The Joy's of Homeownership

** I had just bought my first home in the summer of 2006. I had no idea of what homeownership would have in store for me!**

The definition of “Sucks”

Hmm, where to begin? I guess I’ll have to start with the first bad thing in a string of the most random, and possibly worst, days of my life…

So. Brad and I had been living in an apartment together and back in March he temporarily lost his mind, decided we should “take some time apart”, and moved out. Enter my new roommate: Jen. Jen was a girl I worked with and she moved in with plenty of baggage, cigarettes and a demonically possessed cat named Rocky. Rocky was pure evil but only partially de-clawed. She didn’t have his back claws removed citing some cruelty to animals propaganda that I didn’t care about after he used those claws to ruin my stuff. During the time we lived together he destroyed the following:

• All Venetian blinds in our apartment by way of hurling his body against them,
• A Murano glass figurine I brought back from Italy,
• Two cut glass bowls of my mothers,
• Oh, yeah, and FOUR leather parsons chairs that were funded by selling my soul to Pottery Barn.

Then, a few months later, I bought a Townhouse (yes, yeah for me I am a grown up now) and Jen was slated to move with me to the new place. Just before the closing she came to me to tell me that her friend Lauren desperately needed a place to stay and could she please move into the 3rd bedroom? I agreed and thought that myself, and Jen, and Lauren and Rocky and Pancake (my dog) would probably be a bit much, but what the hell? I’d have a cheap mortgage.

The next day Brad called with news that his sister (whom he lived with) was divorcing her husband and now he was a nomad and could he please move in, too? This was going to be a cluster of estrogen and animals like no man had ever seen before, but he asked for it. So, now it was going to be me, and Jen, and Lauren, and Brad and Rocky-the-Devil-Cat, and Pancake and we would be one big happy-ish family.

So I went to my closing, blissfully unaware of what homeownership would really hold for me…

The beginning of the end

The morning of the move from my apartment into the new house was hectic at best. The movers were supposed to be there at 9 AM but never showed. I had to call some back-up movers that charged 400 space bucks an hour and they didn’t bother showing up until noon. As I was looking at Jen’s furniture (that I had offered to move for her at no charge) I called to ask if she wanted to have it moved with all the clothes still in it. She responded “don’t move my stuff, Lauren and I aren’t moving in.”

blink, blink.

So there goes $1,000 worth of rent every month. Her reason was that she thought it was cruel that I had asked her to keep Rocky in her room when she wasn’t home so that he couldn’t rip up any more of my furniture. How dare I?

Life went on and I moved in anyway now happy to have a home with just Brad, me and Pancake. Our first night there was pretty stress-free and then the weekend came. Friday night my Mom and I stayed up till midnight furiously painting before the furniture arrived Saturday morning. When we awoke we were still high from the paint fumes and couldn’t move our necks. American Signature Furniture called about an hour before the scheduled delivery time to inform me that they had some “bad news.” The bad news being that the truck with ALL of the furniture that I had bought had been stolen the night before. The whole truck! They would obviously not be able to deliver my furniture that day, and not the next day… or even next week. No, they wouldn’t be able to deliver my furniture for a month. MINUS TEN POINTS FOR THEM!

A plumber, a bobcat and thank GOD for insurance

Still reeling in anger from being forced to eat dinner off the floor, we encountered yet another issue to deal with. A few days ago Brad went into our unfinished basement to drool over his massive fishing pole collection when he noticed a small leak in one of the pipes. Upon closer inspection he determined that is was a small crack in the pipe and a plumber would simply need to tighten the joint or do a little caulking.

Oh, man, “a little caulking”? That was cute.

So imagine our shock when the plumber said that we had a little trickier situation on our hands. There was a crack in the pipe, but the problem was that the area of the pipe that was cracked was about 3 feet inside the foundation of our home. And the only way to get to it was to DIG. UP. OUR. FRONT. LAWN! That’s right, they brought a FREEKIN bobcat and tore up every inch of our yard and made a 10 foot moat by our driveway. Then, just for fun, they decided that they couldn’t just pull the pipe out, oh no, this pipe was too tightly wedged into the foundation. In order to get it out they had to JACKHAMMER THE FOUNDATION OF OUR HOME. I am not kidding. I had been a homeowner for 6 days people, and they were using a jackhammer. Really?

Well. We now have state-of-the-art plumbing and the worst landscaping in North America but we are surviving. Everything will be ok. We will eventually get all of our furniture delivered and the yard will be moat-less some day soon. I thought I would share this with you to let you know that being a grown up isn’t all it's cracked up to be. But I am happy, and I am healthy, and I could easily flush a small child down my toilet with no worries that my plumbing couldn’t handle it. On second thought, maybe I’d flush the demonic cat.