The House

**I started writing this a few days ago and just now finished it. I'm leaving it the way it is, so you can see how mad crazy things have been in our lives.

I'm mad as a PMSing hornet right now and have already consumed 3/4 bag of scrumptious truffles, 2 bowls of pasta, 2 mugs of coffee, and am about to pop open some seriously cheap and lethal booze to knock me out so I would not make a belligerent phone calls to find out where my unaccompanied baggage is. That is another story for another time in the saga of "The Move from Hell--Endless Nightmares." There were a couple of days during this whole moving process where I just lay on the floor and cried. Seriously, I just had enough. All I wanted was for us to be in a house with all of our stuff. I never thought I would be the kind of person who felt attachment to things, but after these past couple of months, I've come to realize that it was those things that made me feel "home." The only constant thing in a military life is that there will always be a change whether or not I'm prepared for it. So if sitting on the same dirty old sofa and drinking from my favorite tea mug lessen the jarring effect of constantly being uprooted, then I am happy to be called shallow.

I really thought we were off to a good start after finding a house less than 24 hours after arriving in Statesboro. I was drunk tired by the time we met up with our soon-to-be new landlords for a house showing, because it was already 1 a.m. Germany time. Wil and I just assumed that we were looking at a house, which current tenants were in the process of moving out. We met 3 teenage and early 20's daughters of the renter, who wasn't there, plus her grandson, all of whom lived in the house. They were just lounging around the living room watching tv and Chase was playing with the little boy while I was trying to make polite small talk to keep awake. The house was big--4 bedrooms, 3 full baths, and a sun room--far bigger than any of the houses/apartments Wil and I had shared since we'd been married. It was in a new safe subdivision, there were plenty of room for everyone, but we would need to put up fencing for the dogs ourselves. We were deliriously tired, wanted to go to bed, and honestly didn't pay much attention to the details of the house when we told them that we would take it. I mean, the house was only 3 years old, how bad could it be, right? Anyway, buying was not an option since there was a possibility of moving again in just 2 short years. It wasn't until after we spoke with the landlord the following day that we found out that moving in would not be so easy. Apparently, the current tenant had bought the house off of the landlord, who was a contractor/property developer. Recently she had lost her job and could no longer afford the house, and it defaulted back to our landlord. Essentially, our expressed leasing commitment solidified the eviction process for her and her family, even though they knew they had to go sooner than later. I was teetering between being MORTIFIED at the thought that our family was causing their family to become homeless and selfishly feeling relieved that we finally found somewhere to land and stay a while. We stayed in a small local hotel while waiting for them to move out. While hotel living does sound fabulous, I can assure you that this particular one didn't make me feel remotely like Eloise at the Plaza. The only good things about the place were 1) free breakfast (complete with grits, biscuits and gravy! Hooray for southern heart-clogging foods!), 2) kind staff, 3) 42" TV that kept my kid occupied, and 4) the price that we could afford. We ended up staying nearly 3 weeks in a place that made me wish for my dad's sinus problem that would have prevented me from smelling the cigarette smell deeply embedded in the carpet. The dorm-room-sized mini fridge, which had faux wood paneling and was louder, especially in the middle of the night, than my brother's old college car that had a busted exhaust, held exactly 3 frozen dinners if and only they were taken out of the cartons. There were no stove, and we ate more than our fair share of microwavable anything when eating out twice a day was getting really old and expensive. We had two queen beds and a baby crib in the room. The rest of the available floor space was covered by luggage and toys. The bathroom was grimy and tiny. Wil was at work most days, leaving me and Chase to battle it out while Wren napped. If you are not getting how truly horrible our living situation was, let me try again. One-room living. Add a toddler. And a 7-week old baby. No car. Bad weather. Good thing I worked so hard growing Chase's brain cells during her first year, because I was certain she killed at least a thousand everyday watching TV at least 4-5 hours+/day. It was survival, yes, but it sure didn't make me feel any better about my parenting skill.

Our moving day came and went twice before we actually got to live there. The problem was the house was FILTHY. I don't have any other word for it. Think black carpet that was supposed to be beige, lime scale built-up toilet rings, burned-on caked on food on the stove top, dirt embedded in the wood grain of ALL doors,...etc. And this was after the landlords "cleaned" the place. They allowed us to move in a week early rent free, and at first I was so taken aback and grateful by their generosity since money was getting super tight (the power that be at the Army took their sweet time to reimburse us for our traveling expenses and hotel cost). Should have known that there were no such thing as a free lunch. The first move-in date came and Wil excitedly headed to the house to take a look around while I waited at the hotel with two sleeping beauties. He called me and sounded livid. I didn't realize the extent of the filthy grime until I got there. My cheap landlord (OH, WHY, GOD, WHY DO YOU KEEP STICKING ME WITH THIS TYPE?!?) attempted to clean the carpet by renting a rug doctor or something of that sort. The carpet was now a shade of dark brown instead of black. Can you imagine putting your kids to play on that??? You know, even if I didn't appreciate how grimy the rest of the house still was, I was not above rolling up my sleeve and giving it a go if it saved us another week of hotel stay. But the carpet was a deal breaker. We called the landlord, he met us at the house, and we did a walk through to sort out things that HAD to be done before we move in. He asked for three more days. Doesn't sound like a lot but to me 3 days were 259,200 seconds more of living in that hotel. Oh, there were sobbing.

