Last weekend I woke up determined that I wouldn’t live another month in this house with my laundry room looking like this.

Look, if you haven’t figured it out by now, I am not the type of woman who gets all weak in the knees over the color pink, or anything floral… which, by the way, that wallpaper is NOT. Those red things are strawberries connected, inexplicably, by ivy vines and punctuated by tiny daisies which I assume some idiot in the wallpaper company’s employ mistook for strawberry flowers. Clearly, there’s a lot of wallpaper glue-sniffing going on at that factory.

A note to anyone who might ever buy a house at any point in their life, which probably includes most of you (though maybe not the 30-something sofa-jockey reading this on the Web-TV in his parent’s basement): Do not ever, ever convince yourself to buy a house that strikes you as perfect with the exception of “a few little redecorating projects here and there” because they won’t get done. Period. Oh, as you’re sitting there writing the offer you’ll tell yourself you’ll get those rooms painted and the flooring redone before you move in.

Then you’ll blink and it’ll be closing day, and just as your Realtor hands you the keys it’ll strike you as absolutely stupid to continue paying the mortgage/rent on the place you’re currently living when you’ve got this nice, shiny new house you could move into right now. You’ll convince yourself you can move in and still redecorate, that you’ll confine your living to primarily the rooms that don’t need a little work, that you’ll knock out those projects in a weekend or two and everything will be perfect thereafter.

So you’ll carry the first moving box into your new house, open it and — BOOM! — your crap will be strewn all over every room throughout the house. After that you’ll be busy cleaning, and when you’re not cleaning your free time and increasingly scarce money will be spent on repairs, both big and small, that you probably should have foreseen the need for but had ignored because all you could think about was getting rid of those hideous roosters in the kitchen.

Anyway. Where was I?

Oh, yes. I’m not ignoring you, my Venomites, I’m working on my laundry room. And since it’s taken over a week thus far, as soon as the room’s done I’ll be working on a mountain of laundry as well. And after I reach the bottom of that bottle of laundry? Well, something tells me I’ll be working my way toward the bottom of a bottle of vodka.