Our house hunting adventure began in October. We saw some great houses in bad neighborhoods and horrific houses in great neighborhoods. We finally found the house we bought: it was a decent house that needed some manageable TLC in a nice neighborhood. We jumped at it. Fast forward through packing up an apartment with a puppy reopening every box we packed, and moving across town in a sleet/snow/ice storm: we made it. We had a new house; we had new furniture; we had a backyard for our dog. We thought we were on the fast track to living the dream.
During our clean up and small fixer upper projects my dad repeatedly mentioned that, "You don't own the house; the house owns you." Two weeks after we moved in we did laundry for the first time (because we didn't have a working dryer up until that point) and the carpet was wet in our basement. We had never done laundry and showered and run our dishwasher all in a short window of time. We figured that was probably it and a relatively simple fix: only do one of those at a time. Well it kept happening even if we only did laundry. Or took a long shower. We called a plumber and he replaced part of a pipe he thought might be leaking. Thought the problem was solved and we could go back to our lives. Well it kept happening. Our carpet was wet for unexplained reasons.
We had a sewer guy come over and he ran a snake down the sewer line. He couldn't find any trouble and thought he might have broken up a clot or wiped away some build up. Little did we know he would show up 6 more times in our lives. Every Sunday or Monday we were calling him to snake our sewer line so that we could function. This went on for several weeks. Between Cole and I we missed a fair amount of work, sitting at home waiting for plumbers to show up. We met some very nice plumbers along the way who offered us way more discounts on their services than were necessary but were greatly appreciated.
One night our pipe got so full of water from our sump pump emptying into it, we had to bale water out of the basement from noon to 5AM the next day. It was horrible. The sump pump was going off every 15 minutes. So every 15 minutes we rushed into our laundry room and filled a few buckets with water. We walked them up and out of the basement into the backyard. Cole and I took shifts so that we each got some sleep out of the deal. The phrase "sump pump" still gives me a bit of anxiety now. For the days following the sump pump incident I would panic at work at the sound of a toilet flushing. It will go down as one of the weirdest nights of my life.
The only reason we waited so long to fix the sewer line was because we were advised to purchase insurance that would pay for the cost of replacing the sewer line. Well, we got the wrong insurance (thought we had the right one) and just had to go for it. Come February 13th our entire yard was dug up only to determine that 5 feet of pipe in the boulevard had collapsed and needed to be replaced. We now have a very large mound of dirt in our front yard that is ever so slowly going down. But we have working sewer line and that's all that matters.
So right now, the house owns us. A lot. Eventually we will own enough of it to outweigh the early struggles. It is still really fun. We can put a hole in the wall to hang a picture if we want and we won't get fined. A couple weeks ago we decided spur of the moment to paint a navy blue room light green–simply because we could and no one said we couldn't. It's great. We have a dog, a house, a bunch of freedom...And it's pretty cool.
2-13-2017
3-19-2017
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