The Joy of Home Ownership

I have to say that I love our home and am thankful for it. It was built in 1921, which should tell you something. It has a lot of what Realtors like to call "character." Truly it seems to have a story all it's own in ways that contemporary houses rarely do. On the positive side, it has a beautiful front porch with a swing which, with the perpetual mountain breeze, unfailingly takes me back to the similarly constructed porch of my grandparents' beach house in Groton, Connecticut and all the younger days I spent there. Of course, the porch is by no means level but, again, that's character! I love all of the woodwork and moldings, the hardwood floors and the beautiful large windows. I love the sliding doors and the old grate in the entryway. I love the large rooms and our amazing, well-landscaped yard. I've even learned to live with having only one bathroom and no dishwasher. We've been here almost two years and, though I wasn't sure I would survive at first, I have miraculously done just that!

Now, with all that being said, as with ANY home, regular maintenance and upkeep is required. It just seems like our dear old home has needed an awful lot of it lately, and in spite of my adoration for it, there are some days where the irritation just MUST be vented!

It all started with the discovery that my oven had acquired a mind of it's own, and it's a very unpredictable and fickle one at that! It's quite frustrating to bake something or prepare a meal and have no idea if it's going to be overdone or undercooked, regardless of how often you check it or how often you adjust the temperature. With a new internal thermometer in hand, I decided to test just how inaccurate the infernal thing was recently and was surprised, or rather, NOT so surprised, to find out that any given time it can range from 25 to 75 degrees OFF from the desired temperature, and it's almost impossible to predict by how much at what time and adjust accordingly. But, it still cooks. And, I still manage to get relatively satisfactory meals on the table. So, that is one replacement that, in light of all the other things that we've also dealt with, has been put to the back burner (no pun intended!)

As much of a joy as that's been, it's moderate functionality has redeemed it's place in the household for the time being. However, I did not feel nearly so...understanding...when I no longer had a washer and dryer. Again. You see, the laundry room, for some reason, was never insulated. It's along the exterior wall of the house and yet, no insulation whatsoever. Nothing between you and the cold wintry chill except a pretty thin sheet of drywall and some old windows. Needless to say, doing laundry in the winter always required a nice heavy coat and a pair of shoes. But that was really beside the point. The more frustrating repercussion of this anomaly was the tendency of the water pipes accessing this room to freeze. Now, we were assured upon purchase that the homeowner had taken measures to guard against such occurrences by wrapping the pipes with electrical heating tape. So it came as quite a surprise to me when, the first winter, I discovered, about seven months pregnant and with Mike out of town for work, that water and steam were pouring from the room! (Believe me, climbing behind those appliances at that stage was an acrobatic feat!) Thankfully, Mike is a very handy guy and was able to replace the busted pipes, staving off further disaster for the rest of that winter. Now, with new pipes in place, we didn't expect much of a problem this winter. Mike even put a small space heater in the room for extra measure. And yet, disaster struck yet again. This time it wasn't an "easily" replaceable pipe. The freeze blew out an actual part of the washing machine. So...Mike, again, being handy, was able to work it out so that we could manage to do laundry, manually. Meaning, he had to turn the water on, fill up the machine with a hose and then run the cycle. (And, yes, there were a few occasions when we just didn't keep a close enough eye on the process and an overflow resulted. Joy.) Considering the technicalities of it's limited operation, I really required Mike's assistance with the laundering, thereby restricting the time and frequency of my ability to do the wash. I tried very hard not to complain about this, but I will admit to the situation being quite inconvenient! So, Mike decided it was probably a good idea to invest in a new washer and dryer. (Yay me!) However, like any smart investor, he wanted to ensure that we wouldn't run into these problems in the future and ruin the new products...

Thus began the remodeling of the laundry room. He has torn out all the drywall, installed insulation, installed new drywall and, last weekend, painted the room. Now, this process has taken...months. In the span of that time, all of the cleaning products, towels, sheets and other bedding and all other manner of miscellanea have been piled in our bedroom, all over the floor, and in the kitchen. Thankfully, the only obstacle we now have to a completely restored laundry room is the installation of cabinets and shelves!

Now, all this I have really striven to handle graciously. Sometimes I have been successful in this...other times a little less so...although I really am grateful for a husband who is able to do all of this work himself and make a point to tell him so! But, last week, we had another problem, the straw that broke my proverbial back of patience and restraint. The bathroom. Yes. The ONE bathroom. We've had bathroom issues before. With small kids, it's bound to happen at some point. A car accidentally dropped down the potty. Half a roll of toilet paper tossed in. Something indistinguishable. You name it. Not a horrific ordeal if you have a bevy of bathrooms in the house to choose from. When you have ONE, you need it functioning. When you have a house full of seven people, you NEED it functioning! So, to discover last week that it was stopped up by who knows what...well, I cannot even express the height of pregnant emotions that I felt! The last time this happened in this house it literally took weeks before the toilet was working properly again. In spite of all Mike's best efforts last time, multiple plungings and snakings, taking it apart and putting it back together, it was all to no avail. No, we had to wait until the offending item, a toothbrush, became dislodged on it's own, and floated up to the surface as if something so innocent couldn't possibly have inflicted so much grief and angst! To reflect on the possibility of WEEKS in this situation, again...there are just no words!

It was so bad that the first Friday evening, the day that Mike and the older boys don't get home until 7:30 pm, I actually put all the kids in the car and drove them up to Walmart so that we could all use the restrooms there. Yes, I actually PREFERRED those bathrooms to ours! When you can't flush...well, use your imagination! Plunge you say? I wish! With every attempt I only managed to make the problem worse, if that were even possible! On Monday I was so dreading the prospect of taking the boys home after school that I, knowing their "routines" and after-school habits, took them to Mike's office and told them both they needed to go to the bathroom and that we weren't going home until they (TMI alert) had pooped! We were making it through the week with sanity hanging by a thread until Thursday when, in the midst of another attempt on my part at plunging, McCrea sauntered into the bathroom and for no reason whatsoever tossed a Hotwheel into the swirling toilet! I literally flipped out! I was sure that the whirlpool before me would suck that Hotwheel straight down and simply compound the current problem. So, it was a relief to me, small though it was, to see that car through the murky water at the bottom of the toilet. My next thought was to fish it out as quickly as possible before one of my children accidentally flushed the potty again. Simple enough...IF I had been able to find a pair of cleaning gloves, which were buried or lost somewhere amongst the piles of laundry room paraphernalia spread around my house. I may have owned a pair at one time, but they were nowhere to be found on that day. And thus, the maintenance problems collided! I had to call my dear neighbor to borrow a pair, and she sent her poor husband over on his day off to deliver them. When I inquired whether he would like to me try and clean and return them, he just kindly smiled and said, "No thanks, you feel free to keep those." I can't blame him!

To make my long story...short-er...I called my husband to vent, which resulted in him coming home from work in the middle of the day and spending over two hours taking the toilet apart! As before, it is not completely 100 percent, but is functioning, moderately, for the time being. I'm sure in a few weeks we'll discover a bath toy or action figure floating in there...and I'll have the inclination to pulverize it.

So, for all of you prospective homeowners out there, just be aware...and be prepared!

(Why, you may ask, do you not just buy a new toilet and replace the old thing? Because, it is bolted into the floor at the base and the wall at the tank, through the tile. Therefore, replacing the toilet would also require...re-tiling the bathroom. And that's one project neither of us are ready to tackle! One thing at a time...PLEASE!)