Frumpy Mom: How to have a roof over your head

Every time it rains, I look with satisfaction at my roof and nod, secure in the knowledge that at least once in my life, I acted like a grownup.

Years ago, my mom passed away and left me a very small inheritance. (She left most of her money to my sister-in-law, but we won’t even go there.)

Since you people know me, guess what I wanted to do with that money? Travel, of course. But the roof on my house was leaking. I knew this because the plaster was starting to come away from the ceiling above my laundry area and somehow I surmised this was not good.

This quandary caused me great emotional distress because if I used the money to travel, I knew I’d regret it later. So, with tears in my eyes and a churning stomach, I called Cheetah Boy’s former soccer coach, who’s a roofer. He had actually helped me out for free in the past, by slapping temporary patches on the aforementioned roof.

I was lucky to even get him on the phone because roofers become as popular as Taylor Swift during a season of rainstorms when everyone becomes tired of putting cooking pots on the floor in the kitchen.

This is one of the pitfalls of home ownership, i.e. the need to be sensible and grown up when dealing with home repairs. All you really want to do is throw the hammer across the room, say, “Bleep (not the real word) this!” and then grab an adult beverage and watch “Naked and Afraid.”

I learned what my relationship would be with home repairs when I bought my first house, which was a 100-year-old shingle bungalow built from a kit. As you might imagine, it needed a lot of work.

The first thing I did after escrow closed was go to the home improvement store and buy some mini-blinds and a drill. How hard could installing blinds be? I asked myself, excited to begin what I foolishly believed would be a lifetime of do-it-yourself projects.

Um, no. Several hours after carefully reading the directions and attempting fruitlessly to install at least one set of blinds correctly, I threw the drill into the backyard and proceeded to the adult-beverage-and-TV portion of the evening.

The next day, I called a handyman, who spent 14 minutes doing what I wasn’t able to do in five hours. At that point, I realized my dream of becoming a handy homeowner was never going to come true, so I could stop watching all those home remodeling shows.

(These days, I repair my house using my phone and my checkbook. It works great and I don’t even need any adult beverages afterward.)

There was certainly no possibility that I was going to climb up on my roof, considering I’m the klutziest person alive. But I was happy to see other people – in fact a whole gang of guys – show up and begin tearing off the old roof. It occurred to me that might be very satisfying work, but I had no desire to find out for myself.

Like everything else in this house, the previous roofing had been done the lazy way, and they’d slapped down three, count ’em, three layers of plywood before putting on the new tiles. Naturally, this cost me more, since there was more cruddy stuff to be ripped off.

But they got it done and put down a nice new roof, finishing just before the next rainstorm. It cost basically all the money I inherited from my mom, though I might have had enough left over to get a room at the Motel 6 in Barstow.

Except then the roofer asked me, “Do you want us to add gutters?” Ugh. Seriously? All that money and it didn’t even include the gutters? So much for that motel room in Barstow.

Emptying my bank account without buying a single thing that was fun actually caused me physical pain. I had to go to bed for a couple of days, curled up in a fetal position.

But after I got over the pain, I began to experience the joy of watching it pour rain on my house, knowing that nothing would be leaking. Sometimes I’d go stand in my front yard in the rain, just to watch the water pour out of the gutters.

Even though it’s been years, I still get deep satisfaction from watching it rain and knowing that I acted like a grown-up, for once.

It may not ever happen again, but you never know. It just might.

Want to write to me and tell me what I’m doing wrong? (Why not? Everyone else does.) Email me at mfisher@scng.com

Or check out my Facebook page at facebook.com/FrumpyMiddleagedMom

Source: Orange County Register