Home Ownershit (Maddy Hattie)

I know all you homeowners have been here before so let me speak for us all. To hell with owning a house. Burn it down pookie. Sipping coffee in your drawers or walking around bare ass nude b/c it’s your house and you can do what you want. Sure, it’s nice. You know what makes all that forgettable: when you look up as you take that naked strut through the house and realize there’s a gaping ass hole in the ceiling from God knows what. Like, what happens that just makes an 18 inch drywall crack show up (rhetorical, I’m not completely clueless…b/c it’s happened to me plenty)?

The next time your wife asks “who is she?” referring to the girlfriend that doesn’t exist, give her your freaking address. A house is a damn mistress. She takes your money. She takes your time. She will always want more from you. What started as an obsession and dreams of what could be, becomes a juggling act of keeping her happy enough so she shuts up and you can get on with life. If she’s the least bit broken, like a skank she has a bunch of other men crawl all over her to make her feel better. The sick part is YOU have to pay for those guys to root all around her giving her what she “needs”.

You Can Never Leave

Allow me to give you my more recent gripes, so you can inevitably say “that’s nothing” and one-up my story b/c your house too is in shambles or soon will be.

2nd time ever away from our kid, my wife and I leave our child and his grandparents at our house so we can steal away on a Friday for my good friend’s 40th birthday celebration weekend. I worked like some executive in the backseat while my wife drove the entire way so upon arrival lunchtime seafood+ IPA turned into pregaming the party, which turned into a bottle of Touraine, few pulls off the Jameson Stout bottle, 6 games of beer pong, 6 oysters a pile of wings…just a real good time.

As our merry house of buddies and wives ordered 00:00 Midnight McDonalds, McDonalds, KFC and a Taco Bell at the AirBnb I get the call. Of course I get the call. “Can you turn the alarm off, we’re trying to open all the windows it’s 82 degrees in here”.

I told everyone to “shut up I’m thinking” and went silent. The Big Mac-erito with a side of fried chicken leg would have to wait. Nothing was working but the wind coming through the windows. I prepped my wife to load the car back up upon wakeup the next morning, and march home to the 100% humidity, 94 degree day to get them all into a hotel (upgrade…if it’s one thing I got it’s status, damnit). My dear friend poured me 3 fingers of rye whiskey at 1:20a, thanks.

Full Grievances

Now the TL;DR (too late for that) assessment that followed this “episode” that makes me say to hell with owning a house:

• Investigate the hvac and turns out lines just need a proper cleaning. By going up there and 2 of us walking on old beams we put weight on the drywall and mashed up the ceiling.

• Next day I found 400 ants coming through a peephole in my windowsill. Poison and Scotch tape deployed.

• I think I’ve killed 3k “palmetto bugs” (it’s a freaking cockroach far as I’m concerned) in the last month with traps and the nearest blow torch.

• Roof tiles were blowing up in severe wind/rain and leaked into the attic so had to re-tar those.

• G.d. ice maker is now making 30F degree ice which equates to it dropping out of the machine where the watery glob then fully freezes against the g.d. ice tray and creates a 30 pound block of useless.

• Washer drain hose should blowout any day now. If the sump pump in the basement doesn’t blow on the same day, we should be ok.

Truth of the Sitch

I’m blessed to have a home (and I love the location), and I’m just a statistic in this situation. My family makes a memory here nearly every day, truly. That’s why I deal with this mistress and all her scars, bugs, breaks, and her high-maintenance bullshit. But damn it can be a racket. I don’t know how/when, but I became a guy that doesn’t like much “stuff”. I’m on the right side of the tradeoff, given the memories, but I fall in the camp of “replace ‘home’ with ‘problem’ in any sentence and it probably still holds”.

Still, home is where my heart is. When I travel for 70% of the month, all I can think about is getting back to what’s in that broken down hub and the fun I’ll have in it. The key is to focus on those you love. Don’t look up, down, or around (less you find the next thing to fix).

Here’s to commiserating therapy- and still loving your life,

Hattie 🍻