choice between cute and not cute, which would you pick?
2. Hardwood floors.
3. A clawfoot tub! I can always buy one of these later, I suppose, but I will consider any old shack if it has a clawfoot tub.
4. A good-sized kitchen. I'm okay with whatever kind of flooring. I'm less than thrilled with laminate counters/cabinets. But the size of the kitchen is pretty important to me. I like to cook, and I like a kitchen I can hang out in.
5. In the city. I'm tired of driving 20-40 minutes to get to work in the morning. I'm young, I don't have any kids, and I want to be a city girl, dammit!
See, not picky at all.
Don't get me wrong; I rather like our little place right now. We've got a lot of privacy and space, and our landlords are very cool and laidback. We don't have to cut the grass, and we have a fireplace. But I want to paint the walls and rip up the carpets and go nuts. Maybe my biggest source of wanting to move out would be the bathroom. Our bathroom (and we only have one, which is an annoyance in itself) is a lovely salmon-pink tile. The tile, however, is not on the floor. No, it is on the walls. On the floor is a berber carpet. As far as carpet goes, I actually don't mind berber, but carpet in a bathroom = yuck. Moisture, bacteria, funk of all sorts. Around our shower are many, many cabinets. The storage is cool, but guess what is between the cabinets and the exterior wall? Our toilet.
The toilet sits in an alcove that is honestly less than two feet wide. We call the alcove "the toilet cave." Honestly, if either of us ever gained too much weight, we would not fit into the toilet cave. That is how narrow it is. I can't tell you how many bruises it has resulted in. I bang my elbow into the hard-ass pink tile wall or wooden cabinet every time I reach for some paper. In my morning haze, I have backed right into the corner of the toilet cave, leaving a lovely green-yellow-blue bruise right on my ass. Ow? The salmon-pink toilet cave angers me, and so does the fact that our bathtub doesn't work (we can only shower in it because the drain won't hold water), and we only have one outlet, which can only be used when the light is turned on.
Eh. Sorry, I really don't mean to bitch and moan about my freaking toilet when there are real problems in the world, but really. Who would build that? I guess I need to take a picture to really make you understand how ridiculous it really is. And that is my biggest problem with the disco duplex we're in now. I can handle the painted paneling, the weird downstairs industrial carpet, even the Wasp Situation. I actually even like my kitchen a lot (tile floors, lots of space, skylights). I'm just being a baby, I guess. And, for what we're paying in rent, we could have a place of our own. Wah.