When I was a kid I used to watch a TV series every afternoon called "Home Improvement," starring Tim Allen as Tim the Toolman Taylor. The show was based on the real home improvement shows that were popular back in teh 90's, where plenty of Americans living in surburbia took care of their own landscaping, interior decorating, and other home improvement needs. It romanticized the idea of home improvement for me, but even then I wasn't exactly excited about operating a power drill, sanding down pieces of wood, or applying finish. I was not a "handy" guy, and 7th grade woodshop did nothing to remove me from that notion.
Back in the present, I envied others for buying a home when they bragged about it at parties or invited to their housewarming parties, and subconsciously that feeling of inferiority definitely contributed to my urge of buying a home instead of renting, as MJ and I have been doing. The homewowners I met with didn't mention the amount of time and effort needed to do upkeep on the house, and the home imprveoment efforts that might have even made Tim the Toolman Taylor balk. It's all well and dandy for a new, brand new home, but a fixer-upper can add quite the cost to the bottom line of a home purchase. Ours is not a fixer-upper, but it's somewhere in between, where no major work needed to be done but small nicks like dishwasher, washing machine, and appliances were in need of repair or just outright replacement. We also replaced all the flooring (a mixture of wood floor and carpet) with vinyl carpet, which is a surprisngly costly process.
It really does pay to be a handy person, or have some specialty or know someone to help you from getting ripped off when going to the auto shop, or getting a quote for a repair, or buying something that you're unfamiliar with. Otherwise, you're like me and go into every new experience knowing that a.) I'm almost 100% not able to do any physical repairs, and b.) I don't know the first thing about doing those physical repairs. I just have the pleasure of receiving the quote from the person who does know a lot about those repairs and knows how much to charge and how much that customers usually accept, not the actual cost of it. It's a really vulnerable position, knowing that something is wrong and the service provider also knows that someothing is wrong, the only question being how much I'm willing to pay to make the problem disappear. Sometimes though, I will admit I should try harder to explore a fix to the problem myself. I took a defeatist attitude towards our washer and dryer not working right off the bat, resigning myself to calling Sears home repair, when in fact I probably could have played detective and eventually sussed out that the issue was the screws in the back of the drying machine had come loose, and the fix was just to screw those back in. I'm no handyman, but I can handle screws and a screwdriver!
Ultimately, owning a home isn't like living in an apartment: There's no calling the repair manager of the apartment complex and just laying the problem at their feet; the buck stops with me now, and I likely need to spend some bucks to solve that buck. A wise man said try to avoid playing away games (play games at home when you can), and I feel like I'm in totally foreign waters, without a lifeboat, just trying to survive one day at a time, one repair at a time. (Oh, and our new city also has red light cams that can catch us speeding if we go over 10MPH over the speed limit! No cops needed!) Super fun.
Life will get better soon after we're all moved in, but for now it's been a learning process, trial and tribulation for home improvement. On the positive side, MJ and I spent 2 days painting the inside of our home's walls, and it was a fun experience, and done pretty well! Nothing like enjoying the fruits of our labor after a hard day's work painting white walls. Just ask Tom Sawyer (or actually Tom Sawyer's friends, who did all the work for him).
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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