One Year Later

Patrick has been in his house for [long pause to linger in the vastness of time] a decade. For Rob, it's been a shorter, though more adventurous, journey into being in a place where you can take a hammer to the walls and the only person you have to answer to is yourself (and your partner).

The first year of being in a place where you slowly pay back a bank is one of the most eventful, because everything is new and strange. 10 years later...whatever, the way that window doesn't close properly is annoying and a problem but nobody's got time to deal with it.

This week, Rob and Patrick reflect on where they're at when it comes to building their to-do list, as the weather begins to cool off. Actually, it's more than 90 degrees out in Chicago right now? Whatever.

Rob: A few days ago marked exactly one year since MK and I moved into our new house, which still feels new even though the calendar says it's well on its way to just being our house. That milestone produced an immediate sense of urgency when I thought about all the boxes that are still stacked up in closets or things that are still half-unpacked and scattered on shelves. We've lived here for a year, shouldn't we be done moving in?

Some things just disappeared during the move and I'm hoping the last bits of unpacking will uncover them. What became of the PS3? There's a half-dozen Blu-rays that disappeared. A set of tools, a ton of special laundry chemicals for spot-cleaning or delicate fabrics. Stuff that you don't need but you'd like to know where it is. Also the kind of stuff that just gets swept into moving boxes in that final, frantic last-stage of a big move, where categories stop mattering and you just need to start throwing things into the back seat of your car.

We've had to build a lot of new habits in this place, so I'm not surprised some stuff got set-aside. A lot of my time goes into lawncare now. A basic round of cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms and vacuuming and mopping the floors can take a few hours now. Those final bits of unpacking and organizing? It's tough to make space for it, or even know exactly how long it's going to take.

Janet uses a metaphor that I really like when it comes to games, where she describes them as food sitting in a fridge. After a point you start to get a little iffy about it, which makes you less likely to eat it, meaning now it's definitely gone off in there and part of you doesn't even want to touch it. 

I think certain chores can end up in the same space. You left them long enough that you're not even sure what you need to do, so now you just work around them or avoid them. Which is how you end up looking around your house after a year and realizing you're still half-packed!

What's the solution you have in your household to those jobs that don't really fall into any of your routines, aren't urgent, but do need some serious attention at some point?

Patrick: You’d be surprised what you can get used to, if it spends long enough just staying that way, and especially so if it doesn’t have a material impact on your day-to-day other than being an eyesore. Plus, if the people who are largely experiencing this eyesore are you and your family, who’s really to complain?

Right now, for example, I can hear the toilet around the corner from my office running. It’s done that off and on over the years, and it’s usually because the flapper (the rubber seal at the bottom) is out of place. But I’ve tried fudging it around a few times now…and I can still hear the water running. In fact, I’ve managed to get used to hearing the water running. Who says the water is running, Rob? I can’t hear it? Can you really say it’s worse than the hum of the cicadas that have haunted this area for months now?

Except that I started writing this response, sighed deeply, and realized I was punting on a problem. So I added a toilet flapper to a Home Depot pick-up that I was already going to do and will fix that later today.

This is also how I end up with a number of boxes in my office that would be trivial to clean up and organize, but instead, they stay there because no one is tripping over them, no one is asking why they aren’t in the recycling, and when I come into my office in the morning, it’s the last thing I want to deal with. By the time the day is over, I’m thinking about what activities the kids have, what dinner I’m making, and leaving those boxes for Tomorrow Patrick to think about, knowing full well Tomorrow Patrick won’t care.

I think I’ve talked about this method before, but I have a perpetual note in my phone called House Issues. 

Key to fixing problems, imo, is being reminded of them and building out a hierarchy to address them. Or else, like you mentioned, it just becomes something that’s shoved into the back of the fridge. I’ll spend a month or so jotting down “oh, that bugs me” and taking notes and photos. Then, at the end of the month, I break them down into different priority lists. Is this an issue that could get worse if it’s not attended to? Can I safely ignore this because it’s merely annoying? And then, when I have a day off—like, say, the one I’m going to have this week—I’ll start making calls, sending emails, and ordering parts to work down the list.

What I find is that it’s really hard to address much of this stuff in the rhythm of a normal day. I rarely have hours that are unaccounted for. There is no free time after work, either, between dinner, kid activities, carving out an hour to spend with my wife, and then playing video games before sleep takes me away.

Once we finish recording Remap Radio on Wednesday, my plan is to walk around the house and really flesh out the House Issues note. I already booked a contractor to fix a spot on the side of the house where some squirrels have been nibbling away. Will I book someone to clean up the drooping tree in the front of the house? Will I make an appointment with a different contractor to see if we can build steps in front of the house on top of the existing cement, rather than breaking down the cement and pouring new ones?

Exciting times ahead, bud.

Rob: Right now, MK is crawling around behind our entertainment console trying to troubleshoot a problem that jumped to the front of the line: a buzzing sound coming from our speakers. Poor Brad and Alex over at Nextlander asked me about it on the Ramblecast and I basically held them hostage as I talked through the series of questionable decisions that led me to this but here's the short version.