Home Improvement

We bought our current house back in November knowing that it was a fixer, so we expected to put in some work, but things are starting to get out of hand. The previous owner didn’t do anything even remotely resembling maintenance on the place. He was a complete slob. We think he was a carpet layer by trade; the entire house is carpeted with remnants. One would think, by extention, that he would have been reasonably handy, but some of the things we’ve encountered fixing the place up are real head-scratchers. For instance: it’s a 2,150 square foot house with only one working phone jack. None of the three faucets upstairs were plumbed the same – one had the hot water on the right, one on the left, and the third has the handles installed backwards. One of the bedroom doors was installed upside down. The basement sliding door is only locked when we block it with a 2x4.

We started painting the master bedroom yesterday. The most befuddling part wasn’t that it took 3 buckets of TSP to clean all the candle smoke off the powder blue walls, nor was it cleaning up the phone & cable cords poking through the drywall all helter skelter. No, it was the storm window. We have these wonderful aluminum-frame, single-pane that do very little to keep the heat in, so the previous owner installed storm windows. They don’t work; he did such a crap job that they won’t even close. But when we went to open the bedroom window for ventilation this morning we found the idiot put the storm window on backwards! The window opens right to left, the storm window left to right. Holy Fire Hazard, Batman! How could you get that one screwed up and not fix it?!

I guess I shouldn’t feel guilty that I never got around to buying that escape ladder!