Annie Dear: Everything new just making what’s shabby look worse

It’s not until you have something new that you realize what’s old about the joint is very old, getting shabby and needing renewal.

So it is at Casa de Annie y Sir.

We now have gleaming bamboo flooring throughout the first floor. I’m telling you it gleams, so you need sunglasses to cope with it.

But it’s ever so pretty. And it shows up to no end the utter crumminess of the carpeting on our stairs. And if we had this carpeting replaced with more bamboo, it would show the decrepitude of the carpeting in the hallways, and thence the bedrooms. The linoleum in the bathrooms would be thoroughly embarrassed by it all, and the next thing you know, we would be spending the gross national product of Guam to get all of our floors so sparkling.

We have sexy new countertops and silkily shining brushed-stainless steel sinks. Do our kitchen cupboards look remotely cheerful? No – that’s the short answer.

Where will it all end? This house renovation business really is for the birds – I’m starting to feel like Tom Hanks and Shelley Long in “The Money Pit.” A gaping maw is in front of us demanding to be fed.

It’s not only that though. It is the amount of elbow grease required to get even the most innocent of surfaces in line with the new.

Before this, we had a separate dining room that we never used. We therefore never opened the windows. But now we have one grand room, linking with the living room, I felt the need to fling open the windows onto our back deck for the arrival of some chums from Texas for dinner and a spot of bridge on Sunday.

Before I knew it, I’d flung myself into a frenzy of cleaning. The dining room windows were grimy. So I got out my wonder window cleaner and soon they were sparkling. The ETA of our chums – Potter & Doc – was looming ever closer.

Not a blush of makeup was on my now older visage (it was my birthday, after all, and I attained an additional year somewhere between window washing and fodder preparation), when I noticed that the never revealed window sills sat begrudged in age old grime, appearing more and more like an 18th century London street urchin.

So I attacked them too, muttering the odd “ewww” as I went. And so it went on. I was madly spring cleaning – not a frequent occurrence I might add – to the point that I actually swept the front porch and tried to beat to death the welcome mat which was looking decidedly unwelcoming.

Now keep in mind that Potter & Doc had never before been to this house. This being the first time we’d actually met face to face, they indeed wouldn’t have known either of us from Adam, except for the fact that Potter, apart from being a bridge pal, knew my face from this very publication.

They wouldn’t know what a slattern I was with keeping a Proud House. They wouldn’t have even seen the grime on the window sills – seating them anyway, cleverly as I did, with their backs to the potential re-emerging grunge, with a view over the golf course.

I’d even terribly un-slatternlike of me gone berserk and dotted flowers around the areas I knew they would tread. Who was I, and what had I done with the old Annie?

Nothing like gleaming new floors to do it to you.

Our evening with Potter and Doc was delightful. They didn’t eat nearly enough, but possibly that was due to the fact that I’d catered enough for a small African nation, as I am wont to do, and it was with some hesitance that I produced dessert.

Now this was some dessert. Not ever being one to argue with the likes of Sara Lee or Mr. Tippins, I had en-pied at the grocery store, but was surprised around noon by the delivery of a bouquet courtesy of our fab friend, the Little Hot Tamale. Into our house walked, aided of course by the cheery deliverer, not a bunch of flowers, but a creation from Edible Arrangements. It was a riot of pineapple, grapes, strawberries, chocolate dipped orange segments and melon.

That, I might add, was pretty much demolished by the end of the evening. And I crow in declaring that we girls beat them boys at our game of bridge.
So nice to stagger off to bed, one Chardonnay too many, burping pineapple, I’m telling you.

But now in the warm light of day – it being absolutely glorious weather, isn’t it, by the way – I look again to my grimy carpet, to the unfinished trim we’re waiting for Our Guy to come back and take care of, to the boxes dotting around unseen-by-visitors corners of the house, awaiting a home in a newly shelved closet, that I think our little project has taken a life of its own and is threatening to hungry-mouthed devour our slovenly resolve to ignore and ignite us into further renovations.

To turn a blind eye, or not to turn a blind eye. Aye, that is the question.