With my in-laws in town for a few days, I spent a good chunk of yesterday holed up in my office “working”. By that I mean that I enjoyed a nice, quiet cup of coffee while reading email, then began wading through the stack of magazines that has piled up on my desk since their most recent visit (last month).

My favorite: an essay in December’s This Old House magazine about “house dysmorphia”, a person’s distorted perception that their house is far less nice than it really is. Oh, I can relate.

In the grand scheme of things, my mind tells me that we have a very nice house: three stories on a wooded lot with a creek, a kitchen bigger than my college studio apartment, five bedrooms, four bathrooms including one featuring both a jet shower and a huge whirlpool tub and dual marble bathroom vanities (the real marble, too, not that manufactured stuff).

But all I can see are the cracked tiles in the kitchen floor, the formerly white carpets that have turned gray since we moved in, the splintered wood deck, the fingerprints and gouges on all of the walls and the fact that most of our furniture is more than 10 years old… and looks like it.

Lately, we’ve been trying to do something about my increasingly long list of things I don’t like about our house, and by “we” I mean that I have made the effort of nagging my husband into taking care of it. Unfortunately, that means letting him do things at his own pace (so I don’t have to do them), and I’ve seen snails move faster than he does when tasked with a chore he finds unpleasant.

Since he’s been on winter vacation for two weeks, he’s actually managed to get quite a few things done around the house. He finally painted our kitchen after three years of putting it off, but just as he got ready to repaint the cupboards his parents arrived. So yesterday, while I was “busy working”, he spent the day trying to both socialize with his parents — an act that he believes I forced him into — while also painting the cupboards.

I can’t count the number of times I heard him mutter under his breath because his mother leaned up against the fresh paint while talking to him, which means he had to repaint the same section again and again and again, an experience which seems frighteningly similar to what I go through every time I clean house before he comes home from work.

I’d feel sorry for him, but I don’t. He’s the one who invited his parents, and they are all messing up my house.