I love our house, but there are some things about it that drive me crazy. Little stuff:

1. There are two doorbells, and the one that was hooked into the electricity of the house is long gone and now there are just little wires sticking out next to the front door.
2. The stairs squeak. Our walking on them has awakened many a restless infant.
3. There’s a light switch in the middle of the wall in J’s room. It turns on a flood light in the backyard. WTH?
4. The sliding door to the back deck seems to weigh about 50 pounds and requires all of one’s strength to open and close.
5. We have two decks, an upper deck on the main level (which we still use) and a lower one off the basement. When redoing the upper deck we fenced it in all the way so that little children would not fall down the stairs. So now there’s this stairway to nowhere from the lower deck. I really want to submit a picture to FAIL Blog.
6. Don’t even get me started on the plastic sheeting on part of the family room floor to facilitate cleanup of pee incidents by the geriatric cat.

I write them down here because maybe someday I’ll look back on some of these things as the stuff that gave this place character. Like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, who hates that the wood piece of the banister is always coming off in this hand as he climbs the stairs, until after his big epiphany, when he kisses it on his way up to hug his kids.