Take heed, all ye apartment dwellers, and stay right where you are. You could be worse off. You could be in jail or living in an alley.
Or, even worse, you could be a homeowner.
When you own a house, you spend so much time in building supply stores other customers often take you for staff and start asking you questions about prices, where things are kept and how to use the various building materials on display. What’s even scarier is the fact that you’re able to tell them the answers. When the hardware store owner asks you to lock up behind you when you leave Saturday night, you know you’re in big trouble.
You spend the rest of your free time in banks begging for loans to pay for the house, at work trying to make enough money to pay back the loans and at relatives eating meals you can’t afford to buy for yourself because you took out loans to buy a house.
But these are all minor irritations. Compared to the major ones, these sometimes look like the joys of home ownership.
There are some benefits to owning a home, I guess – you can play the one Beatles record you possess as loudly as you like and you don’t have a balcony to fall off of, but still, there’s that one big drawback you just can’t get around: When you own a home, you don’t have a landlord. You’ve got nobody to scream at on the phone when the taps leak or the furnace quits. No one to castigate, blame and berate. Or sue.
And there are times you really need somebody like that.
For me, Monday night was one of those times.
By 9:30, the dishes were done, cats fed, house cleaned up and garbage taken out. I was heading to bed early for the first time in months. Nothing could stand in my way. Unless it could be the phone call I got from a neighbour at 9:45 p.m.
“Did you know the guy plowing snow in the parking lot next to you has dug up the lawn by your house and buried your telephone box in snow?” I was asked.
“WHAT?” I yelled. At 10 p.m., I was bundled up and standing by a truck next to my home, arguing with a snow plower I’d never met before about the dug up lawn, holding clumps of sod in my hands and engaged in a philosophical discussion about whether in the scheme of things, a lawn wrecked by a snow plower matters very much. He was of the opinion it doesn’t and I differed, of course.
So, we chatted on about this until his boss arrived in another truck to take part in the talks as well. At 10:20 p.m., the discussion was over and I was back in the house. By 10:45 p.m., I was calmed down and ready for bed again.
At 10:50 p.m., while turning off lights in the den, my wife found water dripping profusely through the ceiling in a closet there. After removing everything from the closet, I climbed up into the cold attic, armed with a tiny, disposable flashlight, the only one I could find. During Monday’s storm, snow had blown in through a gable vent and covered about 10 batts of pink insulation. The snow was now melting and coming through the ceiling.
At 11:10 p.m., I was on the phone to a friend who’s been a homeowner longer than I have, asking what to do.
At 11:30, I was back in the attic, shivering, scraping snow off a catwalk and off insulation.
By 11:45, I had removed most of the wet insulation and handed it down to my wife to carry to the basement to dry.
At 12:15 a.m., itchy from the insulation and angry from the aggravation, I finally crawled into bed.
And dreamed about apartments until dawn.
©1990 Jim Hagarty
