Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Why is owning a home the American dream???

Gus and I bought our house about two years ago.   I love our house, especially our kitchen and dining room, but home ownership has been quite the adventure.  Here's a list of our troubles. . .

1.  Three weeks after moving in we found MOLD in our main floor bath.  This is certainly not something we expected after just having the house inspected by someone we thought was a great inspector. 

Doesn't this look fun?!?!?


2.  About a month after finding the mold we noticed a water spot in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs.  Turns out a piece of the bay window roof was missing and there was a huge opening right into our house! 

3.  Last spring we discovered a water spot in our garage ceiling.  Turns out the master shower is leaking into the garage and could cost $3000 to fix . . .we shower in the guest room. 

4.  Also last spring we discovered that water is getting under the threshold of our front door and causing the hardwood floors to buckle.  We've yet to find the source or figure out how to fix it. 

5.  Last July during one heck of a thunderstorm and shortly after adopting Roxey, we found a puddle in the foyer.  Poor Roxey got a not very nice talking too about peeing inside until I realized it wasn't her.  As I was cleaning it up, the puddle kept forming (She ignored for about 2 hours after this).  I then discovered a trail of water running down the two story foyer wall and a nice crack in the drywall ceiling.  After looking around the attic we came to the conclusion it was the roof.  Our very sweet contractor came out at 9:30pm on a Sunday night and tacked a tarp on our in the pouring rain, lighting, and thunder. 

6.  Our chimney pan was rusted to the point of having holes so our contractor ordered us a new one.  The idiot guy from the chimney company put it on wrong and our chimney leaked into our basement causing drywall damage and nearly catching our house on fire. 

7.  Our hot water heater also died at some point last year.  We had a home warranty which covered the cost of a new hot water heater, too bad it didn't cover the extra $800 to bring our house up to new code! 

I'm pretty sure if I would let him, Gus would put this house on the market immediately.  He doesn't quite understand that all houses have their problems and that moving isn't the answer.  Plus, we'd never find another house in our price range with a huge kitchen, master bath/closet, and beautiful dining room like we have now. 

We haven't done a lot to our house but eventually I'll get around to posting what we have done, including renovating the moldy bathroom! 

Has owning your home been as much fun as owning ours?!?!?!

1 comment:

  1. Our experience was similar. The inspector did a crappy job and we ended up paying for/fixing a lot in the first year. The most expensive thing that we haven't fixed: our chimney is shot. No fires in our fireplace unless we want to burn the house down. It'd be at least $3500 to fix. One day...

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