April 14th: Day One-Friday

My parents have finally sobered up and returned from Florida. This HOUse I have bought is in Pittsburgh, and my parents live in MD, so they are not only helping me with the house, but they also have to travel a couple hours to do so. What nice people.

The day started off really shitty. A Friday. I’m meeting my parents at my newest stomping ground, Home Depot, around nine in the morning. I wake up dizzy and nauseous. What am I pregnant? I NEVER get sick. I haven’t been sick in two years and the day I am supposed to do more manual labor than I have (total) in the past two years, my head won’t stop spinning and I feel achy.

But whatever, I suck it up and finally make it to Home Depot, where my parents tell me I have to buy things to make my house look pretty. Polyurethane. That’s what goes on the hardwood floors. A long wooden stick with a pad on it. That’s what is used to spread the polyurethane all over the floors. Paint thinner. That’s what you use to get the polyurethane off your hands. And face. And hair.

Let me tell you about my house. It’s a shit hole. It’s been empty for two years. The people who previously inhabited this house terrorized it. They took all of the duct work out of the house, put rocks in the gas line, hung hideous green and gold blinds everywhere, left the bathroom floor to rot, among various other weird things. (Fortunately, the VA, whom I purchased the house from, had paid someone to do a half-ass job of fixing these things.)

There was also carpet and rugs nailed to the hardwood floor, which had never before been coated with polyurethane. You see, if hardwood floors haven't been coated with some sort of protectant, like polyurethane, it ruins. The wood soaks up all the dirt, grease, piss, Coke spills, whatever, and they stain. That’s why they had to be sanded.

So my parents told me we had to rent a sander (which you can do at Home Depot or Lowe’s) and sand the floors. We had to have two sanders—a drum sander and an edger. The drum sander is used to get the dirty stuff off the floors. The edger is used for, duh, going around the edges of the room. It’s a lot smaller. I don’t know how to use either of these noisy beasts, and anyway, I’m sick, so my parents use the sander. It looks like hard work. It looks heavy.

My mom screams at me to clean something. I told them I had to get new cupboards that day, and I wasn’t going to clean them, and wouldn’t we have time to get ceramic tile to do the kitchen floor? And then there’s the sink in the bathroom that needs replaced, and can we puhlease hurry up a little bit so we can go to Construction Junction (a local nonprofit that is like a Home Depot, only with used and dirty stuff). I thought we could get some (cleaner) kitchen cabinets there.

My parents both looked at me as if to say, "you're crazy". It was at this point that I realized my house wasn’t going to be perfect before I moved into it. I started to whine. It didn’t help.

I thought my Dad was going to wring my neck and my Mom kept assuring me that we would get everything done eventually. Eventually. That it “would be easier to work on the house once I was moved in”.

Oh, dear. I have a lot of work to do. And my parents only came up to help me for two days.