Garden Goods in December

It’s December and incredibly (!) our tiny vegetable garden is still producing cherry tomatoes and zucchini!  Ahhh, the value of choosing a sunny spot for a garden plot.

Here’s the bounty I collected on Christmas Day.

Here are the veggies the day after, whipped up into a delicious chicken and veggie dinner.  Nothing tastes better that a homegrown tomato.  Even in December.

Merry Christmas!

Christmastime means sugar cookies, stockings and sitting by a crackling fire!

This fireplace contains a Heatilator (the four vents), which is a vent system designed to redirect more heat from the fireplace back into the room.  Having sat in front of it several times this month, I attest the Heatilator works.  

Fireplaces

Our House has two fireplaces; a traditional brick one in the living room with a low hearth where you can sit and soak up the fire’s heat.

And in the kitchen a raised contraption that looks more like an Italian restaurant’s pizza oven than a fireplace. 

In the heat of August having a fireplace, not to mention two, seemed over the top for our mild Southern California climate.  But now in the grip of December’s chilly desert evenings, I’m glad we have both of them. 

Note to Self: before the return of August’s triple digit temperatures, I want to make a pizza in the “pizza oven”.

Thanksgiving 2011

This year we hosted Thanksgiving at our house by default: we were the only ones with an oven big enough to cook the free-range, organic bird.  No matter how they came to us, we were happy to feed 12 hungry friends, aged 3 to 70, gathered around two long tables pushed together. 

For the first time Mr. Wonderful lobbied to stuff the turkey.  After some initial squeamishness, he did a stellar job.  

With hourly juice basting sessions, our new gas oven cooked it to perfection.

I was pleased and proud how moist and tender this free range Prince of Poultry turned out.  I think my gluten-free stuffing recipe helped prevent the turkey from drying out.   

Once the turkey, sweet potatoes, creamed spinach and fingerling potatoes had been placed on the table our guests decided we should host again next year.  Which is the best compliment of all.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Living Room—BEFORE, AFTER and AFTER WITH SOFA:

BEFORE: 

Here’s the Living Room with its walls painted Maxi-Pad pink (!) on the day we bought The House.

AFTER: 

Here's the Living Room after we’d painted this accent wall yellow and decorated with our old basic black sofa from the apartment, complete with old throw pillows.

AFTER WITH THE NEW SOFA: 

Here's the yellow and cream Living Room with our new sofa!  This brick orange leather sofa gives the room a Mid-Century Modern meets Palm Springs vibe without sacrificing comfort.  

After two years of visiting furniture stores and sitting in literally hundreds of sofas, this one from www.roomandboard.com had the look, comfort, length and support we wanted.  The clincher: we both can take a nap on it at the same time.  Love! 

Front Door—HAIKUS and BEFORE and AFTER:

A front door is a statement—a haiku poem, if you will—about a house and the residents inside.  Here are two haikus—a BEFORE and an AFTER— I wrote on our front door.  

BEFORE: The flimsy Front Door of The House the day we bought it.

Oh thin, plywood door

Hollow as a cold coffin

Full of white-washed bones

DURING: Mr. Wonderful installing the new door himself!  Uh-huh.

AFTER: The new Front Door--solid mahogany wood. 

Hard wood, solid sound

Welcome friends, vintage style

Craigslist price makes me smile.

A Garbage Disposal and A Lizard

When we bought The House it had been stripped of any valuables that hadn't been bolted down and even some that had.  Here's what our House didn't have on moving day:

a refrigerator, 

an oven, 

stove top vent, 

washer, 

dryer, 

water heater, 

garbage disposal, 

light switch covers, 

closet handles, 

closet magnets 

or 

kitchen cabinet closers.

What it did have lying on the kitchen floor was a very long, very dead Southern Alligator Lizard.

I gasped when I saw its prone body.  Our Realtor, Thelma, brushed my fear aside.
"Congratulations," she smiled.  "A lizard in the house brings good luck."

No wonder Thema's been selling houses for 30 years.  She knows just what to say.

A house good enough for a lizard was good enough for me.

Good People

Commuting from work the other night I exited the freeway early to cruise our neighborhood.  I passed the river, turned at the school and stopped by the park for a herd of dog walkers.  In my corner of Los Angeles, the ratio of Chihuahuas to humans is something like 7000: 1.  And in the fashion competition the dogs outdress the people with their studded collars, knit sweaters and pillbox hats jauntily titled to one side.  If any coyotes came to my ‘hood they would dine very well if they didn’t mind swallowing doggie fabric, zippers and rhinestones.

