Mitch here!
As I type, I can think of five independent chores that I need to do. It often feels like I run around my house all day, attempting to fix things at the same rate that my family can break them. (Which is surprisingly fast, and probably why I can never keep up.) Can anyone relate to this?! 😆 EVERYTHING IS BROKEN ALL THE TIME. To make matters worse, I’m the least handy guy you’ll ever meet, and my repair jobs usually just cause further damage.
Homeownership is like a game of “Chutes and Ladders” except both the chutes and the ladders end up at the hardware store. And when we bought our first place, my dad’s obsession with the hardware store came into clear focus. I get it. It’s not that dads love the hardware store; it’s that a trip there is the only break they get from fixing all the stuff.
And I’m not even talking about the stuff that I break myself, like when I opened the garage door too soon and ripped off the trunk of my car. I’m talking about everyday normal broken things.
The routine is simple:
- Something breaks.
- Kelly asks me to fix it.
- I grab my tool bag to take a look.
- I curse a lot.
- Kelly and I retreat to separate rooms and call our respective fathers for help.
- I go to Home Depot.
The end.
Frankly, I’m terrified of the day when I’m in our dads’ shoes and my kids call me with similar questions. I seriously don’t know what I’ll say, and cell phone connection problems likely won’t be an issue in the future.
So today I’m going to run down my top five “giant broken disasters” I’ve encountered in the time since we’ve moved into this house, just in case anyone else has been feeling useless lately too.
1. The Dishwasher: Our dishwasher kicked the bucket a few months ago. It turns out that hand-washing dishes is nearly impossible when you have two small children at home, so I dropped everything and dedicated myself to solving the crisis as quickly as I could. This involved frantic phone calls to at least 10 appliance stores in the Chicago area, a mid-day drive to the suburbs with Emma in tow, remote learning on a tethered iPad in the back seat, and a favor from a contractor to install the thing. Finally got it in, and all the buttons were inexplicably broken… but it seemed to wash dishes when we close the door hard. That is, it did, until Noodle jumped into it (?) and shredded some kind of dangling metal thing that was super important. So Kelly and I spent a lovely Friday night duct taping the new dishwasher back together. So far so good, but you can bet your bottom dollar that this saga is far from over.
2. The HVAC: If you don’t know what HVAC is, you can stop reading this blog post right now. In the past six months, I’ve had an air conditioner die while hosting my in-laws, a thermostat give up on the coldest day of the year, a humidifier leak, and another humidifier fail. I did actually fix all that stuff, but I feel a little less impervious to the typical Chicago weather hell storm perpetually raging just outside my door knowing how much my HVAC system hates me.
3. The WiFi: We live at an amazing time: Instant worldwide communication, the world’s collective knowledge at our fingertips, and a remote educational and workforce experience that rivals that of the in-person kind. That is unless someone installed a cheap mesh wi-fi router set he bought on Craigslist causing persistent internet disruption, very angry family members, and Peppa Pig plot lines totally muddled. Our internet sucked so much even our garage door wouldn’t work. But… I fixed it. Because that’s what I do.
4. The Lightbulbs: It’s standard practice to assume that a home’s previous owner made every mistake imaginable. Luckily, the couple we bought our home from were expert homeowners. They kindly even left helpful little notes all over the place for the clueless family moving in. ;) They also left, and this is an estimation, 50,000 lightbulbs in every conceivable cabinet, drawer, crawlspace and cavity. Lightbulbs don’t grow on trees, so this was amazing. Unfortunately, though, my wife decided that she wanted a different color temperature. And then one year later, decided that she was wrong and that the previous owners’ taste in lightbulb color temperatures was far superior than her own. IT’S FINE.
5. Family Movie Night: I take movies seriously so I installed a projection screen in my basement with plans to host a proper family movie night each and every Friday. The system is composed of eight individual parts and each of them have broken at least once:
- The projector: Broken bulb.
