I
moved 29 times in 27 years before I finally bought a house in 2005. Those
numbers aren’t a mistake. 29 places that I suppose I had to call home before I
was 3o. It wasn’t until I was in my own place, a house I bought all by myself,
that I felt some sense of security. No one forced me to live there, no one
could force me to leave, it was mine and brand spanking new. I was the first
person to bathe in the tub, first to hang my clothes in the closet, first to
sit my ass on the toilet in my own master bathroom. For the first time in my
life, the American dream felt
tangible. And because this house was new, I wouldn’t have to worry about the furnace
busting, or termites feasting on the walls, or an ancient leaking roof. I
suspected the largest of my concerns would be deciding what color to paint the
walls or figuring out just where I should plant the garden.
Here’s what no one tells you about
the American dream of homeownership: it is an endeavor designed for people who
know what the fuck they’re doing with any sort of tool, or those wealthy enough
to hire someone with those skills. Unfortunately, I am neither of those things.
The other point of consideration
when purchasing a home is that when the need for a handyman arises, the
decision often isn’t one that can be shoved to the back burner the way shopping
for clothes or going on vacation can wait until times are a little more flush. No,
what I've discovered is that when someone needs to come and fix a problem with your home, that problem is usually immediate. For example, say the toilets on
the first floor of your home suddenly begin working in reverse, a kind of raw
sewage Nile River somehow flowing from south to north, and then a good portion
of the main floor of your brand spanking new house is covered with unspeakable
awful. That kind of disaster results in urgent prioritizing of funds. That is,
getting the running water and toilets functioning in your home is always at the
top of the list. But you move on, deal with the minor damage, have 10 feet of
sewer pipe in your front yard replaced, and still don’t even spend enough to
make a claim on your homeowner’s insurance.
My latest woe, the rain coming from
the second floor hot water heater to the first floor powder room, has pushed me
to reconsider the value of the security in owning a home. Let me repeat the
most important part of that last sentence: it’s raining in my god damned
bathroom. The hot water heater apparently is improperly placed and, unbeknownst
to me, has been leaking for some time.
I discovered this after I decided
that filing an insurance claim was likely the best option for me given the
scale of repairs that are needed. So I made the call, the insurance people came,
and gave me an estimate for repairs that my policy will cover. And while my
policy will happily replace the now rusting vents and graciously slap a new
coat of paint on the affected areas, the source of the disaster (namely hot
water heater and resulting rotten floor beneath it) is NOT covered.
When I realized this, I couldn’t
help but think of the Tom Hanks film The
Money Pit. In a particularly pivotal scene of the 1986 comedy, Tom Hanks
attempts to fill the bathtub on the second floor of his home with water he’s
boiled on the stove. His wife, played by Shelley Long, stands by, exhausted and
dejected from the series of disasters that have befallen them since purchasing
the too-good-to-be-true residence. As the couple tip the galvanized steel buckets of warm water into
the tub, the floor beneath gives way, and the whole shebang goes crashing
through into a porcelain and water explosion on the first floor. They stand
silent peering through the gaping hole down to the disaster below and Hanks
laughs. And then he laughs harder, and harder until his mouth falls open and guffaws
trumpet from him, laughter being the final result of the hysteria whipped up
inside a human being after such a series of cataclysms. Because what can you
do? And that’s where I am. I can only laugh.
And I keep laughing. Because though
it occasionally rains in my bathroom, I don’t have raw sewage creeping from the
toilets. And I’ll probably laugh should the rotten floor just give way and
allow a birth canal for the heater to crash through to the powder room, given
no one is popping a squat down there at the time. Because what else I’m
supposed to do? I can’t cry. I can’t complain, because I still have this house
and I’ve busted my ass (pretty literally) to keep it.
My only other option is to begin an
internet campaign to become the most undeserving person in the history of Ty
Pennington to get an Extreme Home Makeover. And while my husband is an active
duty Marine on unaccompanied tour and I suppose I’m generally well liked among
the ne’er-do-wells I call my friends, I haven’t done any sort of impressive
thing for my community or adopted 10 foster kids (though I do have an unusual
number of cats that no one else wants). I don’t want to leave this
place. It’s a poorly and inexpensively constructed pre-fabricated piece of shit
but it is MY PIECE OF SHIT, and I like our neighborhood and the schools, and
after those 29 moves that were almost exclusively out of my control, I want to
stay in the only home that has ever felt like a home to me. And so until I
figure out how exactly we’re going to turn the 5 x 5 foot rainforest back into
the cute art-gallery bathroom it used to be, I’m going to laugh. And try to
find The Money Pit on Netflix.