The second moving day, a.k.a. the second worst day/night of my life, had to happen because we were officially poor. We had been living in hotels for over a month by that point (in Germany and Stateside in several states)--and still no reimbursement from the Army. Wil was at work for half a day, while I packed up our suitcases AGAIN. You would think that after all the money we spent on the damn hotel, they would be generous with their offer of a late check-out, right? No, we were about 5 minutes late out of our room, and the phone rang to remind us of the time. Bastards. Anyway, we loaded up the car with sinking feelings in our stomachs and prayed. The good news was the carpet was finally professionally cleaned and deodorized. The bad news was EVERYTHING ELSE was still exactly how we saw them the last time we were at the house. We didn't have time to mope because Miss Chase had her first dance class that afternoon. So we unloaded our stuff in a big empty house and went to Miss Helen's studio (more story on that later). One thing led to another, and we didn't get out of the whole dancing/ice cream treat with a new friend after class thing until after 6. Still had to eat dinner, which carried us to way pass 7. Then it was the dreaded Walmart stop to buy everything we needed to start living in a big empty house. Our unaccompanied baggage, which contained everything one needed to start out in a new house (pillows, blankets, kitchen things,...etc) was conveniently dropped off at a storage IN FLORIDA and marked on the system as "delivered," without us ever being notified. BASTARDS. We spent the next several hours fumbling over blankets, pillows, and pots in Walmart isles. I was beyond fried. Chase was asleep in a double stroller, and Wren, who was way pass tired, was fighting sleep in the Ergo. In hindsight, we probably should have known better than to believe that our stuff would arrive on the date they were promised and just gone ahead and bought all these things before the move-in date. But there were no room to store anything. Our car, which actually arrived BEFORE schedule--our total saving grace, was packed full of boxes we had mailed ourselves from Germany, and please don't let me start on the condition of the hotel room again. So now you can go back and read my Walmart breastfeeding story from the last post. Then after all that mess, we still somehow managed to forget something that Wil had to go back in to get get while I waited in the car in the parking lot with the girls. Statesboro Walmart parking lot is not where you want to be at 10:30 p.m. Anyway, went to the house, set up our air mattress, set up Chase's tent, set up Wren's Pea Pod, and finally passed out around midnight. This is when things got a little fuzzy for me. I have no idea where Wil was, but Chase was in bed with me. I was shivering because sleeping on an air mattress in a big cold empty house was frigid regardless of how many layers of blankets I had on me. The bed was wet, and I was super confused about where I was and where the hell the water was coming from. As it turned out, Chase wet the bed, and because she was so exhausted, she never even woke up--something that never happened. My kid will cry and complain if she has one drop of water on her shirt, ok? She'd only wet the bed maybe 3 times since we tossed the diapers, and every time that happened the neighbors down the street knew Chase was having a bad night. The child was so OUT she didn't even stir when we had to clean her up and change her clothes. That should tell you how rough that day was for all of us. Chase went back to sleeping in her clean dry Toy Story tent after she got changed, and Wil and I landed on the floor. I was thankful for the soft carpet, which had been freshly steamed, but not so much for the citrus-scented deodorizer that made everything smell like we all had been in a fist-fight with Florida's finest trees for the next week.

Needless to say, we barely slept that night. Wil woke up and went to work. I woke up, started "The Wonder Pets" for Chase on the computer, and started scrubbing. I hope to never be able to say again that I spent the first day in my house with my hands in the toilets scrubbing out the lime scale rings with a pumice stone. Now two weeks after we moved in, I'm still scrubbing on a daily basis. I got all the burned-on food off the stove top about 3 days in. All of the ceiling fans, except the two I can't reach because they are mounted on a 13-foot high ceiling, were rid of their thick layers of dust. Dirty doors were no match against Mr. Clean's Magic Erasers, and all the bathrooms were scrubbed multiple times to get the grime out of the tubs, shower stall, sinks, tiles, and the list goes on and on. I will never understand how anyone could live in such filth. The previous tenant had three grown daughters living with her. When my kids grow up and have houses of their own, I would call it a failure in parenting on my part if they looked anything remotely close to this house before the great Steinhauer clean up. Honestly, I shouldn't be surprised since the mother's room was the filthiest one of them all. All this mess didn't happen overnight. It looked like none of them bothered to clean anything since the day they moved in. Nasty people.

And the last words on a landlord who's also a contractor. You would have though he would use this house as a showcase for his work. No, not really. What we didn't see during a quick walk through was that there were no toilet paper holders, towel holders, or backsplashes in any of the bathrooms. No backsplash in the kitchen either. There's barely any caulking around anything that is near the water. The tile work is jacked up, door frames are crooked, and light switches are placed wherever and none have the same operating order (i.e. in one bedroom, the first switch turns on the fan, the second the light, but it's the opposite for the other bedrooms. In a guest bathroom, there's a switch that does nothing at all in between the two that controls the light and exhaust fan, etc.). I'm sure we're only discovering the tip of the craziest iceberg yet. Wil and I always look at each other, shake our heads, and mumble something to the effect of "it's just our luck."