In which there’s The Past.
Here’s me, 16 years ago, standing in my kitchen.
See how rough and unfinished that shit was? The whole place looked like that. It never got better, just worse. It was barely a step above living in a car. (Well, a very large car, with a bug-infested shower, but still, roughly the comfort and insulation of living in a car. Or maybe a super ghetto mobile home.)
That secretary desk, on the left? Was really cool. Wish there’d been some way I could have kept that. It was old and in shitty shape, but it had cubbies and a hinged desk and I adored it.
I feel that way about a remarkably small number of the things that I had in that house and lost. My grandfather’s table. A couple of leather coats that molded. And I did rather like that samovar. My hard drives, the ones he left in a filthy, shitty, open-to-the-elements “room.” But that was later; I digress.
That house was a piece of shit. We never should have bought it. I never would have, except my husband was a professional fucking contractor and said it was a good idea, it was fine, he could handle it, no problem. And, idiot I was, I chose to believe him. I thought he had expertise!
We bought it on contract, and, like fucking morons, we used the same lawyer the sellers used. I don’t think we even had it inspected, because I was home when an inspector showed up after we’d bought it and moved in, and he told us the electrical was nowhere near code and that we’d be fined if we didn’t correct it. (Husband’s solution was to just destroy the entire mud room/porch, rather than correct the issue. Huzzah.)
We hadn’t even been there a month when the roof leaked and a bunch of ceiling fell in. Oh, and then the well-head pole fell over while I was in a hot shower in a literally freezing house.
The kitchen was in the basement and you could see dirt through the cracked concrete slabs of the floor. Cobwebs in the unfinished ceiling. Main bathroom had a countertop on a raw 2×4 frame, cement floors, and unfinished brick walls with no cupboards. Kitchen “cupboards” were the same: just unfinished, open 2×4 shelving with salvaged countertops stuck on by hippies. There had been cloth curtains on the front when they showed us the house; when we moved in, just raw shelves.
Then he tore the already shitty disaster up even more. Refused to fix the decent bathroom on the second floor, the one with walls and a bathtub and ceilings. Destroyed the only decent or useful spaces in the house — the finished attic, the mud porch, the greenhouse.
Oh, the greenhouse, where it was sun-warm in the winter and one could have grown herbs and sat to read!
He covered most of the basement windows with a massive porch he never finished*, so the main living space became not just dirty and unfinished, but lightless as well, and we had an unusable porch!
I mean, he did re-roof the house, which was actually necessary and good, and a lot of incredibly hard work, certainly, but even that was embarrassing as fuck because I later saw him refuse to honor the markers he’d traded for his friends’ hard work on it, because he was honorless and lazy.
It’s not like he didn’t do shit; he did a lot of shit. I realized later that he just did shit he wanted to do. He was good at getting firewood, for example, but he’d spend inordinate amounts of time on it — cutting down whole trees, hauling them, cutting them, splitting them, renting machinery to do so — rather than just fucking buying it and working on the house. He made it so much more complicated and involved and time-consuming than it needed to be; we could have just worked on the furnace, and maybe, I don’t know, installed some fucking insulation?, and bought more propane. But no, he’d spend months of weekends “getting us firewood to heat the house.”
Firewood I had to haul from the barn, in a wheelbarrow, through the snow, half a city block. Yeah.
He did do a lot of work, sure, but he never did what we needed or finished anything. He’d do shit like spend tons of time building a really cool but ultimately unnecessary trailer for the riding lawnmower, or sawing holes in the roof to frame in dormers he never actually completed (covering shit in plastic sheeting for a year is not completing something), or putting in external doors that didn’t actually go anywhere yet and wouldn’t for years.
And then those fucking hippies had the balls to threaten to sue us! They sold us a total piece of shit of a house [caveat emptor], then forced us (well, not us, because I’d bailed just before then, and not him — because he had no money, per the usual — but J., who paid it off for reasons I will probably never understand) to honor the entire mortgage over a decade early!
What a fucking shit show!