House woes

Tonight is one of those evenings I really wish we'd just stuck to renting a home. Yeah, yeah, we wouldn't have the super-hip wooden floors we do now, or the uber-cool "monsoon" green kitchen, but still, we, or better yet, I wouldn't be suffering from total home-improve-itis right now either.

It all started when I sat down at the kitchen table to start correcting papers (and let's not even start on what's wrong with that sentence at 8:30pm), and noticed that the trim around the opening into the living room showed some small chips. A closer inspection of the entire trim, the trim around the opening from the front room into the kitchen, the trim around the door into the laundry room, and basically every other trim in the house revealed that almost all of them had fallen victim to tiny little chips and dents. Small, but enough to drive any perfectionist, or someone who really should be doing something way more important, like say, grading, absolutely insane.

Now wooden trim around door openings and windows is a typically American habit, one you will not usually find in most European homes, where windows an doors are just openings in a wall, and equally annoying as, say, having sheet rock walls everywhere. I mean, don't get me wrong, the trim is gorgeous, and practical, just like the walls, but all it takes is one loud sneeze, and you've got a dent, a ding, or a chip.

We must have had dents, dings, and chips in window and doorway trim before. Obviously. I mean, I live with three men, and since I'm not exactly the embodiment of grace myself, I can say with a fair amount of conviction that our previous homes suffered from the same problem as our current abode. But the thing is, I don't remember it. At all. Which, for an OCD perfectionist as myself is almost a miracle.

Personally, I think the explanation lies in the fact that this is our first own home. All my other homes have always been rentals. And no matter how much I loved every single one of those homes (and showed this through painting, decoration, and cleaning), it was never -my- home. I never realized the weight of home ownership until the house I lived in was my own, and every time someone would bang a chair against the (wooden) chair rail, I would cringe, as I realized there was no landlord to call, but I would be the one with the woodfiller and paint trying to restore the beautiful curve in said rail. Now, if the shower doesn't work right, we have to fix it ourselves. Our windows don't get cleaned automatically, if we want to repaint our shutters, we need to do it ourselves, and we also can't use the "Oh, it's just a rental" excuse for something less-than-perfect either (like the really ugly windows around the front door, or the chipped paint on the front porch).

And, honestly, I'm not sure I like it all that much. I know there are people who can go on and on and on about how renting is throwing money away each month, and how buying a home is an investment in your future, but people, our future does not lie in Georgia. It had better not, for it does, our future and I will have to have a serious heart to heart, and our future may need to go into time out. Anyway, I digress. My point is that I'm pretty sure we won't be here in 30 years when the house is paid off, and that I'm also pretty sure that in the current economy we'll be making a boatload of money off our house when we sell it. As I said to husband-dear just the other day, I don't think we should buy another house until we're both retired and truly ready to settle down. Because until then, buying a house just means lots of angst about chipped trim and dinged sheet rock. And we all know that more angst is the last thing I need.

Now where did I put the sandpaper and the trim paint?