Before I could move the car forward two boys dashed across the street in front of me.  One looked to be nine-years-old, the other seven and both wore silky blue uniforms and huge, face-splitting smiles.  The older one cradled a soccer ball, indicating he was either an excellent goalie or a lousy striker.  As they ran past I noticed the backs of their jerseys both read “Perez”.  How great to play soccer with your brother; to be near your family; to have a washer and dryer to clean sweaty uniforms. 

My family didn’t live nearby and Mr. Wonderful’s lived even farther away, which meant we were free from nosy mothers, nosy in-laws and complicated Thanksgiving dinner plans.  So we were happy.  But it wasn’t like we disliked our families.  Au contraire Mr. Wonderful and I still gabbed with our relatives through regular phone calls, emails and text messages because they were good people and good people are hard to find.

So every now and then when I saw two brothers in the park or two sisters shopping at the mall I longed for some old-fashioned, good-people family contact.  It was in this mindset that I read an email from my older cousin’s son, Matt, a 23-year-old itching to leave the Midwest and move to the big city.  Not the Big Apple but the Big Citrus “Orange” of Los Angeles, the 21^st century locus where dreams, dreamers and folks on the make came for money, fame and a slice of the organic, fructose, silicone-implant life.

   

“All I need is a place to stay while I look for an apartment,” Matt wrote.  “Can I stay w/ u?”

Mr. Wonderful read the email and cocked an eyebrow.  “What’s your cousin’s kid to you?  A second cousin or a cousin once removed?”

“Does it matter?  He’s family,” I said.  It was true.  I didn’t know Matt well.  He had grown up in a different city from me and his branch of the family didn’t come back to the homestead often.  Although I did remember seeing him at my sister’s wedding when he was battling a particularly bad case of high school acne.  So we had that in common.

Family is good people.  Of course he could stay with us I decided and Mr. Wonderful agreed. 

Just then my mother-in-law called to chat so I told her the Matt news. 

“He’s moving in with you and my son in your brand new house?” she said shamelessly inserting her nose into my business.

“He’s not moving in, he’s just going to stay a few days.”

“Uh-huh,” she said sucking on a cigarette.

“Until he finds a place of his own.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I believe him.”

“Make sure you give him a move-out-by-this-date because if you don’t, he’ll never leave.”

Don’t you hate when your nosy mother-in-law is right? 

September 11, 2011--10 years later; 2,977 lives lost; 350 million lives changed

On the coast of Malibu, Pepperdine University erected a moving tribute to those who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.  One flag for each person.  The strong Pacific wind whips the flags, which flutter, quake and bend but never break.

"Urban Light" and a night out

All work and no thrill makes me a sad... grill.  

Off to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).   I love walking through LACMA's lamp post exhibit.  At night it's especially cool when the lights are on.

 

The Neighbor 1 Part 2

It was Sunday and I'd decided today I wouldn't work on the house.  Last night I stayed up until 2 AM to finish painting the bathroom.  So today was a free day I'd more than earned.

In the morning I shuffled out to the driveway to get the newspaper.  Nothing says weekend more than sipping espresso and lingering over the paper version; from the front page, to the editorials, to the comics.  On Sundays I need my fix of "Zits"in color, thank you very much.

Bending down to pick up the plastic-wrapped paper I felt each separate muscle in my back burst into a flaming pyre of aching agony halting me in mid-reach, just three inches from "Zits", "Doonesbury" and Sunday comfort.  After four weeks of continuous house painting the physical pain lingered.  

But today it didn't matter because today I.  Was.  Doing.  Nothing.  I would lie on the sofa, drink coffee and read all the comics.  With it out of arm's reach, my foot pushed the paper toward the front door.

"Nothing like a seven mile power walk to get the juices flowing," says Harold, our geriatric, nosy next-door neighbor.  He stopped in his marathon shoes to look down on me bent over like an uncoordinated gymnast.

"Hey, Harold," I said.  "Be careful out here in the hot sun."

"Me be careful?  You young people can't keep up," from his lawn he picked up hand weights and started doing curls.  Just watching him make me winded.  

But Harold was just getting going.  "I saw you painted the bedroom Navajo white," he said. 

"You looked in our window?"  

"You don't have curtains." 

Wow.  He looked in our window.  Okay, it was true.  I had bought fabric to make curtains but between work, commuting, the painting and cooking and just life in general I hadn't had the time to make the curtains.

