I have a theory about houses. Just a theory, largely untested, but based on empirical evidence. I've been thinking that being the first owner of a house isn't optimal, because you get a bare house, and have to deal with the shortcuts the builders took. And being the fourth, fifth, etc., owner isn’t great, either, because you have to deal with the patching jobs of multiple previous owners. Somewhere in that line, you’re going to get at least one clueless moron. Probably two or more.

Pakeha, of course, knows all about that.

I’m one of those original owners. It’s a three bedroom, 2.5 bath house. Overall, it’s a perfectly decent house. Although the windows seem to allow more cold to penetrate than you’d expect from their double-paned construction, the house keeps us warm and dry. And, of course, holds our stuff, which is the main thing.

So, what am I complaining about? Let’s see:

• The kitchen sink developed a nasty leak, and one of the burners on the stove decided not to light. Fortunately, these things occurred during the one-year warranty period, and were fixed. Although the burner is still slow to light.

• A bare house is good and bad. Good, because you don’t have to deal with an otherwise nice house with distressingly ugly wallpaper. Nope, our house was bare, but the interior was a perfectly fine, neutral color. The carpet wasn’t bright green. On the other hand, installing curtain rods gets old quickly. Although I did learn valuable lessons, such as why power tools are vital for homeowners, which wall anchors work best, and how to patch holes caused by using crappy wall anchors. Those plastic cones that you have to pound into a pre-drilled hole? Utter crap. The pointy, threaded ones that you install with a screwdriver are great. To be fair, I learned about those indirectly from the contractor, when I was removing a towel bar from the bathroom.

• Speaking of the carpet, the builders installed really cheap stuff. Yes, I know, that’s hardly a surprise, but I can still complain about it. We had to replace it after three years, and it’s not like we were racing monster trucks in the living room.

• Comically bad garage door opener installation. At around the two-year home ownership mark, the chain popped off the opener. I popped it back on. Of course, when I say “popped it back on”, that’s a bit of a gloss. It required a ladder, two screwdrivers, and a respectable amount of cursing. It came off, I put it on, it came off, I put it on, it came off, I called someone to come repair it. He informed us that the opener was fine; it was just installed by cretins. The unit was loose, and the constant shaking finally took its toll. A mere $60, and we had a calm, quiet garage door opener that was no longer performing an artistic recreation of the 1906 earthquake. We had just assumed that the thing was supposed to sound like that.

• Having a backyard already set up for you must be nice. Ours was a sharply sloped expanse of a small amount of soil holding together a few tons of rocks, and evil, tenacious weeds that demanded blood sacrifice before they would budge. The combination had me considering the relative merits of dynamite as a landscaping tool. Of course, then I see Pakeha’s trials with a backyard consisting almost entirely of concrete (which, I admit, was a plan that I considered, however briefly). So, really, you want a previous owner who created a lush, verdant, but not overgrown backyard. Fortunately for any future owners of my house, that’s my wife’s territory. My wife found a pretty little plant at the store yesterday. “I wonder what it needs to survive?” she asked. “Me to stay the hell away from it,” I replied. She laughed, because she knows it’s true: I can keep ivy and cacti alive, but only because they get by on neglect. If I take an active interest in keeping a plant alive, it will die.

• The latest problem is happening in our second upstairs bathroom. The linoleum is bulging with discolored spots. My wife thinks that it’s due to a pipe leaking under the floor. I think it’s caused by humidity trapped in the bathroom, but I’ll admit that my theory is based primarily on hope. Because I really hope that I don’t have to get someone out to pull up the floor and fix a pipe. I can live with spotty linoleum; after all, it’ll have to be replaced someday, anyway. Plus, I can probably replace the flooring. Maybe tile, or…well, something. Tile can be awfully cold, after all. But I’m not about to attempt to replace pieces of wood that may well be important to the structure of the house. They might not be, of course, but I assume that the bits that make up the frame of the house are there for a good reason. Now, yes, that does require some trust in the builders, and I’ve already determined that said trust isn’t necessarily due. But I’m pretty sure that they tended to err on the side of fewer bits, so I’m not being unreasonable. Plus, I hear that dealing with contractors is awfully fun.

Columns by Harlock