TheBanyanTree: CoCo's Couch

[Margaret R. Kramer]

We’re on the home stretch now.  Our house has transformed from Ray and
Margaret’s home to almost an anonymous residence.  It’s been stripped down
to the minimum required furniture.  The knick knacks that express who we are
have been packed away.  Our house is now composed of neutral colors and bare
walls.  It seems we are living in a hotel.  Hopefully, it won’t be long.  We
’ll list the house on Tuesday and then we’ll wait and see.

Ray did a lot of work this week.  He got the deck painted.  He patched up
the garage floor and the patio with cement.  He painted the dining room and
kitchen.  I got the yard weeded and mowed last night.

This is our last weekend to get things done.  The major projects have been
completed except Ray wants to replace the tile on the kitchen floor.  I’ll
try to get in there before he does and get the refrigerator and oven cleaned
out.

We’ll move the dog kennels into Ray’s now decluttered office and that will
open up the family room.  Then we can clean the carpet.

If we’re lucky, we can finish everything up today.  There are open houses
tomorrow of some of the houses on my list.  None of them are my “top”
choices, but it will give us an opportunity to see what’s out there and also
check out this particular neighborhood.  There is one house that  is on my
list, but not having an open house tomorrow, that I really like, but I’m not
sure of the neighborhood, so that might give us a chance to see where it’s
located.

In the course of our decluttering, we’ve had to throw out things that do
have special meaning.  I think that’s inevitable when one is downsizing.  We
can’t keep everything.  A couple of weeks ago we had the garbage people pick
up my parents’ china cabinet.  That piece of furniture was part of my
childhood.  After my mother died and my dad remarried, my sister inherited
it, and then passed it on to me.  It was a 60s style piece, very simple
lines, nothing really valuable, but worth a lot in sentimentality.  The
facings were coming off from the wood underneath and glue wasn’t working
anymore.  It was time to throw it out.  I’m hoping our new little bungalow
will have a built-in china cabinet, but if it doesn’t, then I’ll buy another
china cabinet at Ikea.

My son had a basketball hoop that was mounted on our garage.  When we had
the roof done several years ago, we took the basketball hoop down and never
put it back up.  My son and his friends spent many hours shooting hoops.  I
remember some cold winter nights when the ball would barely bounce and my
son and I would shove each other around on the icy driveway shooting
baskets.  My son doesn’t have any where to hang the hoop at his current
residence.  Ray put it out on the curb, but no one took it, so it was taken
away by the trash people last week.

And then we have the big dog, the 120 pound monster Chesapeake
Bay/Rottweiler mix who is a gentle giant, our big baby, and our sweetie pie.
We got him from the Humane Society a few years ago and from the first night
he was here, he took over the couch in the living room.  Our living room is
one of our useless rooms, a room that is never used for anything except
Christmas.  That’s why we want to move, because the two of us don’t use the
space in the house.  It didn’t matter then that CoCo sprawled out on the
gray couch.  No one ever sat on it anyway.

But it became an eyesore over time, bowing in the middle and getting covered
with dog hair.  I knew it would have to go when we put the house up for
sale.  I waited until the last week and then Ray and I huffed and puffed and
hauled it out to the curb.  The garbage people picked it up yesterday.

CoCo doesn’t seem to miss it.  He sleeps on the cool ceramic tile by the
front door or comes upstairs and spreads out on the floor by me.  He’ll lie
on the upper deck in the evening or sleep on the ceramic tile in front of
the fireplace.  So far, he hasn’t taken over another couch, which would kind
of be a disaster, because he does shed a lot.

This will be the last weekend that we’re tied to this house.  Then we can
enjoy the rest of the summer while we’re waiting for the house to be sold.
It is a bit of a buyer’s market right now, so houses are selling slowly.  I
don’t anticipate a quick sale.  It might be a while before we have to pack
up the rest of the house.  In a way, that would be OK.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net

http://www.bpwmn.org
Business and Professional Women of Minnesota

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.  ~Cicero