Sha Na Na Na Na Na Live for Today

"Your shelf is askew," The Neighbor said.

I replied, "Yes. Yes, it is."

There is a little shelf just to the right as you enter the house. It's meant to hold a small bud vase or a few votive candles. But as it is askew, things slide off of it everytime someone opens or closes the door. The problem would be easy enough to fix, requiring maybe 5 minutes total, a drill and a level. I have all three of those components. (Note: the day I learned to use a cordless drill was one of the most liberating of my life. Suddenly an entire vista of home repair projects was open to me without having to wait for The Spouse to get around to it). So why has this little shelf been hanging by a thread for months?

Once upon a time we had some very dear friends who decided to leave Seattle and move to the Boondocks. Prior to selling their home they did a few things around the place to improve sales appeal. Like fixed up and got operational a second bathroom that they had been doing without even though they had 5 children. Like scraping paint off all the windows so the sashes would open. Like installing outlet covers and quarter-round and other little touches. In short, they finally got around to doing all those pesky little home improvement chores, making their home even more charming and cozy, just when they weren't going to live in it anymore.

This is a cautionary tale about people who wait to improve their lives. Just think of the implications if I was going to go all Oprah on you. But frankly, I just care, for the moment about where you live. It doesn't matter if you rent or own. Where you live is your home. It is - it should be, anyway - the place that nurtures you, encourages you, wraps its metaphoric arms around you even when no one else will. And that's why, even if you can't change the wall color or do anything about the crappy carpet, it should at least be in working order. You shouldn't walk into a room and think, "Man, one of these days I'm going to really have to putty that hole". Putty the hole today. Change the hardware on the kitchen cabinets. Touch up the paint. Cross the t's and dot the i's of your home because you deserve to enjoy it at it's best. Don't wait until you're leaving it to make it what you always wanted. Trust me on this.

For the longest time we had a gross shower. The bathroom used to be at the end of the house, then someone added a garage. Only they didn't remove the window. And the wall never was waterproofed. So it was gross and creepy and we lived with it like that for years. And part of what kept us from doing anything about it was the thought that someday, when we put a master suite on that end of the house, we'd be blowing through the bathroom anyway. Except, of course, someday requires first falling into a vat of money. Which could happen but in the meantime the shower was still gross. One day The Spouse put on his Bob the Builder hat, ripped out the gross window, rebuilt the wall and took me off to the tile store. And now our shower is very groovy and not at all gross. Although I realized this morning that really, we need to do something about the bathroom floor and there's tile left over from the shower....

The shelf in the living room is askew and today I'm going to do something about it because I believe in practising what I preach. I'm also going to dust.