“It’s very convenient,” the woman said. “You just empty the canister whenever it’s full. It’s mounted in the garage, just by the door into the laundry room.”

Something clicked for Sarah. “Laundry room?”

“Well, of course.”

“But it’s off the garage?”

“Yes. You can use it like a mudroom, of course, have the kids come in that way. They can slip off their boots and snowpants and enter the house from the laundry room area.” Even when they were little, we’d been unable to get our children to wear snowpants or boots. It was a mix of seasonal denial and a resistance to anything geeklike.

“So let me understand this,” said Sarah. “There’s a laundry room, on the ground floor?”

“Yes, just around the corner from the kitchen.”

“Do you have a model we could look through?” she asked.

I was going to great lengths to mask my real motives in getting us to move out of the city, convincing her that it had nothing to do with paranoia and everything to do with having more space for us and the kids. Meanwhile, Sarah was blatant in her willingness to turn her back on everything the city offered to get a ground-floor laundry room. No more trudging down a narrow flight of stairs to a damp basement.

“You have no idea how great that would be,” she whispered to me as the saleslady walked us through the model homes next to the sales office. I couldn’t tell for sure, but she seemed to be getting turned on.

It didn’t matter which model home we strolled through, they all had ground-floor laundry rooms. And once Sarah became sold on that idea, she was more open to other features, like more cupboard space in the kitchen, two sinks in the en suite bathroom, a walk-in closet (“Oh my God”), and a skylight over where our bed would be. “Great when there are full moons,” the saleswoman pointed out when she noticed Sarah looking skyward.

“Is there a high school nearby?” Sarah asked.

“Well,” the saleswoman said, hesitantly, “not yet. But I’m sure once the neighborhood grows, and demand for educational facilities becomes great, the school board will have no choice but to build one. But there is a bus that goes by and gets them where they have to go.”

We brought the kids out the next week to show them around.

“Kill me now,” Paul said.

“What’s the name of this development again?” Angie asked. “Loserville Acres?”

Now that I had Sarah onboard (“No more traipsing up and down stairs with laundry baskets,” she said on the drive home from our first tour, sliding her hand up the inside of my thigh), we worked on the kids as a team. Bigger bedrooms, huge basement rec room, extra space in the driveway for when the kids got their own cars—

“We’re going to get cars?”