- The Apple TV mount: Installed wrong, fell and hit me on the head.
- The screen: Wrong size delivered.
- The Apple TV: Too old, software incompatibilities.
- The volume: Only works when changed with my phone.
- The sub: Lost the wire in the ceiling.
- And then there are the speakers, which get an honorable mention: The app updated itself without telling me and installed a mandatory five-second delay between the audio and the video which was un-Googleable and prevented us from watching a movie in that room for six months. I got so mad that I nearly ripped the projector from the ceiling until my technologically inclined best friend figured it out, saved the day, and prevented the carnage.
Listen, I’m not here to complain. I like being a homeowner! Wait a second… I think I hear the sound of running water… BE RIGHT BACK!
Any recent homeownership disasters you’d care to share to help me feel less incompetent? :)
Mitch. OUT!
FELT ALL OF THIS. Hilarious. Thanks.
Aww Mitch. Lets help you out here. We have 2 homes, so twice the problems. Our main home was built in 1915, so that’s a ton of fun. We have been here for almost 11 years and still have no idea what one lightswitch in our bedroom controls. We’ve still not replaced the always-been-missing screen on one of the windows in the living room. In saying that though, we did rip almost the entire house back down to the studs and rebuild, including the kitchen and bathroom at the same time, while I was pregnant and going to grad-school part time while working full time. I was putting in a new subfloor in the nursery and painting it at 20 weeks pregnant. Tiling the bathroom at 30 weeks. Cutting new treads for the stairs, painting the stairs, and supervising new carpet for them and the nursery while I was 39 weeks pregnant. And then had my water break on it 3 days later, just 2 hours after finishing building the custom closets (needed because it is an attic room and the ceiling slope starts 48 inches up the wall and finding closets 48 inches tall is impossible). We did pretty much everything but structural, plumbing and electrical ourselves. So maybe I’m not the best person to reassure you. But we do have issues, I promise you. I’m writing from the sunroom we’ve been building the past 18 months which still does not have any trim other than window sills, and still does not have siding on the outside.
Our weekend/vacation home is a 1968, 2100 sq ft ‘cabin’ in the mountains. One of our many projects there was switching out the nasty harvest gold toilet in the principle bathroom ourselves, but because it didn’t quite nest properly because of how badly it’d been originally plumbed, we created a leak that brought down a chunk of the ceiling in the bathroom right below it. We still haven’t taped and mudded the replacement drywall we put up where the ventilation company did the new ductwork so we’d actually have heating in the living room – coming up on maybe 4 years now. When the washer broke, we re-did the laundry nook, only to have the dryer break a month later which meant that we had to replace the utility sink with a small bathroom style sink because a utility one would no longer fit. Then my hubby forgot he’d not yet set the drain for the sink, and switched on a load of laundry, which dumped about 12 gallons of water all over the floor because it all shared the same drain. Our 8 year old came up and told us there was a flood. Thankfully the neighbors – not us – had a wet/dry carpet cleaner vac that sucked up the majority of it for us, after I’d sponged up about 5 gallons.
So there you go. I’m sure I can come up with a ton more examples if you give me enough time to dig up the buried memories!
So hilarious I read it out loud to my husband and sent it to my dad.
This is hilarious! The dishwasher sounds insane. I love how Noodle climbed in :) thanks for making me laugh on a tough day! Homeownership is worth it but can definitely be tough and annoying. Take it from someone who has pin hole water leaks every couple of months because our water is so strong (full of chemicals haha) it eats through lead pipes?!
Thank you for this. You are all of us, just much more witty. I laughed out loud at the “hit me in the head” line.
I’ve learned not to tell my husband that something needs to be fixed because it ended up costing us so much more after he would try to “repair” said broken thing. I just call my handyman or Abt and everyone is happier and we save money this way! I think his skills came from his dad who, for example, thought you installed baseboards with screws to “make sure they never come away from the wall.”