"The color looks... okay," he continued.  "At least it beats the green sponged stuff."  

He looked in our windowS!  My sense of independence and freedom felt violated.  

"So when are you going to work on that lawn of yours?  Replant the dead grass?  Remove the weeds?"

He's telling me what to do?  "Seems like today is a good day for you to do yard work," he said doing curls while twisting at the waist.

"No, Harold, no yard work today," I said opening the front door and sliding the paper inside with my foot.

I closed the door, pulled out the sewing machine and bag of fabric.  Today is curtain making day.

The newspaper laid on the floor all day unopened.  

Mailbox and Doorbell

Starburst Mailbox and matching Doorbell from the 1950s.  Made in Los Angeles, California by the "Babco" company.  So nifty-fifties mod.

Mailbox

Part of the journey of being a new homeowner is examining the house and yard you've plunked down a boatload of money for and asking yourself: What were the previous owners THINKING?

Why did they paint the living room PINK?  Why did they plant ELEVEN palm trees in the itty-bitty front yard?  Why did they hang the mailbox on the BACK of the house?

Some questions are elementary.  As for the walls, since the previous owners painted the master bedroom a 3D reptilian green and the dining room a salmon-orange meets WWII-era Spam, of course (!) they painted the living room a feminine pad pink.

And landscaping with eleven palm trees?  The people who built the house back in the 1950s were from the Midwest, so they embraced the exotic palm and planted it wherever there was an available plot of one square foot just to say, "Look, Honey, we aren't in Cleveland anymore!"

But hanging a narrow, wall-mounted mailbox on the BACK of the house?  Behind a locked fence?  In the backyard?  That was a head-scratcher.  Perhaps the previous owners disliked junk mail?  Or they disliked ALL mail?  Or they used it as a laundry hamper for just one dirty sock?

"Maybe," Mr Wonderful said, "They retired it to the back because it's too small for a mailbox now."  Granted this was a valid point.  It measured just 7 inches wide by 9 inches tall by not even 3 inches deep and was capped with a flip-top.  It was so tiny a box of Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookies wouldn't fit inside.  "I'll go to the home store and buy a bigger, standard size one," he said unscrewing it from the back wall.

But I found this old mailbox appealing.  Yes, it was small but it was in proportion with Our small House.  According to the metal stamp inside it had been manufactured in Los Angeles, "CA" by the "Babco" company, which meant it was local and since that company no longer exists, made it a relic.  Finally and most importantly the starburst cut out pattern decorating its front matched the illuminated starburst pattern of our doorbell.  This mailbox was original to the house.  It belonged with Our House.  I wanted to keep it.

"For a postal worker a mailbox, is a mailbox, is a mailbox," I said.  "But if you're right and it is too small for current U.S. Postmaster specifications, let's at least hang it near the doorbell since... they go together." 

Despite his misgivings Mr. Wonderful mounted it on the wall between the front door and our starry 1950s doorbell.

The next day I came home from work to see our starburst mailbox holding a packet of envelopes bound with a rubber band.  Flipping through them I noticed various postmark dates stretching back to our escrow.  Apparently the postal carrier had been carrying our mail around for weeks because he didn't have a place to put it.

Happily now he does.

Paint Supplies

We've painted the living room, dining, master, spare, bath, closets, cabinets, ceilings, crevices and cracks.

Now it's time for quiche!  Goat cheese and zucchini.  And garlic.

Made by yours truly.

Delish!

Painting

Bending, dunking, straightening.  Climbing the ladder I craddle the roller so as not to let random paint droplets sprinkle the floor.  Roll one coat up, roll a second coat side to side over it, finish this two foot square area by rolling down.  Repeat.  And repeat and... repeat... until cream covers green, eggshell covers pink and white covers caca-colored brown.  Why anyone would paint a bathroom caca-colored brown is beyond me unless they had a permanent diarrhea problem.

Painting gives me an achy back, sore arms and the discovery that maybe I do have muscles.  They are very latent but they exist, otherwise I wouldn't feel this excruciating pain more befitting of an 80-year old woman.

No pain no gain.  After the last few days of painful painting, we have gained a better house.  Or at least one we can live in now.

Neighbor 1

This morning I ate my first breakfast in the kitchen; it was the best singed toast ever. Then I skedaddled out to the driveway for work.  Yes!  We have a driveway!  Big enough to park two cars in!  So long metered parking, street parking, parallel parking.  I won't miss ya'.

