Taking Care of your Home
Last year I lived in an apartment with my roommate from freshman
year. The apartment was small and we didn’t really have many problems
and when we did, our landlord worked around the corner so it was easy to
get a hold of him right away. This year though I moved into a bigger
house and our landlord lives and works about an hour and a half away
from us. He usually stops by every month to make sure things are working
okay and that the maintenance man has cut the grass, but other than that
we are pretty much on our own.
Since none of us had really ever dealt
with taking care of a home before we had a few surprises the first few
weeks. Embarrassingly enough none of us thought to find out what day was
garbage day and so it took us a while (and a lot of garbage cans) to
finally figure it out.
A few weeks later it rained terribly (like
usual in Muncie, Indiana) and our basement flooded. Let me tell you one
thing that I have learned; water
restoration is terrible. We had to clean out everything from
the basement and then people had to come in, suck out the water, clean
and sterilize everything and then someone else had to come in and seal
the concrete and redo parts by the sum pump. I never want to have to
deal with that again. Even though we got the basement cleaned out and
finished, it took about two weeks to do and our stuff is completely
ruined. We took a chair that we had been storing down here to a
restoration store but they said there was way too much water damage
since we didn’t realize right away (we only use the basement for laundry
and we hadn’t been at school very long so we didn’t notice for a couple
of days).
Finally our toilet stopped working last week and it was
midnight when it happened and we couldn’t call a plumber until the
morning so I called my grandpa and he helped us out and told us what to
do (thank God for grandparents right? Ha). I guess overall, even though
we have been through a lot and at the time it seems like such a hassle,
we are learning a lot for the future. When my grandpa was on the phone
with me he quoted “give a man to fish we will eat for a day, teach a man
to fish and he will eat for a lifetime” I really do think that that
applies for me, but in this case I will be able to unclog toilets for
the rest of my life.