House Hunting Under the Influence of a Migraine

Yesterday was the day I was supposed to be frantically cleaning the House on the Corner in gleeful anticipation of the arrival of four generations of family and friends for Best Day of the Year festivities. Instead, I spent the day shuffling between the bed and the couch and the recliner battling The Bear.

But that's okay! Because as long as there are four generations of family and friends around I don't care if the house is clean, and the Boys tell me that as long as there are homemade rolls and green bean casserole it's a great holiday dinner. (Did I raise them right or what?)

Being incapacitated meant I could spend the ENTIRE DAY in the company of House Hunters. This HGTV show is the perfect companion to a migraine, since it has enough plot to keep me mildly interested but so little plot, really, that if I slept for an hour or two I could pick up where I left off  uninterrupted.  Oddly enough, after eight solid hours of listening to entitled young professionals criticize perfectly lovely houses as if they were manure-daub huts, I have Opinions.

Allow me to share those Opinions:

1. If you are going to live somewhere, you may express your thoughts about certain aspects of a property, but your opinion does not have actual weight unless that aspect is in your bucket of responsibilities. For example, you may really really want a huge back yard with lots of trees and you may look up at your mate with puppy dog eyes and wax eloquent about the childhood memories you wish you could have made in a back yard but couldn't because you lived in a high-rise apartment, but you know good and well that your mate HATES yardwork and is seeing every one of those millions of leaves as a tiny little link in a chain that will bind his weekends in drudgery. If this is the case, back off. This is his call. On the other hand, if you have always dreamed of a kitchen so efficient you can touch both sides of it just by stretching out your arms, but you aren't actually the cook who will be preparing Thanksgiving dinner for four generations of friends and family and trying to figure out where to put the dadgummed turkey because the one tiny square of counter space has been claimed by the potato masher, it is your turn to back off.

2. If you are 22 years old and are starting a business in a foreign country, even if you have ALWAYS DREAMED of having a perfect view of The Arches in Los Cabos, do not exceed your budgeted $1,500 monthly rent by $400 to ensure you get those views. Really. Do not. Because not only are you a jerk (seriously, give those extra $400 to a Mexican family that could live on it for a month), you are an expat jerk who is giving all of the rest of us who live up north a terrible reputation, and I hate you.

3. In the grand scheme of things, really? You are staking your happiness on Italian Carrera marble countertops, and are willing to go over budget to have those countertops? Even though you didn't even have a house inspection that would have revealed criminally dangerous wiring and that a previous remodeler had CUT THE CEILING SUPPORT JOISTS to install (not up-to-code) plumbing? You would rather have those countertops than fix that support joist? Well, huh.

Seeing the picky and the whiny and the unpleasant who haunted my migraine-plagued day yesterday made me look around at our creaky old House on the Corner with new eyes. It doesn't have marble countertops or travertine tile, but today it has Boys sleeping in the upstairs bedrooms and roll dough rising on the Formica countertops.

Best house ever.