adventures in the new

A week ago, I woke up a little depressed. This is because I opened my eyes, sighed with happiness at our beautiful bedroom windows, and then I remembered that but ten hours before, our cheerful downstairs neighbor came up to cheerfully inform us that water was leaking into his bathroom from ours.

I’m sorry. Let me place you in the scene by using the capitals and talking with my hands: WATER WAS LEAKING INTO HIS BATHROOM FROM OURS. Hello, homeownership! Let’s start this out with a bang! A plumbing bang!
This was why I woke up depressed. And puffy. Puffy from all the crying and wailing and gnashing and rending.
All of which, of course, were unnecessary. The seller’s husband had been the contractor to gut-renovate our beautiful kitchen and bathroom, and when we informed him that hello! WATER! (I was talking with my hands but he couldn’t see it over the phone), he was more than willing to come over with his plumber and crawl around behind the fridge until the problem was sussed and solved. They also WD-40′d our front door while we were there and brought us magical unicorns of peace and harmony. We all sang Kumbaya. The end!

I’m telling you all this by way of saying it’s been the only real glitch in the past week and a half of Home! Ownership! which has otherwise been an awesome, enlightening, and exciting adventure. Everything about this new apartment brings me fuzzy joy and aforementioned unicorns. I have also learned a lot, which proves my sixth grade teacher right when she said education can be fun and I rolled my eyes, sorry Mrs. Lacy.
One thing I learned is that living in Brooklyn is teh AWESOME if only because practically all of our friends live here. We’ve been more social in the past week than we’ve been in months because look! We live in Brooklyn! Who wants to make last-minute spontaneous plans? I do!

I’ve also learned that Stuart has impeccably good taste and judgement. You could say this was a refresher course since he married me (badum-ching!) and also, we’ve done the whole renovating a room thing before, but seeing him really get excited and involved about where that ONE chair should go, and whether that bookshelf will crowd the room, it’s all felt very much like I’m not alone in my aesthetic mania. Until it comes to organizing the books by height and spine colors. Then he abandons me to my compulsion. But he’ll bring me tea on the battlefield, I’m sure.

Another lesson has been stairs. STAIRS! It’s four flights up. There are fifty-six of them, steps that is. If you can’t bounce a quarter off my ass after two months of this, I want my money back. From the stairs. Apparently the lesson I have yet to learn is I’ve got to stop making “I want my money back!” jokes about homeownership.
Which leads me to, perhaps, the only real lesson embedded in this wandering monologue. Although I woke up puffy-eyed and depressed on Tuesday, by Wednesday when the plumber and the contractor were due to arrive, I’d spent an hour looking online at diagrams of drainage pipes and tub stoppers and overflow drains (aided by a CAD-designed diagram made by Stuart because he, like the apartment, is TEH AWESOME). I had finally given up on the pipedream of running back to my lovely landlord in Astoria begging for shelter, SHELTER, PLEASE. I was ready to face two Brooklyn Dudes and their plumbing expertise, brandish my Feminism Stick, and know the the hell they were talking about.
And I did. Much as having a landlord is the loveliest blanket of hand-holding support when it comes to New York apartments, I wouldn’t trade all the puffy-eyed panic in the world now. I’m excited about owning our own little corner of New York, even if it’s a constant exercise in learning stuff I didn’t need to know before.
Like how to drill into granite. And how to fix a window ballast. And install a new lock. And whether I’ll ever have the balls to take a bathtub bath again to test that pesky overflow. It’s all, as Stuart constantly reminds me, an adventure.