When it Rains it Pours

July 2023

Today, I ponder life as a homeowner.  I have recently read that we homeowners are a dying breed. Nowadays, young people are just not choosing to buy a home.  More likely, in today’s world, they can’t afford to.  And maybe that’s a good thing.  There are a lot of complications added to one’s life when you have your own home, all of which makes renting seem much more appealing. Especially to a homeowner!

The other day I took a cold shower. Not intentionally mind you, I just began after my wife and son had finished their grooming regimen. Neither go sparingly on their hot water usage. I used to say my wife didn’t take “a shower”, she took “an hour”. When she was young, after particularly long showers, her father asked her if she had worked in a coal mine that day.

My son is also known for taking lengthy showers. Not for mere cleanliness’ sake, but “to relax”. That is his quote. He uses his phone in the shower, never really washing, I guess. Continuing to provide me with evidence of his addiction to his cellphone as well as his obvious willingness to risk electrocution. 

Regardless, I looked into it, as truthfully, we should have plenty of hot water for a few contiguous showers. Of course, when I say I looked into it, what I did was request my wife to do so. No, I was not delegating!  My wife just happens to be the nerve center of our familial existence.  She is also our chief communications officer, as well as CFO.  Therefore, she knows just who to call, no matter what the household malady.  She makes short work of these things and, in just a day or two, we had someone out looking in to what might be wrong.  Of course, once they took a look, they said we needed a new hot water heater. Of course we did!

Several weeks prior we had our water softener looked at and were told we needed a new one of those.  There goes $2000.  We had a plumber come out to take a look at a couple of faucets that were acting up and he said we needed new ones. There goes $800.  I recently had an issue with our screen door to our deck.  Yep, needed a new one. There goes $300.

A towel rack recently came loose from the wall in my son’s bathroom. I don’t know how, as his towels generally end up on the floor. What should have been a quick new mounting bracket turned into a drywall issue.  Certainly, out of my league to fix.  Another bill, soon to come.  The floor seems like a fine place for his towel now. 

And finally, we had a late spring hailstorm that compromised my nearly new roof.  Our insurance agent came out and said we needed it replaced.  Luckily, insurance covered that one.  But it was still $1000 out of my pocket for the deductible.  Add all of those up and you will see we had an expensive May, with over $5000 in unexpected bills.  Yes, when it rains it pours!  Proving a home can certainly be a money pit. 

If expenses like these had happened when I was a kid at home, any one of them would have been a huge financial setback. All together they would have added up to a catastrophe. But back in those days, things were a little different.  Owning a home was still relatively expensive, but the math was different. Because life was different.

I come from a time when there were a lot of freelance tradesmen. Amateur handymen that continually seemed willing and able to help.  And they were not hard to find.  You always seemed to have a neighbor that did some plumbing on the side, or an uncle that was handy with electronics. A mason that lived down the alley.  A roofer up the street.  And of course, you knew everybody in your neighborhood.  That’s just the way it was.

And these folks were affordable.  Most people would help you out of kindness, knowing the favor would be returned in some way. Some might fix your faucet for a freshly baked batch of cookies, patch your floor for one of my mom’s strawberry pies.  Or maybe repair your siding for a glass of lemonade or a couple of beers after the job was done. In this way our lives with our neighbors were intertwined. It was so symbiotic! This also kept financial catastrophes to a minimum.

My dad seemed to be able to do almost anything. Maybe not perfectly, but adequately. He had to! It was the only way we could get by. He had grown up on a farm and had been in the army.  Both of those vocations required you to be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades.  He kept every spare bolt or nut or screw.  Every stray piece of wood, or trim or pipe.  You just never knew when you might need it.  And he often did. That’s how he could afford to raise four kids and pay the bills and mortgage on that 1000-sq-foot house with an $8000 mortgage.  Unfathomable nowadays. 

Today, things are different. Well, certainly for me they are.  No one in the neighborhood helps anyone else. Not really.  Our lives are not only non-intertwined, but they are very independent. We may know a few names and faces, but that’s it. There may be amateur plumbers and carpenters and roofers and electricians on my street.  But I would never know it.  I would be loath to ask them for help anyway. We are all way just too busy for that.

I am also not a handyman.  Not like my dad anyway.  No, my life was conducted almost purposefully to make enough money to afford not to be one.  I didn’t see the value at the time.  In my life, I developed a lot of skills that I used successfully.  But I never took the time to get clever like my dad was, so I might perhaps fix something on my own.  I took the route where I would make enough money to have someone else do that for me.  I chose a very different path.  And I am paying for that now. Quite literally as a matter of fact!  It is not criticism of either path; it’s just a fact.  Things are different now.

Do I regret this?  I guess I occasionally do.  Especially when I have a month like this one.  Where it has truly been a virtual storm of homeowner bliss.  Being slowly bled to death by the bills that come with owning a house that’s getting a little older, a little more needy. So, when my kids talk about owning a house, I do not push them that way.  They will make their own choices anyway.

The future will no doubt be much different than the present, or the past.  Maybe my kids will look back fondly on my wife and me and say something like “Remember how good old dad had to pay for every little thing that came up with that house he owned”.  “Remember how mom used to have to work so hard to run the house?”

They will likely live in high tech abodes, maybe even provided by the government. Residential units that will be interactive and fully wireless, allowing them to monitor constant streams of data which will be accessible from any point in the house or otherwise. Dwellings that will have AI support units that can quickly diagnose and repair anything on the spot that needs fixing. No clever neighbors or handymen will be required.  Or likely exist.  Except maybe to repair the AI itself.  So, it doesn’t take over your life, or the world for that matter.  Which should be a concern.

Certainly, everything about the home will be run by a computerized personal assistant, much like Iron Man’s Jarvis. This might control every single aspect of your home, from wirelessly charging your vehicles, to mowing and watering your lawns, to making your beds. Kitchen bench tops could become completely interactive.  You won’t have to do, or repair anything. My wife likely already has dreams of this, whenever she is sick of being the nerve center of our home.

My kids will certainly love this!  They can spend their days showering with their phones or likely watching TikTok on built-in computer screens while washing their hair.  Never running out of hot water! Of course, the water will likely have been recycled from their toilet by this time.  But my kids won’t care.  As long as there is internet.  And someone to hang up their bath towels.