Lucy Reflects

As I sit in my new home waiting in an unreasonable window of time for Comcast, I decided to write about our experience purchasing our first home together. And why it almost drove me to the brink of insanity.

I had this idea that looking for our home was going to be an unforgettably touching experience as we skipped from one perfect house to the next, buy a home that I loved at first sight, and everything would fall into place. Just like it did in my overly active imagination.

My husband and I had quite the wish-list that seemed completely reasonable - granite kitchen, stainless steel appliances, en suite bathroom, garage, in-ground pool, a yard to raise pigmy goats, solar panels, and a place for Phil to brew beer, all in our budget. Seemed reasonable since it always worked for the folks on HGTV.

FAKE NEWS.

What I didn’t want was a cookie-cutter split-level home and we ended up buying just that. Because it’s no longer about what I want, it’s now about what the four of us need. And together we saw potential in it.

Next came the general contractor, a quirky young farmer fellow who seemed to know what he was talking about when it came to home improvements. He was quick to explain he was anti-corporate and took pride in taking his prized alpaca and llama to the anti-Trump rally in D.C. to protest GMOs and support local farming (true story, I Googled it). That’s cool, I thought. I can get on board with that.

The first day I stopped at the new house he wasn’t working, but instead sent a couple of his Oompa Loompas to do the work.

“The contractors German Shepard ate his alpaca today,” said a painter.

Two days later I stopped in to notice the contractor was again absent.

“His German Shepard ate his llama,” the floor installer told me.

As I looked around and noticed some major mistakes on the flooring and walls, I couldn’t bring myself to question what was going on. Asking why the floor was like a trampoline under my feet and the electricity didn’t work and there was paint dripped on my belongings just made me look like an asshole, because “Cujo 3” was unraveling at my contractor’s house and his workers were splitting time between “fixing” my house and digging animal’s graves.

As bad as I felt about the animals, especially since alpacas are my favorite animal ever, I couldn’t let that be an excuse for shoddy work. We had no choice but to fire our contractor who is now threatening to put a lien on our house and shut down the giant corporate establishment where we purchased our flooring. Have at it, bro.

My older brother visited to assess the work and insisted that a saw was not used to cut the floor, but was in fact, a beaver. He came to our rescue and fixed it at no cost. He was our hero.

Everything was going wrong. I blamed myself because I pushed to buy a house and I was starting to think I made a hasty decision. A few days after moving in, it seemed everything was breaking. The sink leaked two inches of water into the cabinet. I jammed a bucket underneath to catch water, and unbeknownst to me, knocked over a can of oven cleaner, which jammed into the perfect position to slowly and quietly ooze its entire contents, leaving a toxic haze throughout the house. I opened our freezer to find it was a solid block of ice due to another leak. I grabbed a butcher knife and hammer and went to work to prevent a flood. I took the blocks of food outside, throwing it onto the driveway, cursing, stabbing and hammering at bags of frozen vegetables and chicken breasts.

As I was cleaning our toxic mess from underneath the sink, the doorbell rang. It was a nice young gentleman welcoming me to the neighborhood with a complimentary bag of Gain laundry pods.

“OK, so let’s take a look at which one of your carpets gets the most traffic!” he blurted out as he tried to push through the door.

Damnit, I thought to myself.

“I’m actually headed out to pick my son up from school, but I’ll gladly take your card,” I said to him trying to avoid a sales pitch.

“Yeah, well, I’m going to need that bag of laundry pods back to give to someone else then,” as he huffed off.

UGI made a mistake and shut off the gas at the new house instead of the old one, leaving us with cold showers and three squares of cereal for two days.

Our refrigerator guy also marched to the beat of his own drum. And as he pulled the ice maker out of the freezer that had a solid block of ice in it, he said “That there thing is going to take until the cows come home to melt so I’ll let you deal with that and put it back.”

I started to wonder who was going to be the unlucky S.O.B. who I officially lost my shit on after dealing with too much nonsense.

On top of everything going wrong, life had to go on as normal. And that was the toughest part for me. “Why does everyone lie about being able to do shit the right way?!” I blurted out as I drained a large amount of Black Box wine into a glass. “We need more women in trades. We don’t pull this kinda bull crap. And a woman would have TOTALLY let me keep the stupid laundry pods!”

It was clear to everyone in my home that I was about to lose my marbles as this money pit of a home that seemed more like a jail cell took over my life. I was at the mercy of hours of windows of time for people to fix every single appliance in my home and try to squeeze more money out of us. I was pretty sure my kids were going to start looking for a new home, one without toxic fumes in the air, hot water, high-speed internet and a mom who didn’t act like Cruella Deville. Max has already started begging me to drop him off at Starbucks to use their internet.

It's been about a month and things are finally falling into place. And as things were fixed, I started making our new house look like the home I really loved. We made it through the process without anyone going to rehab, getting divorced or running away from home. We have a tiny view of the Conestoga river and a playground down the street, wonderful neighbors and quiet evenings. And the four of us couldn’t be happier. Especially now that we have hot meals the internet.

We’d like to hear from you, tell us about your experiences with buying a new home. What were some of your biggest challenges?