Shopping trips hijacked by home needs

Have you ever gone shopping for yourself and come home with something else? A couple of weeks ago, I went shopping for shoes and came home with a shower curtain and a lampshade but no shoes.

Houses are experts at subliminal messaging. Homeowners are subconsciously bombarded daily with improvement suggestions from their tax deduction. I was compelled to buy that lampshade. To be honest, not the shower curtain, but it was so pretty!

Once we canceled a trip to stay home and paint the porch. We didn’t want to paint the porch, but the porch needed painting, and we couldn’t help ourselves.

Once this spring while we were out shopping, we had an urge to stop at a local hardware store and buy a ceiling fan. We had no plans to get a ceiling fan, but we bought one. While in line to pay for that fan, we stood behind a man buying decking. Though he hadn’t planned on it, he had cut his vacation short so he’d have time to build his house a deck.

A while back Taller Half went to the grocery store to get a few things we needed, plus a large wrought-iron bench. “I don’t know what came over me,” he said, “but I just had to buy that bench.”

As it turned out, our house had always wanted a bench just like that one.

As a result of those shopping experiences, we now make a list before we go shopping and always plan to shop only for what is on that list. It still happens, though. We get sudden urges to look at things not on our list, but we are now aware of the origins of those sudden urges. And sometimes we may not give in to them right away. But sometimes, sadly, we do. However, it does keep our house happy!

Laura Moore can be emailed at lehmoore1@gmail.com.