Brett made the dryer work yesterday. It was (are you ready for this?) a bad fuse. Not a blown fuse, but an intact fuse that was bad out of the box. Can you believe that?! I did three loads of laundry yesterday and it was heaven, I tell you. Sweet, warm, fluffy heaven.

I did basic kitchen maintenance.

I cooked twice – and dinner was black bean, onion, and Mexican feta enchiladas, fried hominy, refried beans, and a fantastic rice pilaf I made up.

I did surface maintenance of the living room (dust, tidy up, throw away Brett’s junk.)

I took out the garbage. (Not as trivial as it sounds. “Taking out the garbage” at my house means collecting current trash into a plastic bag and hauling it up to the dump truck and chucking it in. Since the weather’s been so muddy and shitty, I had three of those bags, plus all the shipping material from our recent Amazon.com order to carry up there in the rain.)
I put laundry away.

And I cleaned the bathroom. Which made me feel utterly overwhelmed and disgusted with my gross old home.

Now, most of you have been to my house and you know how it is, but if you haven’t, let me explain in detail why this post is about being sick of my house.

We live in the basement because that’s where the kitchen is. The basement is funky and the floor is cracked and uneven and the ceilings are either totally unfinished or they’re so old they’re sagging and about to fall down.

Our basement floods, anywhere from once to four times per year.

The house is old, and it was moved to its current location forty or maybe fifty years ago, and placed on the foundation I live in today. If you don’t know about Iowa, I’ll tell you: foundations don’t last here. The temperature swings are too great, the earth too wet. Foundations fall apart. No one lives in the basement of an old farmhouse in Iowa, it just isn’t done. They’re all damp, they’re all smelly, and they’re all cracking and buckling. It’s their job.

Well, the folks who moved the house to where it is now always intended to live upstairs, but legend is that they discovered the basement was warm in the winter and cool in the summer (which is true), and the temporary arrangement became permanent. They never bothered to complete their remodel, and the basement continued to be the main living floor, with convenient ground-level entries and everything.

Living in the basement had temperature advantages and it made the house ‘bigger’: the main storey became four bedrooms and a bath, and the unfinished attic was probably used for storage and thought of as possible expansion space.

The people we bought the house from started the attic-finishing process (they put in a staircase and finished the walls and floors) and completed the installation of quasi-modern plumbing in the kitchen. (The kitchen sink drained into a hole in the floor when they moved in, ten years before we did.)

I thought the basement was somewhat sparse when I visted before we bought the place, but I didn’t know then that (A.) it’s impossible to keep anything truly clean down there, and (B.) it fucking floods regularly. I guess the woman who lived there before me decided it was easier to just not have anything in the living room and look poor than it was to have to move it out and clean it after every flood.

That’s about where I’m at now. I think it would be easier to just remove everything from the basement entirely; then I wouldn’t have to move it to clean.

All our furniture is shit, of course, but it would be somewhat less shitty if it were anywhere other than where it actually is. Simply being in our living room ages furniture unnaturally; it warps and gets funky.

The rodent and bug population in our house is outrageous because we’re the warmest nest for miles, and the house is old and funky and there are a million ways to get in. The spider webs are insane and impossible to keep up with.

Our furnace is from the 50’s. The ducts are just as old. The cobwebs are insane and impossible to keep up with.

What I’m trying to do is explain what “cleaning the bathroom” really means in my house. It means that I remove everything first – products, hair brushes, tooth brushes, towels, magazines, rugs, TP, everything – and clean the ceiling first.

The ceiling isn’t. There’s no ceiling. It’s open ancient rafters, chock full of dust and dusty cobwebs and dusty spider webs. I get one of those telescoping dusters and try to clean uncleanable surfaces and angles over my head: old rough wood, plastic pipes, copper pipes, electrical wiring so old it’s cloth-insulated. Weird random old cloths that previous residents have stuffed here or there for reasons of their own. In short, I spend a long time trying to thoroughly dust a bumpy, dark, crazy, undustable surface.

While I’m doing this it is literally raining dust on me, and blobs of cobwebs are sticking to nails and burrs and other rough surfaces, so more than cleaning I’m mostly rearranging. When I’m finished, I’m filty, the ceiling doesn’t look much better, and now instead of a delicate filagree of dust-catching strands, I have wads of cobwebs stuck to nails, caught there when I moved the duster by.

