1y ago

the Perks of ownership...

71 comments

My wife and I bought a house with two GIANT trees in the backyard. At least sixty feet tall, four feet across. They were probably planted when the house was built in '72.
One month in, one of them dies. It cost $2,700 to remove it and leave the stump.
Then in March this year the OTHER ONE FUCKING DIES TOO. We went ahead and had the stumps ground this time. $4,400.
I spent $7,100 to have a backyard with 0 trees and 2 mounds where I would rather have trees. Fucking NOTHING to show for all that money. Those trees were gorgeous. I was pretty devastated when we had to have the second one cut down.
Apart from the trees, we have had:
A 50 year old toilet flush valve break ($35 plus the time it took me to repair the toilet because I do not want to figure out how to get rid of an old toilet);
The garbage disposal fail ($300 for a new disposal; $450 for the plumber because I got in over my head);
The gas valve on the heater break ($840 plus a weekend of it being 45° in my house before anyone in town could come with the part)
A garage door that hangs up as it closes. I'm gonna ignore that one for as long as I can and just pull it down while it closes for now. Maybe I'll get the hardware to convert it to a manual door while I'm young enough to pull it up and down.
I'd still rather own, but man, the cons go hard.
- Home ownership is for people who DIY.
  I've fixed enough things myself to realise that most things are broken because the previous owners also fixed it themselves.
  
  Me starting a project “What kind of alcoholic simpleton set up THIS CONTRAPTION?!? This is why we need professionals”
  Also me, finishing a project “I’m done fiddling with this godforsaken piping. That’s good enough, leave it for the next person”
  And thus the cycle continues anew
  
  This is why I jumped at the chance to buy my parents' old house when they moved out. Not only were they giving me a good deal, but I knew how my dad took care of the place and that I wasn't buying a fire hazard or worse.
  
  I weep for whoever bought my parents old house. My dad left so much half-assed shit that's going to break again for them to find. Hell he's already done a number on their new house and that's just what I can see walking through. I'm probably going to inherit that one...
- The worst past of renting is the Landlord. The worst part of owning is being the Landlord.
  
  I like not having to wait for the landlord to get off their ass.
- Our walk in shower on the 2nd floor leaked to the first due to the membrane being compromised. Found out there is no easy fix and had to completely redo the shower. It was 9k. T_T
- The garbage disposal fail ($300 for a new disposal; $450 for the plumber because I got in over my head);
  This seems a little outrageous. Garbage disposals are about $150 new, and I have no plumbing experience and can swap one out in less than 15 minutes. Unless you seriously damaged some pipes or the plumber was getting double time I have no idea why it would cost that much.
  
  I did fuck up the plumbing. Like I said, got in over my head. All the old pipes were cemented in and the disposal didn't match up to the existing plumbing. I should have thrown in the towel sooner, but "too late" was when I, the dumbass with a sawzall, chose to admit defeat. He was here a solid 2 hours cleaning up my mess. I can fix most stuff, but sometimes, it just goes the wrong amount of sideways.
  As for the disposal, if we were gonna replace it, we were gonna get a GOOD one. It's a 1 horse and it's probably overkill, but I'd rather spend the extra on a higher quality machine. We both spent way too much time living with shit tier appliances in cheap apartments.
  Fortunately, the plumber was a total bro and replaced all the cemented fittings with compression fittings. So if the next one doesn't perfectly fit, it'll be as simple as loosening everything up and adjusting it all.
- You got the control over the quality of stuff you own Not so much on rented
- Sucks about the trees, but your other repairs you’ve made don’t seem too bad. It could’ve been worse… trees could’ve been neglected and fallen on your property.
- A 60ft tall 4ft wide tree costs $4k to remove in your neck of the woods? In my area, it costs that much to remove a tree a third of that size and I shopped around and got multiple quotes too 😣
- I followed some arborist's ch on YT for a while and man, people really butcher trees when they don't know what they're doing. It's quite sad given how much a tree affects a property's price, I feel bad that you effectively got ripped off like that. I don't think many appraisers would know their shit either so that sorta thing is just being SoL I guess...
  
