Big Houses And Hours Of Cleaning

Since I've moved to a house, there's been endless cleaning and work. If you've been wondering why SMG has been offline and haven't posted for a while, that's the reason.

When I wrote about the endless search in the quest to buy a house, I mentioned that I liked houses with wooden floorboards, high ceilings, minimum of two bathrooms, built ins and so forth. Now that I've moved into the actual house, reality hits.

Houses with large rooms take longer to heat up, houses with high ceilings take even longer to heat up, and generally houses with the combination of large rooms, high ceilings and wooden floorboards are destined to be cold in winter and takes forever to heat up. 

Dust likes to pile up along the edge of the rooms and along the hallways. Dust will pile up regardless of how often you vacuum! Where on earth does all the dust come from when the windows are almost always shut?!

I've rattled on about loving gardening and plants and my addiction to plants. Now that there's a garden attached to the house, there's hours of gardening work involved which is more maintenance than pleasure. House dwellers never seem to mention these things. Previously when I've lived on the farm, everything was allowed to grow wild and it looked great.

Living in a house however, there's endless lawn to mow, weeds to pull out from the garden, the footpath, the paving and from the lawn itself. Dead flower heads to cut off, plants to trim and hedges to maintain. 

We are still unpacking despite having moved for several weeks now. Bigger houses need more furniture and the house is semi furnished with furniture from the apartment. There are vacant rooms with nothing in them and although that doesn't bother me, it does bother Mr SMG who is a perfectionist, loves brand new and doesn't like hand-me-downs. I can be a perfectionist as well, but fortunately not when it relates to furnishing the house and housing decor or else I'd have gone mad looking at the empty rooms and endless space.

So more shopping to do and on top of that, the mortgage payments have commenced and the monthly interest is painful. I had forgotten how much mortgage interest charges suck. 

The goal would be to knuckle down and work on tackling the mortgage to make huge ass lump sum repayments. However, that goal has been derailed somewhat by the endless quest to furnish the house, repair the house (leaking taps, broken/damaged washers), installing security doors and dead bolts, installing down lights so the house isn't so fashionably dim and buying rugs so that we can heat up the house.

Oh, and you know what happens when you buy houses that have beautifully high ceilings? You need to buy a HUGE, TALL ladder so that you can reach the lights, the top of the built ins and be able to repair and clean the higher sections of the house ;p So think twice before your dreams become reality and the reality doesn't measure up with expectations... larger houses aren't always the solution and the reality of maintaining a larger house means dedicating hours to housework that wasn't previously required.