Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [79]
We need double the number of electrical outlets on the back wall of the counter.
Let me see if I can make a list of the major items on the counters without going upstairs to the kitchen to look. The kitchen counters now hold: a toaster-oven, a blender, a heavy-duty mixer, an electric can opener, one orange-juice squeezer, a Cuisinart, a radio, one small blackand-white TV.
Don’t tell me some of these items are repetitious because I know it, but if you’re given a Cuisinart you can’t throw it away even if you have a Mixmaster and a Waring blender.
Real Real Estate 169
In addition to these electrical devices, there are, below the counter, a pancake grill, a waffle iron, an egg poacher that hasn’t poached an egg in twelve years, an electric fry pan, a deep fryer we never use and a small ice-cream freezer. Pushed to the back is an electric knife that I’ve only used twice although it was given to us by a relative who now has been dead for nine years.
It’s apparent we need either a great deal more counter space in the kitchen or we need someone to invent a compact combination radioTV-toaster-oven that would open cans, squeeze oranges, whip egg whites and mix cake batters.
I have my house, but my advice to anyone about to buy a new one is to ask some questions beyond how many bedrooms there are. Don’t think you’re smart because you’ve asked about the type of heating and the amount of insulation. Ask the real-estate salesperson some really hard questions. Ask, for instance, how much room is left on either side after you’ve put two cars in the two-car garage.
Have the real-estate salesman demonstrate how to put the vacuum cleaner away in a closet that’s already full of heavy winter coats and leaves for the dining-room table.
Ask the person selling you the house where you’re going to put the wheelbarrow and the snow tires and try to figure out where you’d hang the leaf rakes and the shovel.
Look at the new house carefully and estimate how far you’re going to have to carry the garbage can to get it to a place near the road where the garbagemen will take it . . . then figure out where the garbage can is going to go when it isn’t by the edge of the road. Measure the distance between the big outside garbage can and the little inside garbage can that you have to empty into it.
Measure everything and make sure you know where you’re going to be able to store the screens and the screen door when you replace them with the storm doors and the storm windows.
Home
O ne Saturday night we were sitting around our somewhat shopworn living room with some old friends when one of them started trying to remember how long we’d lived there.
“Since 1952,” I said. “We paid off the mortgage eight years ago.”
“If you don’t have a mortgage,” he said, “the house isn’t worth as much as if you did have one.”
Being in no way clever with money except when it comes to spending it, this irritated me.
“To whom is it not worth as much,” I asked him in a voice that was louder than necessary for him to hear what I was saying. “Not to me, and I’m the one who lives here. As a matter of fact, I like it about fifty percent more than I did when the bank owned part of it.”
“What did you pay for it?” he asked.
“We paid $29,500 in 1952.”
My friend nodded knowingly and thought a minute.
“I’ll bet you,” he said, “that you could get $85,000 for it today . . . you ought to ask $95,000.”
I don’t know why this is such a popular topic of conversation these days, but if any real-estate dealers are reading this, I’ll give them some money-saving advice. Don’t waste any stamps on me with your offers to buy. You can take me off your mailing list.
Our house is not an investment. It is not a hastily erected shelter in which to spend the night before we rise in the morning to forge on farther west to locate in another campsite at dusk. Our house is our home. We live there. It is an anchor. It is the place we go to when we don’t feel like going anyplace.
We do not plan to move.
The last census indicated that forty million