Orange crush

Our first house was in Liverpool.  We were so excited to have a house after two years of living in apartments.  The house was a contemporary one.  It had an "A" frame shape and giant windows across the front and the side of the house.  The livingroom was huge with cathedral ceilings and beams going across the top.  I don't think the house even had 1000 square feet, but it was huge to us and really fancy.  We bought the house in 1980 so it was decorated for the 1970's.  The carpet was dark brown in the living room.  Hardwood floors were throughout the three small bedrooms.  I can't remember what color the bathroom was, so it must not have been blue like our house in Dryden was because THAT I will remember forever.  The living room, dining room and kitchen were all open to each other.  The wall that was considered the eating area wall had crazy mod wallpaper on it.  It was vinyl and shiny and brown, black and white swirls over the entire wall (10' ceilings!!).  That's alot of swirl!  About 5 years into living there, I convinced Mark to put parque tile (like hardwood flooring) on that wall and it took him over 2 years to almost complete it and we ended up hiring someone to finish the rest, but it looked pretty nice.  The outlet on that wall will always be remembered as the one baby Andrea decided to put mommy's car keys into and proceeded to power-outage the entire house (and curl her hair for the rest of her life :-) 

The thing I remember most about that house was the kitchen carpet!  It was ORANGE!  And I mean orange like rainbow orange!  It was an indoor/outdoor carpet and the kitchen was really small, but the carpet added life to the browns and gold and avocado greens of the wallpaper in that room.  I kinda liked it for the first two hours we owned the house.  We walked into the house with our keys (that's such a weird feeling to have a 30 year mortgage when you're 22 and feel like you just signed away your entire life savings, but you are now a HOMEOWNER!)   We checked out the house up and down and went to the basement.  There was only one thing in the house that was left by the owners and that was a very large piece of plywood leaning up against the basement wall.  It must be that inspectors didn't inspect things back then the way they do now, because the entire foundational wall had a one inch crack from the window all the way down to the floor behind that plywood.  It was filled with caulk.  Um yeah!  So we ended up getting that repaired at some point, but that was the first thing that sunk our spirits.  

The next thing was that Mark declared we needed to get groceries because the refrigerator was empty and cupboards were bare.  We bought a bunch of junk food because we were 22 and celebrating.  Mark carried, like macho man, all the brown paper bags at once into the house and had probably 6 full grocery bags in his arms along with a 6 pack of orange soda bottles in his hand.  As he was walking into the kitchen, he somehow knocked the wall entering into the room with the bags and the soda and the cardboard carrier holding the soda split open.  All 6 bottles of soda went crashing down to the floor on top of each other and the bottles broke.  I stood in the middle of our brand new kitchen floor next to Mark as we watched in horror gluggling bottles of soda, ORANGE soda soaking the carpet, our shoes, the walls and the cupboards.  As if in slow motion, we looked up at each other and Mark said "well at least we bought the right color soda!"

Not funny Mark Searle, not funny at all!

(we had to replace the carpet within just a couple months of living there because the soda wasn't able to be removed from all the padding underneath...)

So duh!  ha ha ha... get it... so-da!

The moral of today's story is that inspectors aren't perfect, soda is bad for you, don't drink it (or spill it) and just about every memory, good or bad, will eventually be a good one to write about and learn from.  (We had so many wonderful things happen in our little house on Woodside Lane.  I will tell you about them someday).