The Surprise in the Attic

I absolutely LOVE throwing things out. It is one of my favorite hobbies. So you can only imagine my horror when we discovered that the house we had moved into eight months prior held a crapload of stuff in the attic space over the garage.

I was at work when my daughter texted me a video scanning a dark area piled with junk.

I don't even know what these are! They're heavy and there's a boxful.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Our attic," was her response.

"WTF?" was my response. I have never used this texting lingo before (nor have I ever uttered it aloud), but if ever there were an appropriate time for it, it was now. As a matter of fact, I think the expression was created for this very moment: when a Type A neatnik finds out her attic could be on an episode of "Hoarders." Oh, the humiliation! Oh, WTF?!

Yes, we had lived in the house eight months. No, we had not gone up in the attic. We do not like ladders. We do not like dark, claustrophobic, hot spaces. (I am not using the Royal We. I am referring to Ricky and me. If you think we are acting royal for not going in the attic, that's your business. Haters gonna hate.)

The man who inspected the house (which had been a foreclosure) never said a word about this. Since we moved in, others have been up there: the exterminator, a handyman, an A/C repairman. But it wasn't until a young man working with his electrician father made the climb that someone finally said something.

"You know, there's a couple of Christmas trees up there," the 20-year-old said to my daughter after he came down. He apparently was astute enough to guess that we are Jewish, and he realized the trees and assorted holiday baubles didn't match up with us.

But it wasn't just Christmas trees (one white and one green) and decorations. Oh, no. There were light fixtures and fax machines -- five fax machines! Curtain rods and suitcases. Dog crates and boxes of clothes. Creepy clown dolls with ceramic heads. Craft materials for bedazzling things. Decorative pillows, a metal lockbox, Halloween costumes. There was a whole carton of rectangular, heavy glass rods. Frankly, I'm hyperventilating just typing this list.

Once I knew the junk was up there, I could feel its oppressive presence pressing down on me as I slept. We (and this time I actually just mean me) have now had two days of spelunking, and there's still at least one more day of work left just to drag it all down and put it by the curb. With each chunk that gets removed, I can feel the house saying, "Ahhhh." (Or maybe that's me. The house, me, whatever.)

Soon it will be cleared out and the world will be orderly and right once again. But not soon enough.

Constructive Choices

There's something called face blindness, where people can't recognize or differentiate others' faces. I have something called bathroom faucet blindness. And cabinet handle blindness. And grout-color blindness. This is a big problem since we are re-doing a bathroom. There are many bathroom faucets in the bathroom faucet spectrum that I find pleasing. "I kinda like any of those," however, is not an acceptable answer to the contractor.

The once and future bathroom.

There was a leak. There was rust. There was mold. Men came and turned the bathroom into a bathroom skeleton. (Talk about not wanting to see how the sausage is made! Have you ever seen the inside of your house's walls? I do not recommend it.) There were metal support frames and concrete, and it was a bit smelly for awhile until the giant, loudly-whirring fan did its job to dry everything out.

And then it was time for all the decisions. I spent one torturous afternoon at a plumbing fixture supply store. Shower heads and bathtub handles and toilets and toilet handles and sinks. Colors, shapes, methods of mounting things. Help! Please, help! Ricky has much better taste than I do, but he couldn't go.

Even when Ricky has been around for some of this picking-out process, the salespeople pretty much ignore him. The unspoken industry standard seems to be that the woman is the boss when it comes to the preferred way to mount a bathroom sink. Everyone we talk to makes eye contact only with me. This is the complete opposite of buying a car.

The tile guy left a chart of grout colors ranging from beige to beige. So I picked beige. One of the middle ones. (I use the same method when selecting a stall in a public bathroom -- one of the middle ones. I don't know why I do this, but there it is.) The next day, the tile guy tells me it took some time for them to find the grout I had picked because it was a "special order."

Argh! Why did they waste time looking for it? I would have just randomly picked one of the other beiges in the middle of the chart. Sigh.

Maybe I will understand the importance of all these choices some day. Maybe there will be a time years from now when I look at my toilet handle and say to myself: "Thank heavens I selected this exact toilet handle! What would my life have been like if I'd gone with stainless steel?" But I doubt it.