I just bought my very first house in September of 2008, so I've been a homeowner for nearly 8 months. I know nothing about owning a home, except that I'm responsible for everything, and I don't have to throw away money paying rent anymore. I know nil about home repairs, property taxes, lawn care, landscaping, pest control (except the insects that my cats maul, leaving them near death and in pain flailing about on my floors each morning), trash collection, leaf collection, keeping the driveway clean, etc. I've lived in urburbia for the past 16 years or so. I had "people" (a.k.a. landlords and maintenance staff) who took care of such things. Now, it's just me. I'm solely responsible. I've discovered something: I am an idiot.
I wouldn't give myself the title of idiot unless I was sure it fit. I'm sure. From the very beginning, before I even closed on the house, I should have realized that I was in over my head. When I was checking rates for homeowners insurance and they asked me what kind of pipes were in the house, I said, "I don't know, round ones." I wasn't trying to be funny. I honestly believed that to be a helpful, sufficient answer.
Once I signed the papers and moved in, the first thing I wanted to do was paint. I bought primer, brushes, rollers, paint, etc. and thought I was all set! It turns out that when priming, you don't actually have to put a solid coat of primer on the wall, and, you should either go side-to-side or up-and-down, not both. My brother informed me of that after paying a visit to my home while I was out of town for work to check on my cats. I'm glad I wasn't there when he saw it because his laughter would have been entirely too much for me to handle. I'm sure he is still laughing about it now...several months later.
A few weeks after moving into my new house (after the painting fiasco), several of the electrical outlets stopped working. I searched the attic for chewed wires because of the plethora of squirrels who congregate on my property. I searched the crawl space, sweeping past spiders and other creepy-crawlies I couldn't identify, looking for chewed wires there. My cousin Anthony (thanks Anth) put the idea of squirrels in my head. Turns out, a breaker had tripped. I swear, I looked in the box and saw nothing. I called electricians and they simply flipped the breaker, and left with a check for $65.00. Oh, but they did tell me this happens to a lot of people. Yeah, sure it does, but I appreciated them trying to make me feel like less of a dumb ass.
Two months after moving in, my heat was no longer working (and it was cold and snowing). Fortunately my soon-to-be-sister-in-law phoned her ex-husband, who happens to be an electrician (and lucky for me, they are on speaking terms) and he rushed right over to diagnose the problem. He asked me where the heating unit was and I took him outside and showed him the outside heat pump. He looked at me a bit strangely and said, "Umm, that can't be everything. I need to see the actual heating unit." I thought that was the heating unit, but I showed him the crawl space under the house that had other pipes and ducts, and bingo, that was it! Hopefully he didn't share that episode with his other electrician friends.
It turns out the heating problem started with the thermostat shorting and melting, which melted other things, which caused the heat to stop working. He bought me a new thermostat, the new kind that's programmable (of course, I paid for it). He cut me a deal in the price I believe. The next month, my energy bill went from $239 to $570! Turns out I was using what is called auxiliary heat. I was wondering what AUX meant on the thermostat. Now I know.
When I mentioned to my boyfriend that I would like to put some more plants in the front yard, he suggested we go to a nursery. I thought he meant to pick out babies. He meant plants. I'm not good with plants. I've killed plants that other people have told me are impossible to kill such as aloe and cacti. Yup, I've killed them. I don't have a green thumb. I don't even have a green finger nail. I accidentally "broke" one of the rose bushes planted by the previous owner. I touched the stem to look at it, and it snapped it. The rose bush is dead. I'm guilty.
Now that I've been here for 8 months, I'm finally comfortable with changing light bulbs, pulling the trash and recycling containers to the curb on Monday nights, and watering, but not touching my plants. That's about it. I did order the Gardening for Dummies and Home Maintenance for Dummies books. They are on the book shelf in my study, gathering dust.
I thought being unemployed would give me time to do things around the house and learn to garden, but as it turns out, I probably shouldn't...
--Fortuitous Observer
