The saying goes that the two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys his boat, and the day that he sells it.
I do not own a boat. But as of January 31st of this year, I do own a house. So I feel for this hypothetical boat owner. Because like a boat, owning a home means constant exposure to all the flaws in your investment, every loose bit of caulk asking you if this was really worth it. Also like a boat, my house takes on water sometimes.
I know, intellectually, that home ownership is a good thing. It’s not only the long-game outcome of American Capitalism, it represents some level of stability and autonomy you do not get with renting. My friends who all bought houses before me made the pitch that nothing feels better than going to bed in a house that is all yours, no lease, no landlords - full control and full responsibility.
Well, I wouldn’t know.
Because despite being a house-owner for nearly five months, I am still not a house-liver. I am just now a house-sleeper-in, and that’s just because of an air mattress in my one currently-livable room. It’s really more like squatting while also paying a mortgage.
Let’s back up: My wife Sarah and I purchased a three-bedroom, one-bath home in the wildly gentrified Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. (Fishtown - It’s like Brooklyn if your parents are poor!). Zillow says that this house was built in 1910, but because Dirtbag Narnia has about the same record-keeping systems as Actual Narnia, I have no real way of knowing if that number is accurate. My 78-year-old neighbor, who has had multiple strokes and forgets which stories he’s told me already, says it was built in the late 1890s, and he’s about as reliable a source as Philadelphia City Records, so really who can say. The point is, shit’s old.
And when shit’s old, you expect a few capital-M Major Issues. We weren’t morons, we had multiple inspections and were made aware of all Major Issues prior to purchase, and they were considered in the offer. Our most capital of Ms was the electrical system. As with most houses built in the early-1900s-or-maybe-late-1890s-depending-who-you-ask, the electrical system in my house was designed for what’s known as a knob-and-tube system, from a time when electricity came from… I dunno, knobs, and tubes, I guess.
Anyway, those knobs and/or tubes are outdated, weak, and, in the words of my electrician, holy shit, so very flammable. And all updates to my house over the past 110-or-130-years have consisted of dudes deciding to just put some new wires over the old wires. This practice is known as, again, in the words of our electrician, “holy shit such a bad idea it’s so flammable”
(Okay, that part isn’t true. I’ll tell you what he actually said because it’s funnier than anything I wrote. He told us, roughly: “Everyone’s worried about if knob-and-tube is flammable. Which, it is, but it’s sort of like having an original Model T and not wanting to drive it on I-95 because it might get a flat tire. Yeah, that is a possibility, but there are other troubling factors in this equation.”)
So, we did the smart and responsible thing as homeowners — we had almost our entire electrical system taken out and re-wired with modern equipment. This was, literally and metaphorically, the first exertion of power over our domicile. Electricians asked me questions like “where do you want the outlets in this room?” as if I was a person of authority, not someone who has lived his entire life adapting his daily routine and home furnishings to fit whatever pre-existing infrastructure he is currently being pushed into, like water changing shape to fit its container.
However, it is also our first big “oh, shit, duh” event as homeowners as well. After the work was completed and the system rid of both knobs and of tubes, we were left with a beautiful home… that had over 100 large holes spread through every wall and ceiling in every room of the house. See, it turns out that inside the wall is where the wires live. And to get to them, electricians need to make big-ass holes in said walls. This is paradoxical: Something that is both completely obvious and foreseeable to anyone who thought about it for two goddamn minutes, but also completely a non-factor, never considered in the planning process by me, an absolute moron.
So the Capital-M Major problems have given birth to over 100 lowercase-m minor problems. But a very funny thing happens when you investigate the lowercase-m minor problems of your house so closely - they reveal many other problems of various levels, ranging from Capital-M to lowercase-m, to a new, in-between, third-case-M I am calling “Smurgle-case EM”
It is the smurgle-case problems I will likely be detailing in following updates to this newsletter. I realize that this is a lot of complaining over what is, objectively, A Good Thing. Owning a home is a Good thing, one that I realize not everyone in my generation feels they will be able to achieve. It is objectively A Good Thing that my wife and I have the ability to design our home together, that we are given the opportunity to build our future foundation from the ground up.
But this is how things go. You work for The Thing, you get the Thing, you complain about The Thing. These are the boring grown-up conversations you avoided at parties when you were a kid. I also know that the only way I was able to get The Thing was to have it come with a lot of smurgle-case problems, and because I figure many of you are or will be in the same boat (remember the boat from the first paragraph?) I hope you can learn from my issues.
Also I found a human tooth in my basement.