Half of home ownership is basically just a series of weird emergencies you didn’t know could happen.
We had a ladybug problem. I didn’t know that was on the list of options? Ladybug INFESTATION was not on my list of potential issues AT ALL.
GirlWonder has now had three, yes THREE, bats and always when she is home alone. Always necessitating a call to her father. So far our score is 2-1 with bats. Mr. Wonderful successfully removed one, her beloved “Paw-Paw” showed up with a net and a can-do attitude to escort the next back outside, and the third bat eluded capture. We have every reason to believe THAT bat saw him or herself out. God willing.
All this is likely because none of her three (or is it four?) chimneys have a cap. She reached out to professionals for chimney cap estimates. For ONE chimney, the quote was roughly $13,000. Absolutely not. As she said, she will shelve her law degree and climb scaffolding herself for one-third of that price.
I absolutely adore vintage houses. Mine especially. I am also very fond of the vintage delights owned by BoyWonder and GirlWonder, respectively. The bones! The character! The things that go bump in the night. Sure, it also helps to sometimes think of the house as a member of the family — perhaps a senile, incontinent elder you are a caretaker for.
I feel like, aside from child-rearing, home ownership is where “adulthood” actually hits you front and center. In fact, one could argue that home ownership forces you to grow up more than having a child does. I have two children and own a home. Yes, raising children is more important, but it’s also more intuitive.
No one, including your own biology, really prepares you for owning and maintaining an entire structure. Worse, one small mistake or oversight that you never expected to know about could destroy the whole thing. Keeping children alive comes fairly naturally. Knowing to drain the water to your outside hose bib before the freezing temperatures hit does not.
It doesn’t help that, no matter the topic, anytime you research a house issue you get answers from “it’s fine, ignore that” to “your house is about to implode.”
We all rely on the internet to give us at least a ballpark estimate of how much this could cost. Are we talking we might have to forego ordering pizza this week, or are we looking up the current market rate for a gently used kidney? Google says “it depends.” It’s like a Magic 8 ball, but more vague.
I am a prolific photographer. I enjoy looking at all the meaningful memories I have captured over the years. That said, I was recently made aware that I take a lot of photos of our living room ceiling. I must have at least two dozen or more photos of an old water spot from the bathroom upstairs. I am monitoring it so I can assure myself it has not grown or changed in the past few years. Misty-water-colored memories indeed.
Advice. I am often asked what advice I would give to anyone wanting to renovate an old home. My advice: You’ll learn, you’ll get better, you will begin to anticipate things before they happen, and then you realize that you’re just working on the house because you want to. I recently overheard a man in a hardware store say “our house is old, it’s 8 years old.” I laughed in “built in the 1800s.”
It has been said that when you buy a house, you become the COO of that home. It’s so true. I’ve been a homeowner since I was 24. Too many times I have said, “I’m not qualified for this job!” But oh how much I’ve learned.
There was no YouTube in 1997. I had to use books to figure out how to fix things. More reliably, I had to ask my father-in-law and/or rely on how well Mr. Wonderful had paid attention to his father’s tutelage growing up.
As we like to say about BoyWonder now, “he’s 28 years old with 20 years of construction experience.” Children learn what they live? Mine, and his father before him, learned drywall, framing and basic plumbing before he graduated high school — middle school if we are being completely honest.
This is my advice to all who entertain the notion of home ownership. After all, even new houses are not without maintenance and repair. At the end of the day, be brave and dive in! At least you have videos to reference and not just an entire volume of hardbound DIY books, a VCR set to record every episode of “This Old House” on PBS, and an unhealthy attachment to a particularly helpful veteran employee at Sears.
