updates

When I first started talking about selling the place, the realtor asked me if I'd done any updates? Had I painted, pulled up carpet or replaced anything? Had I extracted the aging, battle-tested appliances and plugged in newer, shinier models like the ones usually found in the pages of a Sears Catalog?

No.

I hadn't done a damned thing. Oh sure, there'd  been vague plans --after I won the lottery, got a book deal, was involved in a class action lawsuit against a soft drink bottler. Sure, then maybe I'd have got a nice, polished steel refrigerator with a built-in ice cream maker and mixed drink blender.

Back when I was looking into selling the place, I'd researched updates, but the numbers didn't work out for most of them --like replacing appliances. Everything I read said you'd maybe get back 3/4 what you paid out for a new stove or dishwasher.

Spending money to lose money, and I can't afford to lose anything, but after talking it over with the realtor, I did agree to pull up the vintage 1970 orange marmalade-colored shag carpet. Removing something that I didn't have to replace seemed well within my skill set.

Basically. Well, not really. I had no idea what I was doing. Comfortably, I can change my oil and change a tire --which aren't things you typically need to do to a house, but I looked it up online and watched the video twice. Then I went out, bought a crowbar, and tried to watch "Bates Motel" on Netflix as I followed the directions of the video I'd seen.

It was a lot harder than I thought. With pliers in hand and Norman Bates (played by the kid from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") gingerly edging toward madness, I yanked and tugged and worked up a dirty sweat before eventually coming to the realization that maybe I'd missed something.

The video I'd watched hadn't really pointed out removing the baseboards, just the trim. The carpet was tacked very neatly, and very tightly, under the baseboards. In fact, the method the carpet installer from the age of disco had used varied considerably from the way I'd been shown on Youtube.

Anyway, I got through a couple of episodes of the adventures of Norman Bates and I don't know how many plot points involving drug farms and sex slaves before I worked out what I had to do on my own.

Getting up close and personal with something that had been walked on and God knows what else for a couple of decades was enlightening. The carpet stank. It reeked and I was a little offended. I vacuumed a couple of times a week and I'd bought a carpet cleaner over a year ago, which was used regularly. All the work, all the dog hair I'd pulled up, none of that mattered.

But I rolled the thing up, lugged it out the front door, had a beer, and watched more Netflix before calling it quits around midnight.

I woke up with a terrible headache the next day. I felt terrible: dizzy and weak. I went back to bed, but couldn't sleep. Lying on my back, I couldn't breathe. On my stomach, my head throbbed. My heart sounded weird and loud in my ears, felt like it was going to pop out of my chest. All I could do was shiver and sweat beneath a cocoon of blankets and quilts.

I felt like death.

I gobbled aspirin like breath mints, sipped water and spent the day delirious and terrified until my fever broke in the middle of the afternoon. I drifted in and out of a restless sleep and finally fell well enough to get up after dark.


It days for me to shake it completely off and for a little while I tried to blame the sudden illness on the flu or a bug, but then no one around me got sick --it was just me. I'd gotten a big, fat dose of mold or bacteria or something else trapped for 40 years.


Luckily, cleaning out the fridge turned out to be a lot easier.