The Crap in and Around My House: An Update

Note: This is not my house.

When you own a house, and I don't suggest you do, there are a number of things that you'd like to eventually improve or fix or remove or add, but time and money and skill and laziness stand in the way of executing these updates.

I noted a number of the things I'd like to have done in my house, in a post I wrote nearly a year ago, and it's no surprise that I haven't enjoyed much success.



TOO TAPPED OUT TO REJECT THE TAP

Do you think my name is
Rockefeller or something?

I still haven't bought new Brita filters for my tap, and the water line in my fridge has been frozen for nearly two years now, with the exception of a two-week period after I unclogged the line and was able to rejoice in the glory of water without lead or arsenic or AIDS or whatever is lurking in my tap, according to Brita's marketing department.

When I had to drink from the tap again, I went through my usual two-step process that can apply to anything around the house that is falling apart or in some state of shittiness:

1. Pour water from tap into glass, experience revulsion.
2. Repeat, until I no longer give a shit.

Versions of this process can vary, depending on the situation:

1. (The day I paint the stairwell) It's too late to finish painting that stairwell. I'll have to complete this task tomorrow.
2. (The following week) I was too tired and busy to finish that stairwell job last week. I'll have to get on it sometime this week month.
3. (Months later) Damn, that stairwell looks terrible. Someone's gonna have to do something about it. Maybe if I'm able to take an entire week off while the kids are at summer camp or something, I can take a whole day to finish it. Too bad it's only October.
4. (Sometime between now and the end of time) What do you mean, The stairwell looks like shit? That's how it came with the house!

A SUCCESS STORY
To be fair (to whom?), I did complete an improvement task, buying the flatware basket for my dishwasher to replace the one that was more rickety than a rope bridge in an Indiana Jones movie. (For that matter, more rickety than Indiana Jones himself, these days.)

Behold!

Now the utensils stay in the basket and don't fall through into the slurry that forms on the bottom of the dishwasher, consisting of soapy water, vegetable slivers, and year-old sliced plastic tops of Flavor Ices.

THEN AGAIN...
Recently (which could mean four months or a year and a half ago), the little detergent door on my dishwasher refuses to close. I didn't think this would matter, but it kind of does. Instead of the liquid soap being released at the proper time during the wash cycle, it immediately runs down the door, most of it pooling in the slurry I described above.

To fix that door would require calling a repairman (screw that) or replacing the part myself, which would require knowing what I'm doing, which I don't.

But I'm sick of seeing spotting spoons, so this will probably be my Next Big Home-Improvement Task. I just ordered the part, so I may document my efforts in the near future.

PUTTING THE "GARBAGE" IN "GARBAGE CANS"
And now I return to the issue of my garbage cans.

When you have a job and kids and a house and responsibilities there are plenty of things that you just do on autopilot if you don't want suffer a cerebral implosion. But suddenly, you'll find yourself experiencing a revelation like, "I should tighten the screw on that cabinet after all these years."

My most recent revelation occurred when I was fulfilling my twice-a-week garbage-curbing duties. I'd once read a story mentioned a guy inviting someone over to his messy apartment and suddenly realizing what a shithole he lived in when he looked at it "through someone else's eyes." In this case the someone else's eyes were my own, and I saw this:

Ugh.

And this:

Feh.

I have six garbage cans. Some lack handles. Others lack wheels. And I haven't seen a lid since 2005.

Twice a week (if I remember) I drag at least one of these sad containers out to my curb, either pitying the garbageman trying to grip a can without a handle or worrying that the wheel-less can is going to slip off the curb on which I've perched it, like a pirate missing his pegleg.

I want to get new garbage cans, but I always find an excuse not to: replacing them is too expensive, the current ones still technically "work" (even though the bottoms are staring to wear out like a hobo's shoes). I pass other houses in my neighborhood and see other sets of cans standing proudly at the curb, lids secured tightly, as if to say, "We don't even look like garbage cans! We even look nicer than that excuse for a flower arrangement in front of your living room window!"

Despite the approaching shame, do I plan to buy new garbage cans? Probably not, but I am thinking about dumping my trash in my neighbors' beautiful cans.