Remodeling Our Marriage

So Matt and I recently bought another investment house to rent/sell. All part of Matt's plan to not have us broke and surrounded by flip flops - as is my current plan. We bought this big foreclosure a few weeks ago and Matt has been working hard remodeling it. Keep in mind, this is in addition to his normal financial advisor job. It's funny because he'll put on a suit and talk earnestly about retirement and such and then come home, scarf down some food and change into work clothes and spend late hours into the night pulling carpet, painting, fixing things, laying tile, whatever.

We're currently in the tile portion of the house remodel and let me tell you something - there are fewer things less fun than laying tile.

A week or two ago we were talking to Matt's parents about working on the house and Matt's dad made a joke about it bonding the two of us together.

I looked around at our 4 kids, half of whom were screaming/fighting and dryly stated that if we weren't bonded after almost 14 years of marriage and 4 kids then there's really no hope for us.

Anyway, our marital bonding is well under way, with the carpet removal, painting, and much of the cleaning done. Along the way were such marriage-boosting moments, such as:

"Hey, did you have a seizure today?"
"Um, no. Why?"
"Oh, no reason. I was just looking at the bathroom you painted earlier..."

I have to say, I have been a surprisingly big help to Matt throughout this process. Sure, there have been a few mishaps. One evening, I was vacuuming up the baseboard before he painted and he gestured to me in a vague direction so I vacuumed the nearest baseboard. Sure, I wondered why the brush on the end of the shopvac hose was turning white but I've never been one to need answers to life's mysteries. Plus, the look on Matt's face after he realized I was vacuuming a baseboard that he just finished painting was pretty funny.

And then there was the time I scrubbed (SCRUBBED) years-old caked dirt and urine on a toilet, only to realize after 20 minutes of hard scrubbing that there was a plastic wrapper on the pumice stick I was using.

Yes indeed.

Let's face it, I'm not a perfect person. I have no idea how to wear lipstick without looking like a hooker and I judge people by their grammar and books by their covers all the time.

So the past week we've been tiling. Which has got to be the worst job so far, which is saying something coming from a person who broke a sweat scrubbing a toilet through the wrapper of a pumice stick.

The worst part is that when we tell people we have a night of laying tile planned, it's not a euphemism for something more fun. We're literally just laying tile.

Tiling requires, like, 200 steps. It's all very specific. For instance, a couple days ago I go with Matt to the house to wipe off the grout haze (a phrase I am, unfortunately, not making up). I squeeze out my sponge and am just about ready to start wiping it off when Matt tells me, "Ok, so you basically want to divide your sponge into quadrants. Use each quadrant only once, being careful not to get any water on the grout, and make sure you rinse the sponge after each quadrant is used. You really need to wring the sponge out so it's almost bone dry."

*At the start of this speech on technically sponging, my eyes begin to glaze over like ceramic tiles.*

After a little while, Matt checks in on me.

"Are you using the quadrants?"

"No. I actually found a very efficient method of sponging which entails dividing the sponge into parallelograms. I've also multiplied my sponge field by the square root of pi. I think you'll find the results geometrically pleasing..."

Our exercise in good marriage practices has been further hampered by our smart phones. Instead of insulting each other with good ol' fashioned talking, like in the days of yore, we're using our phones.

"Ok, Google Now, please inform my wife that our 9 year old is more skilled in tilework."

"Siri, kindly inform my husband to get a life."

"Ok, Google Now, send a text to my wife and tell her to go jump in the retention pond."

"Siri, please tell my husband exactly what he can do with that putty knife..."


We are, of course, expecting a book deal for our marriage ideas any day now.