Climbing into my car Harold stops me.  He's our next door neighbor, a retired engineer who wears running shoes with marathoner arch support and knows the skinny on every man woman and cat within a five mile radius.

He tosses out a nonchalant wave and says, "You're the fifth couple in that house in six years."
"We'll be here longer than them."    
"Let's talk again once you start working in it.  You got a lot to do."
"We like the challenge," I said feeling my chin jut out.
"Uh-huh, welcome to the neighborhood," he said turning into his garage.

Welcome indeed.  Harold, the challenge is on!

  

First Night

It's 1 AM and still 95 degrees, the house is full of boxes and I can't find my toothpaste.  I put clean sheets on the mattress and crawl on top of the duvet.  Mr. Wonderful joins me.  We're going to sleep in Our House for the very first time.  No more neighbors with shared walls, or landlords who change contracts, or gross rent increases.  We're home in Our House.  I look at him and kick my feet like I'm at an all-girl sleepover.  We laugh and laugh and laugh.

Moving Day

Moving “Day” is a total misnomer.  It took me two months to inform the world we were moving, three months to find the right boxes, and four months to pack.  Nothing happens in a day, especially moving every one of your life’s possessions from a rental apartment to your first house.

For our actual move, Mr. Wonderful and I went local.  I called several Los Angeles-based companies and got price quotes for our in-town move.  This shopping around proved invaluable because 1) I discovered the going rate to move a mere 10 minutes/five miles away; and 2) I learned we wanted movers who communicated with us.  Of the companies I called one was unavailable, one’s office number was disconnected and several others never bothered to return my voicemails.  I know, how demanding, old-fashioned and just plain silly of me wanting a business to call me back to discuss me giving them my business.  Get with the times, Girl!

In the end we chose a company who called us back and could move us on the date we wanted.  Finally someone was speaking our language.  Actually they didn’t speak much of our language but they were fluent in Russian.  Our moving crew consisted of a Muscovite, a Ukrainian and one Kazakhstani who had immigrated to the City of Angels just one month before.  I only know one thing about Kazakhstan so I asked our mover if he knew that crazy Kazak reporter, “Borat” and his tour of America.  Right about then the Kazak broke my grandmother’s picture frame.

After that I decided to stop asking stupid questions and get out of the movers’ way, which definitely helped because they finished loading the truck without breaking anything else.  As the sun climbed pushing the temperature close to triple digits, these men from a region of the world where Siberia is a vacation destination and “summer” is a foreign concept, were visibly wilting in the Southern Californian sun.  To offset the heat they gulped down a bottle of water for every five boxes they put on the truck; in other words 732 water bottles.

Driving his car Mr. Wonderful led the way out of our noisy rental neighborhood, which lay in the middle of the Burbank Airport flight path, to The House.  The moving truck followed him while I took a detour to pick up a dozen sandwiches from Subway.  By the time I arrived the driveway, kitchen and patio looked like a World War II depot had vomited boxes.  Then the Kazak approached me with panic in his eyes. 

“Wh- where restroom?” he said shifting his weight from foot to foot in a universally understandable jig.

I steered him to the room off the kitchen then joined the others schlepping box after box after box.  Boxes labeled “living room”, master bedroom” and “random junk I should have thrown out” soon filled the rooms.

Inside I bumped into the Kazak holding a box labeled “bathroom”.  

“Where I put?” he asked.

I steered him to the room he already knew located off the kitchen.

“No,” he shook his head, “That ‘restroom’.  This go to ‘bathroom’,” he pointed to the label I’d written.

“Bathroom means restroom.”

He tilted his head like a Terrier.

“They mean the same thing, they are the same thing,” I said wiping the sweat from my brow.

“Two words for same thing?” he grimaced.  “So not practical.”

Practical?  He’s talking prac-tical!?  I looked around: the place was littered with boxes of stuff I didn’t need, a long scrape now ran across the whole wall of a freshly painted bedroom and our solid oak dining room table suddenly had two wobbly legs.

He’s right!  It completely impractical to pack up all your life’s possessions, cart them to a new house, which you don’t fully own but are borrowing from a bank and for the next twenty years and must spend every month paying back.  Packing, moving and not breaking anything in the process are absolute impracticalities I never should have embarked upon.  Turn back!  I want to shout to Mr. Wonderful.  I’ve changed my mind!  This is too impractical, messy and disruptive for me!

“Excuse me—”

“What now?!” I wailed.

