Dream Home

It’s hard to blog when you’re spending all your time compulsively checking the MLS listings and scanning online floor plans. So I pulled out my grade ten diary and discovered that 21 years ago I was spending most of my time having sleepovers with my friends and planning out my dream home. Here are some excerpts from January 1987:

New Year’s Resolutions:
I, [Bubandpie], resolve on this day, January 1st, 1987, to:
1) Write a story I can be proud of – and hopefully send away.
2) Stop hating people (eg. preppies, snobby Lambeth people).
3) Have more empathy for others.

*****

BFF slept over Saturday night and we talked about:

1) The guys we would go out with – and how much we wanted to go out with them.
2) Going to France for grade thirteen [still three years away, a plan that never materialized].
3) Florida – we’re staying at Disney World for March Break.
4) Social People Scales – the Lambeth SPS, the Byron and Westmount SPS’s, the theatre arts SPS etc. The thing is that everyone is climbing. Shannon, for instance, is dictator of the Lambeth SPS, and Lisa, Patty, Stephanie, and even Carolyn, BFF and I to a lesser (much lesser) extent are all struggling to pull ourselves into her little circle. But Shannon herself is about midway up the Westmount and Byron preppy clique, and struggling to climb that particular ladder. Even the people who are at the top are as anxious as anyone, perhaps more so, because their whole life is built on their social position.

So that’s what we talked about from 8 pm until 2 am. It was a good sleepover.

*****

On New Year’s Eve, Andrea slept over and we planned each other’s futures by saying what we’d be doing five and ten years from now on New Year’s Eve. Andrea’s future is more exciting than mine – she goes to New York and joins a rock band while I get married, become a happy homemaker and raise children. Andrea says she wants her house to be decorated all in white and silver, with pink furniture if necessary, the only spots of colour being large, abstract prints in silver frames – only she doesn’t want a house, she wants a two-story apartment. And three cats. The cats are the only things that humanize it – I wonder if they have to be white as well.

*****

BFF and I decided that it would be worthwhile to go out with someone we only like in order to have a boyfriend. I wouldn’t advise extending that philosophy into marriage though.

*****

Felicia and I planned out our dream homes tonight. They are less dreamy than they might be, in that we’ve stuck to the plain and ordinary with a few innovations (attic bedrooms, several fireplaces, a nursery), but I like it better that way.

First floor:
Kitchen – blue and yellow
Dining room – red with dark wood
Family room – orange and teal green (fireplace)


Living room – rose and grey (fireplace)


Second floor:
Master bedroom – peach and cream (fireplace)


2 children’s bedrooms – pink / white, red, blue
Nursery – yellow and white


Basement:
Rec room – red with dark wood
2 studies

As I recall, the exterior of this house looked almost exactly like this:


It's a good thing I was sticking to the "plain and ordinary," don't you think?