When the fixer-upper is beyond fixing

If dreams are any indication of what is occupying your subconscious, it wasn’t boding well for the situation my husband and I just gotten ourselves into. Zombies were chasing someone right up to my house—(the one we just bought in in real life.) I wasn’t particularly afraid of them but was holding the door open, hoping the person would make it in time.

Unfortunately I will never know because the scene switched to the basement of the dream place where we discovered a room that had been a gift shop. It was still full of stuff but someone told me that underneath the place were wind tunnels whose constant screeching drove people crazy. And I still wasn’t worried (?!)

Now the setup for this dream isn’t that far-fetched because the person whose real-time property we bought had just walked away. Family was concerned and came to get him. Left his beer can on the end table, bills piled high. Rusty Coleman stove on the kitchen counter and pictures on the wall. Said he didn’t want a thing.

Fixated on a fixer-upper or—When that penchant for fixer-uppers gets you in a real fix

You know how amazed you get when you see the beauty some people, (like Chip and Joanna Gaines on Fixer-Upper) can make out of a wreck of a house? Just knock out this wall here and put in a stainless steel kitchen there. And ta-da! A new house is born right before your eyes.

It’s easy if you have the ability (and the money) to “see” the vision. I can see the end result when I have something to work with—we knocked out walls in confident abandon in my present home

before

—but I have no, absolutely none, conceptual ability to transpose a

after

flat scale drawing of a layout into an actual 3-dimensional space. And I can’t sleep or think on anything else until I get it.

So for the past three days I have been walking around my house measuring spaces, measuring couches and desks and doorways in an attempt to imagine what they would look like in a new little house that doesn’t yet exist. My left eye is bloodshot, my brains are beat and I’ve used up a whole pad of graph paper trying to “see” the house that will replace the one we bought after we tear it down.

Yep. That’s it above. I was afraid when our kids saw what we just purchased, they’d be putting us in a home all right but it wouldn’t be the one on the hill.