Had to call hubby to figure out why half the electric in the bedroom cut out – it was because I painted close to an outlet that wasn’t attached to its box, which tripped the GFCI in the other room that kept working but shut off everything else without tripping a circuit breaker. Yeah, our electrician couldn’t figure it out, either.

So I’m thinking about these shows that are ticking me off while I’m painting. The “House Hunters” where the buyers manage to find three houses that are bigger than ours, newer than ours, and half the price. The remodeling shows where they agonize whether, with a budget of only $75 thousand, they’ll be able to get the room that fits their needs AND their budget!!!!! Worse still, “If Walls Could Talk”, in which people have to tear things down to find out what the house was like before.

We knew that we’d end up having to fix things no matter what we bought, but we had never expected so many things to go wrong right from the get-go. We might not be wondering how to do a lot of the things we’re now putting off if we hadn’t had so many surprises. Now, we’ve seen only one “House Hunters” that was in NJ, and I bet everyone else who lives here knows why. . .the buyers’ budget was about $400,000, and they wanted to move into Bergen County. BWAHAHAHA!!! That doesn’t make real good television. “They decided on the one-bedroom, 1 bath handyman special with the 25 by 50 foot yard!” And yet. . .we decided to stay in NJ. Oh, well.

So we come to fixing some of the stuff on the inside, now that we’ve blown so much money on the outside. In addition to the paint, we want to get rid of the wall to wall carpet, which is ugly, and has a particular smell that multiple shampooings hasn’t managed to get out completely. We’d like to put in laminate – and when we start figuring prices, we start wondering how realistic it would be to put it in ourselves. OMG. Don’t even go there. We don’t want carpet, but it’s a third the price. And now something really has to be done, because the walls are nice and fresh and bright and orange, and the carpet is shades of dirty dirt-beige and navy.

And finally, we have a fair idea of what the house might have looked like at some point, partly because the neighborhood is a development, with four styles of house, all variations on a theme. Plus, you can look and see where a lot of the remodeling was done. Here in the ceiling – look, this used to be part of another room! You can tell because rather than fixing the ceiling, they put more of that popcorn stuff where the wall used to be! Here’s where one outside door used to be, because they left the concrete stoop sticking out a little and hid it with a bush! And in the room I’m painting, well, one wall is covered with paneling, and there are a couple of mooshy parts that are just the right size for another door and window that were, well, left as holes with paneling slapped up over them. There are no mysteries to be found during remodeling, because all the previous remodeling was done crappily. Some doors were replaced, and some door hardware was replaced, but not all new doors got new hardware or vice versa.

*sigh* As I said, this kind of stuff doesn’t make good television. I wish it did, though, because I’d even let the Design on a Dime people come in at this point. . .