Adventures in Home Ownership

In July 2019, my husband and I became first-time homeowners.  Condo owners to be more precise.  While this is a big deal, it feels as though it's a somewhat bigger deal because we're older than most first-time homeowners - me (mid-40s) and him (early-50s).

I've grown accustomed to calling maintenance over the 20-something years I've spent as a renter.  Have a leak, plumbing emergency, weird sound coming from the garbage disposal?  Pick up the phone or enter a ticket online and get on with my life.   So, why did we buy?  The short answer is that we were renting a condo and the owner decided he wanted to sell it.  Being newly married, we knew the next logical step was to buy something.  We ran around looking at a bunch of places and, at the end of the day, we decided we really liked where we were the best.  We let the owner know we wanted to buy the place and the rest is history.  Plus, we figured one of the big advantages of buying the place we had rented for the previous few years is that there were no hidden issues.  We knew all of the quirky things that we either could live with or change. 

I grew up being the handiest person in my family.  That's not saying much.  But I have distinct memories of coming home from college and there being a "to do" list for me - bookcases to assemble, technology to fix, and so on.  I was just good at figuring things out.  And, this was before Google and YouTube.  My husband also prides himself on being somewhat handy.  He recounts stories of home repair projects he worked on with his grandfather.   So, when the lower left vanity doors in both of the bathrooms ganged up on us and decided to fall off within days of us signing the official paperwork to buy the condo, we were fairly confident that our first home repair would be simple.  We had the doors, we had the old hinges - how hard could it be?  

On a hot summer Sunday afternoon, we drove to the local mega hardware store armed with examples of what we were looking for.  We wandered endless aisles looking for hinges.  We finally found them and, boy, there were a lot.  Tons of them.  I started picking one up after another - comparing to the examples we brought with us - and got more and more confused.  One looked right but then the next two looked right too.  They had different product numbers - what was different about them?  We finally called someone over for assistance.  We explained the situation to him - showed him the existing one and he quickly pointed out the most popular/ standard one that would work.  We grabbed what we needed, thanked him, and walked proudly up to the cashier to buy the hinges.  We couldn't wait to get home and conquer our first home repair.

Well, we got home.  The husband pulled out his power tools. (He has power tools!) He got to work and he quickly called me into the powder room.  The hinges weren't the right ones.  He attached them but when he closed the door, there was a two inch gap between the doors.  I, of course, didn't believe him at first that they were wrong.  I mean we asked the hardware store employee after all.  I started in, providing suggestions on things to try instead, but it became pretty clear that this easy home repair was a bit more of a challenge than what we expected.

On his next day off, the husband decided to venture back to the mega hardware store to return the wrong hinges and buy the right ones.  We live in a city and only have one car, which I drive to work 30 miles outside of the city.  So, the husband's trip to the store was a bit more of an adventure because it entailed him taking one bus and transferring to another and doing the same on the reverse trip back.  But, he was on a mission.  He marched into the store (or so he later told me), confident that he would be successful this time. And, he did all of this without telling me because he wanted to surprise me with two reattached vanity doors when I got home from work.  So, imagine my surprise when I got home and there were expletives coming from the powder room.  Yup, you guessed it.  These hinges were also wrong.  They caused the doors to overlap by 1/4 of an inch.  My husband was in complete disbelief.  We were defeated by two stupid vanity doors.  

To this day, we still have not tried again to reattach them.  We have them leaning precariously in place so it's not obvious to someone that the left doors are unattached.  But, if you should accidentally bump one of them, like I seem to do on a somewhat regular basis, it comes crashing down.  If I'm lucky, I move my foot out of the way first.  Using the bathroom sink shouldn't be as dangerous as it is in my condo. 

But that's just my view.  From the 33rd floor.