I
was in the process of writing this weeks column when a
call in from a friend of mine who had just bought his
first home. If you’ll recall a couple of months ago, we
went to Austria to be in a wedding…. well, it’s his and
his new bride’s house.
Seems he’s been a bachelor for some 43 years and has never
owned a house up until now. I spent several minutes
listening to him moan and groan about the rigors of home
ownership which he is experiencing for the first time in
his life. Up until now things have been going quite well
for him since when anything broke you just picked up the
phone and called the landlord and dumped the load on his
back.
Welcome to the real world, my friend.
Let me give you a few words of advice, which are the
result of many years of personal experience.
Number one, home ownership isn’t like living in an
apartment or a townhouse.
If you’re planning on having a party, say a Super Bowl
party, start planning four to five hours ahead of when you
normally would, if you were living in an apartment… here’s
the reason…. everything works until you plan to have
people over to your house. Then the plumbing will go
bonkers, the toilets will stop up and the sprinklers won’t
turn off. You can just about count on everything working
fine Monday through Friday, but wait until the weekend
comes and Katy bar the door. The heating systems in houses
are designed to breakdown about 3AM Saturday morning of
the coldest weekend of the year. In the summer you can bet
money that the air-conditioning will go out when the old
temperature is going to hit over 110 degrees in the shade.
Put this in your book…. all service and repairmen get paid
lots more money to come to your house on the weekends. The
toilets will overflow on a Saturday, not Monday. The roof
will leak on a Sunday, not Tuesday. It’s just something we
homeowners take for granted.
If you want to save money and maintain your sanity, then I
suggest you and your bride leave the house every Friday
afternoon and check into a nice hotel and stay there on
Saturday and Sunday. In addition to having someone change
your sheets and bring you breakfast in bed; it will save
you untold amounts of money by not breaking anything that
will need fixing until the following week.
Let me give you another couple of hints about your new
house. Never put anything solid in the garbage disposal,
like say… bread. Liquids seem to be fine, but anything
larger than a grain of rice may cause your whole entire
plumbing system to backup and result in major repair
costs. Do not, under any circumstances put rice into the
drain and then add hot water. It tends to make a substance
that is somehow stronger than concrete. The United Nations
could certainly use this material for the rebuilding of
third world countries.
We use the same rule for the toilets as we do on our
boat…which is… don’t put anything in there unless you have
to. We recommend you find a nice clean service station
close by to use when nature calls. Make friends with the
manager.
A couple more things to consider in your new
marriage…pets. Now at some point in time you or your
lovely wife will want to bring home a sweet cuddly kitten
or a loveable pooch. Think about this before you succumb
to temptation. These are living, breathing things. They
get sick and barf on your new carpets, which make you need
the services of a carpet cleaner who can only come out on
Saturday at double the cost. Your mother cat will decide
to have her kittens early on a Saturday morning at the
same time as when the heating breaks down. You will need
the number of a good 24-hour animal hospital. Keep it
close by… you will use it often.
Finally let’s talk about children. Everything I’ve said so
far applies double when you have them. I know, I know it’s
only natural to want to propagate our species, but
listen…. kids will cost a lot of money. They will put
things into the toilets you cannot possibly imagine…they
don’t know that Lego’s won’t go down the garbage disposal.
They watch a flying dog on television and can’t understand
why Rover breaks his leg when they toss him off the roof
of the garage… on Sunday.
You can always go to the extreme of taking your kids with
you to the hotel on the weekends, but they’ll still get
the flu or fall down the stairs and then you’ll still have
to go to the emergency room. So just forget about it and
learn to live with it. You’ll become friends with all of
the nurses and doctors who work there. They’re nice. Most
of them aren’t married, don’t have kids and live in
apartments where someone fixes the things that break.
Happy home ownership.