  I'm pretty sure the horrendous drought we had last couple years and the 105-110 degree summers did them in.
  We're the second owners so the lady who lived here before us had to have loved those trees. She and her husband built this place and raised their kids here. She continued to live here until he died. She seemed genuinely elated to be selling to another young couple looking to build a family instead of some corpo or landlord or flipper. Nice lady.
  I don't think anyone caught that first tree was probably dying at closing. Oh well. It sucks but what're you gonna do? As for the second one, the last few summers have been brutally hot and dry. We didn't do anything to the trees. We did cut back on watering the lawn because of the drought. I think the poor old thing just couldn't take it anymore.
  We're in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Redbud is our state tree. One of the neighbors has one, and when it starts seeding again, I'm going to ask if I can collect some seed pods so we can try to get a few going. They're really hardy here and a local tree should produce seeds that are best adapted to the local climate. I miss those two trees, but for those couple weeks a year, when the redbuds are in bloom, I think the beauty of that will be an acceptable consolation.
  
  Those trees sound like a neighbour might've poisoned them once new people moved in. Just sounds suss to me the timing etc
- I don't know if it's because prices are different where you live, but around here, you totally got hosed on the trees. Admittedly, we didn't get the stumps removed, but we've had multiple very large oak trees cut down (they predate the house by many years and the house was built in the 1980s) and they cost around $1000 each time.
  
  There's a lot of variables, not the least of which being the specific people you hire, how busy it is in your area at that time for them, and the specific site (can they access easily with their equipment, are there easily damaged buildings nearby, etc.).
  The last time my parents had tree work done, my dad was getting estimates in the range of $2,500-4,000 per tree, for a total of 4 trees.
  Then one guy came out, took a look, and says, "$1,500."
  My dad is thinking that's the best price he's likely to get, but still wants to see if the guy has any wiggle room, so he says something like, "Is there anything you can do on the price if I want to get all four done at once?"
  And the guy just says something like, "I was planning on doing all four at once. If I gotta come back a second day, it'll cost a bit more. Maybe $1,800 in total for the four of em. But I'll only need one day as long as I can get here early and put a full day in."
  When my dad realized the price was for the entire job, he basically just said, "How soon can you do it?"
- For the garage door one: maybe try to lube the wheels on the guidance. It most likely registers some too high resistance and thinks a object is in the way.
- Be glad you don't live in a high cost of living area, my first thought was envy of how cheap that was for you.
- Getting rid of a toilet might be easy. My trash company accepted one as my once a month "large item". I just had to dry out all the water and bag it up with the tank and bowl in separate bags.
  Upgrading to a modern toilet with a good MAP score was a huge upgrade and not terribly expensive compared to other projects. I think we've plugged it maybe once since we got it? The old toilet needed to be plunged regularly.
  If you decide to take it on just give your trash company a call first and see what their policies are.
  
  A lot of people break up the toilet and put it in their normal trash in pieces. I paid $100 for a junk collection company to pick up my 35 year old toilet.

The trick is to bring in whatever busted piece you have and find the exact match. Nobody's gonna think you're shoplifting rusted garbage and usually you can knock out your purchase in just one trip.
If your project/fix is too complicated to bring in the busted piece, may God have mercy on your soul.
- too complicated to bring in the busted piece
  time to get good at projecting your project visually on the ceiling like beth harmon in the queen's gambit.
  
  I take pictures on my phone and draw measurements on them. That's been pretty helpful for me.
  
  I don’t understand why the pieces are above her and her eyes are on the side of her head.
  
  Fire sprinkler installers crying

It's always the plumbing that makes for the late night trips too. Missing a piece of wood or something electrical, and it's fine. You can fix it tomorrow. But busted a pipe and have water cut off to the house until it's fixed? That's when you make a late night run to wherever is still open.
- there is a certain demographic of fellow travelers that is at home depot because they just cant stand being home

Ah, I remember getting the stairs redone. They had 1990s vinyl on them, and we wanted non- slip carpet. I was smart enough not to do the carpeting myself, but surely I could strip it?
Turns out the vinyl was attached with pure fucking magic, and the nothing short of xenomorph blood was getting that shit off, apart from hard labour. So after 2 days of violence, I find out that they can't actually glue carpet to paint. They used to be able to, but the modern glue puts not killing the user over being convenient for me, which is fair. This wasn't true for the previous glue, which I had to burn and scrape off.
Unfortunately, unlike the vinyl, the paint too was very high quality. And thick enough to serve as a a staircase by itself, so after using some expensive goopy enzymatic paint stripper, and some good old fashioned harsh chemicals, I ended up sanding away the remaining paint over the next week.
It's been two years, and I think I finally vacuumed up the last dust.
Never again.
- Jesus Christ on a motorbike that sounds like hell! :O
  
