Ongoing repairs to the house
May. 9th, 2021 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI bought my house last fall and there is still plenty more to be done as it increasingly turns out to have been not so much remodeled as to have had issues concealed. Most of the issues are not awful, there are just so very many of them that they sum to several person-months of work.
For example, last week we added
In the longer term, this house should work out, the location is great for what I need for some years yet, the neighbors on each side are nice, etc. Nonetheless, this has to be one of my worst purchase mistakes ever and I will come out from these repairs with my savings left far short of what I need for other purposes. Perhaps this is the cost of my naively using a home inspector recommended by my realtor. Continuing to hemorrhage money, month after month, instead of settling into my new house, certainly exacts an ongoing toll on my mental health. I avoid luxuries like an $8 per month Disney+ subscription yet feel the opposite of frugal in typically paying contractors around $400 per person-day, doubly painful in my remembering how hard my parents worked and saved for the money I inherited from them. But, reflecting on the repairs that I am having done, it would be foolish to delay them, better to fix these issues sooner rather than later. The house is now mine and I must make the best of it.
For example, last week we added
new windowto the list in discovering that the frame of one of them largely consists of rotten wood, caulk, and wood filler, freshly painted over: one can just push it and it bends. A fair few of the recent discoveries have centered around water leaks and rotten wood, though it also turns out that some of the thicker painting also hides termite damage. A fair fraction of the not-rotten wood is sparsely nailed together, often into nothing substantial, where some longer screws or suchlike may have been warranted. For example, some of the baseboard can be pulled off the wall with one's hand. Other pieces of wood simply separate as they change shape over time: for instance, the deck, largely made of untreated wood, was slowly pulling itself apart. The next unknown to investigate is, why the floor near a couple of corners feels damp, those corners being at the base of the wall where the house's circuit breaker box is.
In the longer term, this house should work out, the location is great for what I need for some years yet, the neighbors on each side are nice, etc. Nonetheless, this has to be one of my worst purchase mistakes ever and I will come out from these repairs with my savings left far short of what I need for other purposes. Perhaps this is the cost of my naively using a home inspector recommended by my realtor. Continuing to hemorrhage money, month after month, instead of settling into my new house, certainly exacts an ongoing toll on my mental health. I avoid luxuries like an $8 per month Disney+ subscription yet feel the opposite of frugal in typically paying contractors around $400 per person-day, doubly painful in my remembering how hard my parents worked and saved for the money I inherited from them. But, reflecting on the repairs that I am having done, it would be foolish to delay them, better to fix these issues sooner rather than later. The house is now mine and I must make the best of it.
