Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Weird House
We moved into a rental house to wait for our old house to be rebuilt after a tornado. And man, is it weird. And old. Not farmhouse old or historic place old, but 50s ranch-style old.
How did we know it was that old (aside from reading the listing)? When we moved in, we asked the furniture rental company for three TVs and two computer desks. These they promptly supplied. Then we found out there were no cable outlets in any room. Presumably this house had been occupied before, but evidently, none of those families watched TV or went online. Weird. It took the cable guy five hours to fit out the house with all the outlets we needed.
The layout of the house is also weird. The front door opens onto the dining room, just steps away from the kitchen, which is also the laundry room. The washer and dryer sit opposite the fridge, sticking partway into the actual kitchen space. Next to them, for no apparent reason, is a foot-wide patch of countertop and then the stove. The microwave is next, taking up most of the rest of the counter space. The cabinets look fine from the outside but are unfinished inside. Shelf paper is definitely called for. (Remember that movie Johnny Dangerously, where Marilu Henner says, “Oh, Johnny, I love shelf paper”? I never thought I would find myself agreeing with her, but here I am. But I digress.)
Down a short, narrow hall (all the halls are narrow) is the living room, which is at least a cozy but decent size and has three windows overlooking the backyard, where my husband can put some bird feeders so as to have cat TV (no cables required for that).
The bathrooms are also weird. The master bathroom is actually the half-bath. The full bathroom is off the hall a ways down. Both are tiny. Evidently, we’re supposed to shower, then drip back to the bedroom to dress. It might be quicker to go to the kitchen and pull clean clothes out of the dryer.
The weirdest part of the house is a big empty room also off the dining room, which is billed as “a family room or even a fourth bedroom.” It is bigger than the master bedroom, but it has a tiled floor and the only door that leads to the backyard. Plus the only three-pronged outlets in the house. Right now we’re using it as the cats’ bathroom. Litter room. Whatever. (They bathe anywhere and everywhere.) I suppose we could get a ping-pong table and designate it the game room. Maybe even teach our cats to play ping-pong like those ones on the internet. Which we can now connect with.
The house is not without its charm. It is in a nice, secluded neighborhood of similar vintage houses, but not too far from the main drag, which has a convenient drugstore, a pizza parlor that delivers to us, and a Kroger’s a little further down. There’s an entrance to the highway within a reasonable distance, too. Even an establishment (I don’t quite know what to call it) that offers doughnuts, ice cream, and free wifi, and a Dollar General, which I imagine we’ll be frequenting for all the little stuff we don’t now own and the rental company didn’t provide. (They provided an astonishing variety of things — even kitchen utensils, including a whisk. I’ve never owned a whisk. If anything needed whisking, I forked it instead.)
The house does come with some nice amenities: an attached garage; a shed out back; central air; ceiling fans in the dining room, living room, and master bedroom; and two smaller bedrooms, which have become our home office and study.
We’ll likely live here about a year while our own house is rebuilt. We’ll probably find more curious things about it as we do, but we think we can be comfortable here. After all, the house may be weird, but so are we.