“The truck is empty,” Mr. Wonderful said.  “You hungry?”

With the movers I pulled together a couple random chairs in the back yard and laid out the Subway sandwiches and drinks.  The sun shone, a gentle breeze rustled our palm trees, a mockingbird perked on the fence and sang his melodious repertoire.  I didn’t hear an airplane, or a truck not even a motorcycle.

The Kazak grabbed a turkey sandwich on focaccia bread and announced, “This good.” 

I looked at the stacked boxes pouring out of the rooms like a disaster zone.  I saw all the work we had to do just to make a cup of coffee.

“Yes,” I said looking at our first house, “It's very good.”

Pool BEFORE and AFTER

Here's the pool BEFORE--on the day we first saw The House.  It was filthy gross and looked like the home of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

 
Here's the pool AFTER it was drained, cleaned and refilled.  Ahhh, the power of a good scrub and a shock of chlorine.

The pool was built in the 1940s by a swim teacher who used it to teach swim classes.  Even today it's a joy to swim in--long and wide.

Chimney BEFORE and AFTER the Ivy

Here's the Chimney BEFORE when it was overrun with ivy.  It was so covered we didn't know what state the chimney would be in...

And here it is AFTER we ripped out the ivy to reveal a beautiful, intact chimney.

I'm looking forward to the winter to roast chestnuts over an open fire.

We Got The House!

The day we “closed on The House”—in other words the day we promised everyone from the bank, seller, realtor, insurance agent, title company and Chinese traveling circus that we would spend the next 20 years paying for it—we got the keys. 

After work I stopped at our apartment, picked up a bottle of chilled bubbly then rendez-vous’ed with Mr. Wonderful at The House. 

“You do the honors,” he said handing me the keys.

Odd, they felt light and inconsequential in my palm.  Yet these thin pieces of metal were moving us into a new chapter of our lives—from renters to first-time homeowners; from hunters and gatherers to stationary farmers; from a devil may care couple dropping all garbage into the apartment dumpster to Dang!  These devils really care about sorting paper and plastic from watermelon rinds and coffee grounds. 

I put the key in the lock and turned.  The door swung wide and we stepped into the cold emptiness.  The night’s darkness masked the dirt on the floors and the garish paint on the walls letting me momentarily forget about all the work this House needed before we could move in.  With a flashlight I walked into each room imagining: here’s where we’ll eat, where we’ll sleep, where we’ll Google kitten videos on Youtube. 

I opened the French doors and set up two folding chairs by the pool whose still water was bathed in moonlight.  Mr. Wonderful popped the cork on the bubbles and poured it into two coffee mugs, one chipped and one with “Elvis!” blazoned across it. 

“Congratulations,” I said toasting us with my King mug.  Sipping I watched the blinking lights of planes passing in the inky distance and wondered what city—or far away country—that plane was going to and—

Splash!

The champagne bottle pierced the placid surface of the pool and broke my traveling reverie.  The green bottle bobbed in the water like a buoy on a choppy sea, the rings of waves rippling out from it like the endless embrace of parentheses.  Surprised, I turned to Mr. Wonderful.

“They christen boats,” he shrugged.  “I just christened our pool.”  

Let the plane go where it will, let the passengers wander the world, I’m staying here and putting down roots with this man in Our House. 

Champagne never tasted so good.  

Master Bedroom--BEFORE--with the Green Painted Walls

Because you wanted to see it...  BEFORE: this is how the room looked when we moved in--green paint applied to the walls with a sponge...

AFTER:

This is how we covered the green walls--with one coat of white and two coats of cream.  It was a lot of painting but now the green is history!

Parlez-vous Escrow?

Once the seller accepts your offer to buy the house, you enter a 30-day period known as “escrow”.  In these four weeks you hire electricians, plumbers and chimney specialists to inspect the house and all of them tell you 101 reasons not to buy it.  The roof needs repair, the foundation isn’t bolted, the property sits in the middle of a flood plain/earthquake/iceberg zone. 

If finding the house with a realtor is like falling in love with a guy, escrow is like meeting that guy’s friends who tell you all the horrible things he does, has done and may possibly do again.  So if you decide to go ahead and marry him don’t say you weren’t warned by the specialists!  Escrow only ends when you accept a house’s imperfections, hold your nose and close the deal on it anyway.  They make it official by recording your name on the house’s title, which you can’t see unless you pay for a copy.  Paying people money during escrow is as easy as taking candy from a baby.  You walked in the house, that'll cost you $125.  You breathed in the house, that'll be $125.  You "thought" of the house, fork over $200.  

