Buying a House, Part 2

(For those of you waiting to see how my story ends, sorry I have been keeping you waiting this long. I've been dealing with stuff at work and travelled to San Francisco, Las Vegas and Philadelphia in the past month.)

So, when I last wrote, the house was awaiting inspection. For those of you who don't know how a home inspection works, you pay a guy about $500 to show up to the house you made an offer on and poke around, find stuff wrong, and shatter your dreams. I knew the kitchen needed work already when I looked at the home, but then there was the furnace, and the circuit breaker box, and the possible termite damage, and the low levels of toxic Radon in the house. Every time I mentioned these to people, they would say, "Welcome to homeownership." I now sort of understood what it felt like to be a rookie quarterback who was sacked by a 290 pound defensive lineman, who says, "welcome to the NFL," as you are lying on the ground. Then he throws your house on you.

The other thing wrong with the house was the color selection for the rooms. I'm not a fashion guru or have a great sense of style. (I'm a guy.) I was able to see that there were some poor color choices in the rooms. The living room was sea green. The office was turquoise, the second upstairs bedroom was powder blue. The master bedroom was LAVENDER. The downstairs main room was peach. The one downstairs "bedroom" was mustard and the other one was the color of green screens. I sort of liked that aspect of that room. If I decided to buy the house, I could CGI myself into photos in all sorts of places that were now unaffordable to me. The home inspector gave me the inspection binder. (It was over an inch thick.) Yeah. "You've got a fixer upper," he said. "It's a good one though. I'd probably buy it myself."

It took another week of thinking about it before I finally bought the place. It then took about another month to close, which means five different people keep sending legal documents to each other until everyone has lost their own paperwork or just gives up caring. Then they stick you in a room and make you sign about four hundred pages of information, not really explaining any of it to you except that lead paint is bad. I finally owned the house.

Once I closed on the house, I had to travel up to Philadelphia for a meeting. I made it just at the tail end, as it was wrapping up. A few days later, my brother and I went back down to move into the house. That afternoon, we moved in a few items from the storage place. At 9:30pm, the gate wouldn't open at the place anymore. We sort of assessed the situation, we weren't going to be able to get everything before he had to go back home. We ran to Target, where we looked at inflatable mattresses. "This one looks like its the best," my brother said. "and it's cheaper than the other ones." I looked at the mattress. It definitely was the biggest, with not only a faux mattress, but a faux inflatable box spring, too. Presumably the illusion of a box spring gave added support. "Okay," I said let's go."

My brother dropped me off at the house. After pulling the rest of the stuff out of his car and grabbing some food, it was 11pm. "I'm going to back to Philly tonight," he said. I've got a lot of work to do." He backed out of the driveway and left me alone, in the fixer upper with the lavender master bedroom.

I looked on the cover of the inflatable mattress box again. There was a couple lounging on it having a great time (or I would presume so, after all, they were just lounging on an inflatable mattress, but they were smiling. When I lounge on an inflatable mattress it's not fun enough to make me smile, but then again maybe I expect too much out of life). I pulled out the contents of the box. The mattress was big alright. It was going to take a long time to inflate with the electric pump. Only - there was no electric pump, the reason the mattress was so cheap. I looked at the clock on my phone 11:28 - too late for Target. Too late to call my friends and ask them if hey had an inflatable mattress pump. Well, I thought, let's see how far I can get trying to inflate this thing....

Four one and a half hours I attempted to manually bring the mattress to life. I felt like I was taking CPR training and even though the patient with a pattern that give the consumer the feeling that they were sleeping on an actual mattress with coils had flatlined, I kept going for another 87 minutes. I started becoming giddy from inhaling to much latex smell. I looked at the clock - 1:00am and I was making little progress. I laid the inflatable mattress on the floor and tried climbing on it. I was surrounded by billowy pockets of rubber, but beneath me, I still felt the hardwood floor against my back. This was going to be like sleeping on a deflated Macy's parade balloon. My one unpacked light reflected the lavender off the walls to give everything in the room a pale, sickly hue. Well, I thought, at least my bedroom will look good for Easter.