If you give your house a cookie...

It will know you got some money, somewhere, and entropy will ensue. 

In residency, we were paid every 2 weeks. This meant that a few times a year, we had a 3 paycheck month. Woot! Maybe we could go to Yesterdog or Buffalo Wild Wings. Yet every month that my wife had an extra paycheck, her car would get wind of it and a $1200 something would break. It became a joke that we couldn’t discuss it in the car. Particularly if we were on our way to dinner. 

Now our house is listening. It is 20 years old, and we have learned that this is when houses throw in the towel on all the things you haven’t already replaced. The furnace. Hot water heater. Our Electrosux refrigerator is a petulant toddler, in constant need of repair and attention. The electrical panel? That’s a new one for me. 

So far in the month of March, we have had repair people at our home seven times. And the month isn’t over yet. Our tax refund and extra shift paychecks (all my wife, thank you dear) are spent on the thrilling furnace replacement and likely a new electrical panel. Despite having inspections and professionals every time we upgraded or remodeled, someone took some shortcuts with the breakers and creative wiring and now, “not to scare you, but it’s not up to code”.  Argh. Second opinion on that next week in April.  

My sister's theory is that it’s because our homes were new 18- 20 years ago. We replaced all the things in our first homes, which were forty and eighty years old at the time, but they gave out in waves and didn’t quit in quite such rapid succession.  Mechanicals in a twenty year old home are like the hair loss in telogen effluvium—instead of shedding periodically, it falls out in synchrony. When she told me that it was raining from my niece’s bedroom smoke detector, I was surprised, but not shocked. It’s what 20 year old homes do. 

I’m annoyingly griping about our problems of privilege.   Stop reading if it pisses you off. 

Sometime during spring break, the garage door opener panel went rogue, and wouldn’t work. Our cat sitter was locked out. Annoying, but fixable with two of us, a ladder and google. Garage doors and openers, you’re on the bench. You’ve already been replaced.  

After our flight landed in a snowstorm, we discovered our hot tub lid had blown open, the water had evaporated, and it was half full of snow. My wife gamely shoveled out the snow and refilled the hot tub directly from our hot water heater. It turned on, balmy 58 degrees. Perfect. Our kid took a lukewarm shower, bitched, and we blamed it on using all the hot water for vacation laundry and the hot tub. 

The next morning my wife had no Wi-Fi to catch up on work. The outlet in the mechanical room wasn’t working. So she unplugged the central vac (it’s cute that you think we might miss it) and connected the Wi-Fi to that outlet, 6 feet off the ground. Electrician scheduled for the next day. Things progressively went out in the mechanical room that day: the overhead lights. Other outlets. Storage room lights. When our daughter took a frigid shower (“My toes were BLUE!!”), we realized that the outlet for the hot water heater was kaput as well. So we plugged that into an archaic power strip hanging from the 6 foot off the ground outlet, with the Wi-Fi. Dangling in mid-air. I was too mortified to photograph this the next day when the overhead lights were working.

Electrician fixed the mechanical room breaker, and gave us the awesome news about the electrical box waiting to fry us and/or start a fire. After he left, I checked the hot tub temp, only to realize that it no longer had electricity. Reset breaker several times without success. Hot tub guy recommended putting a space heater into the cabinet of the hot tub to keep the pipes from freezing. So, yes, I put a space heater into an enclosed area outside and prayed that I wouldn’t start a fire, melt the pipes or other important parts, and that it would work overnight in 10 degrees.  

I asked a professional first-- I consulted a Ranger. My brother-in-law is from the Iron Range of Minnesota, a place where one might dangle electrical cords and use a space heater under a hot tub and call it Tuesday.  

Seriously, he is handy, practical, and acutely aware of which workarounds are reasonable and which are dangerous. I needed a falling-apart-house consult, and he was it. It was therapeutic for us both to discuss how our houses were itching to rebel.   Their squeaking bathroom fan sounds like they have trapped a mouse. The smoke detector rain storm is likely from my nephew’s love of a very hot and full bathtub upstairs, and something leaking from the overflow. They’ve enforced showers only for the time being, which seems to prevent the need for a bucket or umbrella below.  

I expect the Mayhem guy from the Allstate commercials to pop around the corner of our house at any time.   

The stack of vital and useless vacation mail contained our property taxes for the condo, a fraction of any of the repairs this month. My wife looked at me and asked “why aren’t we living there?”  

We have a house. We have the resources to fix the unglamorous shit that the house is throwing at us. We are lucky.  I shouldn’t complain.

But I did want you to know that even two doctors will sometimes dangle electrical cords mid-air for Wi-Fi and hot showers, and put a space heater under a hot tub. And so far, live to tell about it.  

And, should you win the lottery, get an extra paycheck or a tax refund, you should never discuss it in earshot of your house or your car. They are already plotting how to spend it.