  Jesus Christ on a motorbike
  "The Lord was with Joshua and his Triumph was heard throughout the land." (Joshua 6:27)
  I can't remember which translation says "triumph," most say "noise" instead.
- Can someone from a non american country chime in? This meme hit so hard for me as an America 🇺🇸
  Saying Dad can we go home now at 11pm at home depot as kid
  got to make sure my kids have that same experience
  
  Chiming in from Germany where stores close at 8 pm the latest. If I entered a home depot like store after 7 pm on a Saturday (you know, Sunday is for Church so no way any store is open) the employees would be killing me with their glace. So, I guess if you plan to emigrate and providing your childhood experience to your kids is important to you, Germany isn't the right destination.
  
  I'm Dutch, which is very much not American. I do most of my DIY store trips on a bicycle.

As a European:
Struggle to find a craftsman to do any small work.
Work really needs to get done.
Go online, find how it is done.
Go to some hardware store and buy everything and a couple of extras, just for good measure.
Start the work.
Break or destroy whatever the cause of the problem.
Realize the original work was already badly done, is too old to be safe or was half assed together by some lazy person.
Go back online, find modern solution.
Go back to store, buy extra materials.
Break things even more.
Replace bad original work with modern solution, creating in the meanwhile a solution to conected bad work you can't solve to the work you've done.
It works and it is safe.
Eventually, one of the crafts worker calls back.
Sees the work you have done: "Why did you bother doing all of that? You spent too much money."
Describes shoddy solution, like what was before the damage you solved by yourself.
"Fuck my luck."
End note: I faced this when fixing a sewers issue and a renewal of an electrical circuit.
- Homeowners insurance: "Since you don't have some certificate or whatever, your proper solution is something we won't cover. If you want it covered, get someone with a certificate to do a hackjob."
  At least in Germany, you're not allowed to touch anything "important" like water, electric, plumbing, or gas. Even if you would do a much better job, quicker, and cheaper, than any contractor who'd be allowed to do that work. Every single contractor I hired remodeling our house did something which was clearly not up to code (DIN or EN), and almost every time they put up a fight explaining it away, even when I read them the exact wording of the norm. "Well, if I'd do it that way, I would never finish work!" "This would be too much work, nobody does it that way" "I am always doing it this way and never had any complaints"
  Discussion was always over when I asked whether I should get an inspector to settle it. They begrudgingly fixed the issue, and without fail tried to bill me for it (additionally).
  I am so done with contractors, those are the original gatekeepers.
  
  It varies by the locality, but the municipal inspectors in the US often let you get away with doing your own electrical and plumbing. They come down harder on gas, though. For a pretty sensible reason. If you mess up electrical or plumbing, you tend to only fuck yourself. If you mess up gas, you tend to fuck your neighbors, too.
  
  I can. I'm in Portugal and we can fix things in our own house, except for gas and appliances like AC.
  Insurances only care what you do when it damages others. Like a pipe bursting and flooding your neighbours house. The burst pipe needs to be fixed by a certified worker but whatever it may have destroyed in your house you can have it contracted or fix it yourself. Or not at all. You only need to provide a proforma invoice for the work and materials, by a professional. If you fix it or not, that is your problem.
  Electricity is a touchy subject but you can modernize a house entire eletrical circuit by yourself and only pay a professional to inspect it and have it declared as up to code. And it is not that hard to make things better than professionals. You already know the reigning logic.
  Inside buildings, it's harder to perform work on water and sewer lines but you can renovate/improve anything up until you reach the main pipe, which is common property. I have a stand alone house and I'm forced to do all of these works by myself because I have a mess inside the walls and ground, for water, sewage and eletricity, because nobody wants the job as I want it done.
  And connecting modern PVC to 70 years old ceramic pipes for waste water is not safe nor adequate on any level, yet...
  And me wanting a properly done breaker box, with separate lights and outlets for each room is too much of a hassle.
  I'll go complain to my walls, as usual, and take my leave here.
- This is so accurate. I absolutely hate that it's super hard to find qualified craftsmen nowadays. And worse, sometimes they're clearly unqualified AND don't speak my language, so communication is super frustrating.
  
