Mulling Over the Overlooked House Hunt Option
and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
My mind can not settle. My soul insists that we take to our bed and pull the covers over our head. Restlessness and apathy. It is an asinine combo.
The cause is straightforward: we are stuck in a house that was barely maintained, and with every living spaced splashed in lemon-colored walls and six decades of knickknacks and outdated stuff. Stains, spills, scratches, filth lend a poverty white trash hue to everything.
I can not imagine many more years where I have the ability to move, paint, and mend. We are in our autumn years. We should have all this sorted out already. We do not.
My mother, much like my dad, refuses to part with anything. She does not want anything fixed. She does not want anything updated. How bad is it? The basement toilet leaks and the floor is destroyed. She insists on using that fucking bathroom.
I could push (again!) the need to clean out and clean up, the desire to put paint on the walls before I can no longer to ladders, to rescue my couches and other things from the ravages of eight years of storage. It feels daunting.
It does not necessarily need to be so. We could sort through the garage and basement and purge things we have not used in eight years. We can secret stuff away to make more room upstairs. We can slap paint on the walls and maybe see about stripping and protecting all the wood here.
Staying here and making it accessible means taking out a second mortgage. Home additions are not cheap. There are current needs, such as replacing the worn out shower stall or putting in a new sewer line, so we would need to manage that money carefully. It is used for fixing the house and not for other things.
Another reason for staying put is Mum's health. She has new growths in her lungs. At 87 and on thinners, a biopsy is not possible. I do not want her final years to be in hospice. As with my Dad, I would want her to pass in her own home.
Jeff and I mulled over everything this afternoon. We will bring up this topic tomorrow during dinner.
And my sorrow? I honestly grieve losing a house in perfect condition. I grieve the charming rural setting. I grieve the lack of vegetation here, especially the lack of trees. I make an herculean effort to not exude a cold or indifferent mindset.
Tsk.
Wait and See Mode activated.