The Woes of Homeownership

You may have noticed that I took a brief hiatus from blogging the past few days.  Believe it or not, even though I have tons of back posts ready to go, I was too busy to even get online and set them up to post.  Why so busy?

Well first, we're still doing renovations indoors following the dining room and office/spare bedroom work.  This time it's for the "old office" aka "new baby room."  Progress has been slow, to say the least, even though we're not doing much - painting walls and woodwork and installing new closet structures.  We also added a new attic access to this room, which involves a pull down ladder instead of the whole in my closet that was the previous access that required a ladder.

"But why do you need a new attic access?" you might ask.  Great question.  Well, we still continue to be plagued by the mice from hell that simply WILL. NOT. DIE.  After about 8 weeks of having a ladder in my closet, we decided we needed a better way to wage this war with the rodents.  We're still losing. Miserably.  Every night we wake up, listening to them dancing around above our heads.  This new batch of mice are fearless little buggers, and no amount of racket that we make below stops them from their disco above.  Our sleep is disturbed in major ways and we're constantly tired these days.  All we want to do in the evening is relax and go to bed.  Stupid mice.

Unrelatedly, during a particularly torrential downpour a week or two ago, water started coming into our bathroom.  DH went to the roof to do a patch and then visited the attic.  There was definite evidence that our roof was leaking.  Fast forward to Wednesday of last week (hmm... or is that rewinding, since it's now Wednesday of this week?) and water started coming into our kitchen.  While it was raining DH went back to the attic and found no fewer than 5 places where water was coming, and he only checked 5 places so who knows how many other leaks there were.  A few quick phone calls and we had a dumpster ordered, DH brother ready to drive in from Baltimore, and a need to dip into our savings account for an emergency re-roofing project.  Fun.

That was this past weekend.  Do you remember this past weekend at all?  It was cold. Bitter cold.  18 degrees in the morning cold.  Thermos' can't keep your coffee warm kind of cold.  And DH and his brother were out there from 6:30 a.m. to about 7 p.m. both days this weekend putting a new roof on our house.  If that isn't commitment, I'm not sure what is.

Our roof went from looking like this:

To this:

I had no idea our original roof was tan.  I kind of like it better in that color now that I'm comparing, but honestly, I could care less what color our roof is, as long as it doesn't leak.  Or maybe I just like that picture better because it was taken in the spring, at a much more artistic angle, and there are flowers blooming in it. 

Also, why does our house look like a shack from the back?  It's really an ugly house from this perspective.  I'm glad that we don't really have back-yard neighbors.

Anyway, a future post will be written with more details about the roofing weekend.  It was long, hard and cold, and I wasn't even up on the roof. 

It's times like these when we wonder why in the world we bother with home ownership.  If we were renting, our landlord would have to replace the roof.  If we were renting, our landlord would be responsible for bringing in an exterminator to deal with the mice.  And if we were renting and needing more space for an addition to our family, we would find a bigger apartment to rent.  Done and done. 

So for those of you who lament renting, read this post again and be thankful.