For most homebuyers 30 days of escrow is all the time you get to make the single biggest purchase of your entire life.  But 30 days is all you need because a house “For Sale” is a house that someone wants to get rid of. 

Or at least that’s how it used to be.  Things have changed since the housing market meltdown.

In the case of The House with the green bedroom walls and pool that Mr. Wonderful and I wanted to buy, our escrow lasted three times that—three very long months.   Just when we thought we’d close “this week”, the seller would call asking to extend escrow for another seven, 14, 30 days.  The seller requested the extensions for one reason: the house could not be sold.

According to official records, The House had sat vacant for 18 months during which time it racked up violations with the city that had to be amended before it could be sold.  The violations included “mow the lawn”, “trim the hedges”, “fence the backyard”.

Mr. W. and I prepared to take a weed wacker to the front yard but Thelma stopped us saying since we didn’t own the house, we couldn’t cut a blade of grass nor rake an unruly palm tree leaf.  That work was to be done by the seller.

Meanwhile the bank that was lending us the money for our loan was tired of waiting and threatened to increase our mortgage rate if we did not close by the end of the third month.  Trapped between a lazy seller and an antsy lending bank, we did the only thing we could: we went looking for another house. 

On the theMLS.com I found a two bedroom, two bath in tip-top, turn-key shape with a huge yard without a pool.  Mr. Wonderful and I went to see it during its open house and we liked it.  We called Thelma and told her to remove our offer from The House we loved and put an offer in on this new house we liked.   

“What?” Her voiced bellowed over the speakerphone.  “I thought you wanted that fixer upper with the green walls?  That you were going to make it beautiful?”

“The seller isn’t serious about removing the violations, so we can’t buy it.  Besides you called us idiots for wanting to buy that house and apparently you were right.” 

“Everyone who buys a house in this market is an idiot.  The process turns you into an idiot.”

“Thelma, we just can’t wait forever.”

“I’ll call you back,” she said and hung up.

I don’t know who she called or what she said but by the end of the month, the lawn was cut, the papers were signed and our escrow ended.

Finally The House belonged to us idiots!  

Finding "The House"

Mr. Wonderful and I first saw “The House” in late December.  

Let me be more specific, Mr. Wonderful is my husband and he’s just that, awesome.  The day was December 26^th when the excitement of Christmas, Santa and receiving gifts is a daily expectation.  And “The House” was a one-story with chipping paint, overgrown lawn and a tilting “For Sale” sign wedged in the front yard.  

We peeked in the windows.  It was filthy, in disrepair and covered in ivy, which had grow up, over and into the chimney so thickly you’d need a blowtorch to remove it. But the house had some things going for it like an open floor plan, a large kitchen and a pool!  I was in love.

The best part though was the sale price, which shockingly, was within our budget. 

I called our Realtor, a woman with a florescent white smile and bottle blond hair who insisted on wearing sensible shoes.  Thelma removed the keys from the lockbox and swung the door open.  We stepped inside The House. 

“It needs a lot of cleaning,” she said sniffing the air.  “And fixing.”  She entered the master bedroom and shrieked.  Mr. Wonderful and I raced in to find her staring at the walls.  

“They’re… green!”

“We know,” I said.

“Lime green and forest green together, which some colorblind fool applied with a sponge--”

“We know.”

“Which makes this the ugliest bedroom I’ve seen in 30 years of being a realtor." 

“We want to buy it.”

“This house?  Absolutely not.”

“It has a pool.”

“Which is empty and might not even hold water.”

“We like the kitchen.”

“I wouldn’t let my daughter cook in that kitchen, not to mention enter this house!”

“We can afford it,” I said.

“Because it’s a dump and needs serious help.” Thelma crossed her arms and shook her head.  “No way.  I won’t let you buy it.”

I looked at Mr. Wonderful.  Could we buy this house and fix it up while living in it?  He nodded and smiled. Yes, we can.

“You're right, Thelma,” I said, “This place is a dump but we can repair it, we can make it beautiful.  We want it.  So will you help us, or not?”

Thelma's sensible shoe tapped on the wood floor while she looked at the green bedroom with disgust.  “Fine, I’ll do it."

"Thank you!" I hugged, then I embraced Mr. Wonderful.

"I can’t decide about you two," Thelma said. "Either you have major vision or you’re complete idiots.”

I didn’t realize how prophetic her words would be.