magpie's nest of shiny objects

2004-07-14 16:30

Things They Don't Teach You In New Homeowner School

Owning a home brings a weird kind of permanence and repetitiveness that you may not expect. The same telemarketers will call you; the same mortgage companies will try to get you to refinance; the same charities will hit you up for donations month after month.
If you refinish the floors, you will be living with sawdust for the next six months. Not only will it show up in every nook and cranny of your home, you will find your counters and appliances periodically recoated with it for no apparent reason.
You will learn to garden, whether you like it or not. Once you have a yard that you own, you have three options: learn to garden, wait until you're desperate and pay someone an exorbitant amount of money to clean it up for you, or let your yard look like ass.
Option 3 sounds good until you find that if you own the yard, guilt and shame kick in harder than you expect. Suddenly you're That Woman who can't work a mower and who has the Ugliest Yard On The Block. Your neighbors hear the faint whistling sound of property values dropping whenever they look at your house. Passers-by wonder if the house is abandoned. Even your mailman thinks you're ghetto. And suddenly you find yourself in the garden aisle of Target buying hedge clippers.
You will do battle with pests -- ants coming into your kitchen, raccoons busting into the garbage cans, dandelions taking over your lawn -- and while you will fight valiantly, you will lose. You may have dealt with some or all of these pests as a renter, but once you own your home these mundane battles become viciously personal. (After finally rooting up a particularly persistent dandelion, I left it on my porch railing like a head on a pike to serve as an example to the others. At the time it seemed like the logical thing to do.)
Sometimes repairs will look small and be huge. Sometimes they will look huge and be small. As a first-time homeowner, there's no way to tell which is which until you hire someone expensive to come in and look at them. (And thank your favorite deity if you can actually manage to find someone expensive to come in and look at them, because at least around here, 90% of them won't even call you back.)

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