After that fun exercise, I clean the counter, sink, and toilet the normal way: Comet and scrubbing. That’s the most normal part of cleaning the bathroom for me.

Then I spray bleach on the mold colony growing on the bricks near the corner (again), but it’s so damp it never dies.

Then I sweep the floor.

In a normal house I’d mop, too, but in my house there’s no point. It’s just a basement floor, about as moppable as a packed-dirt hut floor. (And yes, this is the room I get naked and bathe in. I used to use the upstairs bathroom, which is much nicer, but the sink and tub both started leaking and Brett says it’s unfixable.)

I’d install some kind of flooring, but I don’t think there’s any point in that either. Whoever built the counter for the sink was on some kind of weird hippy crack; there are 2x4s nailed down to the floor itself and not enough room between them for a cheap 12×12 sticky tile. Plus the floor’s dirty and crooked and I don’t think anything would adhere to it for any length of time. Plus the walls are brick so it’s not like I could nail up some baseboard or anything. Plus the last time I mopped it really did look like I was mopping a dirt floor.

And then there’s the hot water heater. It’s in the bathroom in an unfinished alcove. We hang our towels on a bar in front of it, which kinda hides it, but not really. It’s just a dark area filled with rough wood and dust and cobwebs. And a water heater, of course.

And then there’s the shower. Brett built and tiled a beautiful shower, but it’s never been finished. There’s no ceiling. There’s no door (we’re just using a shower curtain, which isn’t long enough and so the floor’s always damp). The outside of the structure is open – no sheetrock or anything, just little alcoves full of standing dust. (Literally. There’s one I can see but not reach and there’s got to be a quarter inch of dust on the horizontal surface.)

After “dusting,” cleaning, and sweeping, I spend an hour cleaning everything I took out earlier and replacing it. What I mean is that my house is so old and funky and dirty that every month I have to wash everything – everything – as I replace it in the bathroom. Each item has to be dusted or washed or it just looks like garbage. Every bottle is so dusty you can’t even imagine it. If I don’t dust everything, the bathroom doesn’t look like I’ve cleaned it.

After cleaning the bathroom for two hours – and I didn’t even get to the shower – it didn’t look better. It was still so dark and funky that I’d be embarassed to offer it to any but my closest (and therefore most understanding) of friends or relatives. And it didn’t smell any better; it still smelled funky and old and white trash and not clean.

This summer I stayed at Ron’s house in Colorado for two weeks. Both he and Brett worked construction, which is dirty by nature, and there were four dogs staying there, but I was able to keep it clean in less than an hour a day. I think that’s how normal houses are: if you’re good at maintaining – like I am – it’s never really dirty.

The house I live in now, on the other hand, would be filthy – literally – in a week even if no one was there.

Last month my cousin Paul sent pictures of his new house It’s bright and clean and adorable. I could keep that fucker clean in an hour a day, too.

Sunday I went to Krista’s house for her baby shower. Her place is handsome and spotless. Five hours a week, max, and it would never be dirty.

Now please remember that I’m a chronic blessings-counter by nature. I am keenly aware of all that I have and how fortunate I am – and that’s no shit, either.

But.

I am so sick of living in that nasty, stinky, ugly, un-fucking-cleanable basement. I don’t give a shit that it’s ten degrees cooler than anyplace else in the summer. I don’t care that it’s cozy and warm in the winter. I want to live in a place with insulation and draperies and central fucking heating and air that doesn’t flood or grow mold or smell like dead old ladies.

I want to have a clean, comfortable, welcoming house. I want to feel like a normal 30-something grownup rather than a weird freaky white trash podunk. I’d like to throw a fucking dinner party once in awhile, in a kitchen I’m not afraid will give people rabies.

I think I spent much of last year feeling like a loser and a failure in terms of my domestic contributions because they’re pointless: I cannot make my house look nice or be clean. I spend about sixteen hours a week on household stuff, and while some of it is bill-paying and errands, most of that time is spent cleaning my ass off. And yet whenever anyone drops by, I’m afraid that they’re uncomfortable, and I wonder if they’re thinking, “How could anyone live anywhere so dirty?”

My MIL used our bathroom Sunday, and even though I cleaned it the last time it came up on my chore rotation, I still winced a little. Not because I think she’d be judgemental, but because it is gross in there.

I want a nice, finished, cute little house. The farm house can and will be that someday, but the wait seems eternal.

Sigh.