The Myth Of Fixing Stuff

March Men's Room

I was recently confronted with a depressing milestone of middle age. It wasn’t a gray hair or an expanding mid-section (although I have both), but something far more disheartening: a technician’s call to inform me that my struggling HVAC unit would soon have to be replaced.

“But I put that in new,” I protested.

“When?” he asked.

 I did some quick math.

“Only sixteen years ago,” I replied, choking on “only.”

“Well, fifteen to twenty is how long they last these days,” he said matter-of-factly.

This will sound awfully naive, but when I bought the house, it never occurred to me that the improvements I made would one day wear out.

Back then, I was a proud first-time homeowner feeling like a real grown-up as I watched a crew install the new HVAC unit. Fixing up a historic bungalow felt like a significant step up the hill toward adulthood.

This was when the housing bubble was still inflating, and everyone was gung-ho about real estate. At dinner parties, friends and I talked incessantly about houses we’d closed on or coveted. We’d lean close, sharing sotto voce guesstimates of our growing equity and sharing grand plans for bathroom updates or renovated kitchens with granite countertops.

We entered into home ownership with the same naive optimism that young people enter marriage. We ignored all the warnings, minimized the challenges, and were confident the standard rules didn’t apply to us.

Weekends were soon devoted to scraping, caulking, and painting, and as we paid for new roofs and replaced hot water heaters, home ownership lost its novelty. But we soldiered forth toward the big payoff at the end. We were building something. Equity, sure. But something even more concrete. Something solid. Something permanent.

Eventually, however, walls we’d painted needed repainting. Blinds and ceiling fans we’d installed had to be replaced. Nothing big at first but harbingers of what was to come. At a recent dinner party, an old friend spoke for us all as she wondered aloud if it might have been better to rent all along.

Since the call from the HVAC guy, it’s hard not to feel that homeownership is a Sisyphean task. It’s no fun watching those boulders we’ve labored so long over just roll back down the hill.

I no longer dream of granite countertops. These days, I just hope to get through a month without the dishwasher crapping out or having to call a plumber to snake out the sewer pipes.

What’s the point in home improvements? You can try to change the world, but things will just go back to how they were before. Is that fatalistic? Some may think me jaded, but I like to think I’ve learned to appreciate things as they are.

These days, my living room wall, patched and spackled eight months ago by a handyman, still needs to be painted. I’m in no rush. I’ve grown to appreciate its rough-hewn charm.

Dylan Patterson is a writer and filmmaker who teaches English at Cape Fear Community College.

To view more of illustrator Mark Weber's work, go to www.markweberart.blogspot.com.