  I can find plenty of craftspeople. But usually they will only take specific jobs, with specific outcomes.
  I have a situation where I have to have a bathroom completely demolished and plumbing and waste water lines redone.
  It's a simple deal and a quick work yet nobody will take it because there are special demands that need to be met (it involves insurances) like ripping old water lines completely from the wall and run new tubes.
  But "ripping out the old is too much work and puttin new pipes into the wall is too conplex: leave the old ones as is and put the new ones outside the wall".
  Nope. Old out, new in. Everything through conduits, with joints and safety valves inside inspection bixes. And there they go running.

No project is complete without at least two trips to the hardware store.
- Also have to give it some blood. Nothing I do ever goes together right until I've injured myself somehow doing it.
  
  My wife and I have agreed to try to keep things to one emergency room visit per project.
  The last one being when I was pulling up tack strip to replace carpet that was right along a transition to the kitchen tile. Crowbar caught a chunk of ceramic and gashed my head pretty bad. Missed my eye by a few centimeters. Wear a face shield for that shit.

I was almost finished redoing a floor when one of the planks kicked back in the table saw and hit me in the arm. I didn't think anything of it, and then realized the threshold I bought wouldn't work.
So there I was, in Home Depot at 8:58pm, walking back to the flooring section when I realize that I've been dripping blood on the floor from a cut in my arm the entire time.
- Pain is your body's way of staying stop. Doing your own carpentry tends to override this response 🤣

The guy on the right is carefree and full of joy compared to a guy who walks to the auto-parts store.
- That second guy was me walking into a target at 9pm to buy bungee cords after is spent an hour on the side of the highway in -20 weather trying to straighten my skidplate out enough that it wasn't dragging after I slid into a median.

Going to home depot at 9p to get one more of a simple washer or nail that you could have gotten on any of the 3 previous trips that day to finish fixing whatever broke in the middle of the night is what I call the adult walk of shame

Going back 3 fucking times for the right part or to buy a tool you know you already own but you can't find right now is a whole level of hell that we sometimes pay people thousands of dollars to help us avoid
- to buy a tool you know you already own but you can’t find right now
  That's how I find the first tool.
  It's like a sacrifice of my time and money to the tool gods to show how invested I am in dealing with this problem on my own. They reward me with giving me back my old "lost" tool.
- Look, I don't need to be stockpiling tools for every occasion. There's no reason for me to buy that drill or saw for the one project I need it for.
  So I'll just pay the people who have all that stuff already.
  
  You know that you can use drills and saws more than once, and for more than one kind of thing, right? I've used the same drill for plumbing, electrical, woodworking, and probably 100 other projects at this point. A basic mechanics set and a basic combo kit of power tools from any hardware store will allow you to do 90% of projects around your house, and will take up about as much space as a medium moving box.

I’m in both of these pictures.

Mercifully for us, there's a Menards right outside our subdivision. A perfect location when you're a homeowner.
- Do you save big money?
  
  I do indeed!
- Coming from out west, Menards was absolutely next level for doing house projects.

Isn't it wonderful?
- Let me fix this small issue right quick…oh…oh dear.

That's me, but with my 3d printer.

Ah, that Saturday evening at our old house when we came back from the movies at 23h, brushed our teeth and the the faucet in the master bathroom broke and water kept running. Oh, the great many Sundays we spent at Leroy Merlin and at furniture stores to find a cabinet to put under the new sink after we had to redo the whole plumbing.
And the previous owners of our current house had a thing for shitty electrical wiring. They did a lot of stupid things and we keep fixing their mess as we find them. There’s a special place in hell for those DIYers.

Steve: Esteban was eaten.
Klaus: He was bitten?
Steve: EATEN!
(Zooms in on Steve's crazy-eyes)
Steve: Esteban! Esteban!
(Klaus jumps in to save Steve)

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