was afraid to breathe on, a stainless steel Viking hood and range I knew I was too broke to even glance at, and bottles of expensive sparkling water in the refrigerator at all times because these fancy motherfuckers couldn’t even hydrate regular.
if I want a new banister, do I just google “new banister person”
why does the dishwasher sound like that
which neighbor is responsible for the fence neither side asked to be installed
I would love to install a dimmer switch but I also love not being electrocuted
what is a property tax
a lawnmower costs HOW MUCH
how did the neighbor decide exactly on which invisible line between our homes his snow blower was going to stop? Like, would it kill him to help me out with a few inches of clear sidewalk
the faucet can just drip forever, right
wait, what is this sticky…? Never mind
should I set traps for these mice or just burn the fucking house down
I have lived with exactly ONE handy person. And I don’t mean handy by trade. I mean my old roommate, a regular woman with a job at a bank who knew how to use a stud finder and also how to put up shelves. It’s pretty amazing to be around the kind of person who envisions a thing they want, and then goes to Menards and figures out how to make it real. I’m the type of person who thinks, “Wow, that table would be gorgeous in a deep teal,” and then walks past it every single day for the rest of my life without once considering going to the hardware store and getting sandpaper and a drop cloth. I would love to replace my kitchen cabinets, but how am I supposed to get the old ones down? And, even if I developed some herculean old-man strength and ripped them clean off the wall, what am I supposed to do with them? How do you throw cabinets away? Who do you get to put up the new ones?!
My roommate taught me things I still might not know about if she hadn’t been there to drag me kicking and screaming into rote domesticity:
what air plants are
that teriyaki chicken wings at the hot bar in Whole Foods are incredible
that it’s good to leave boxes of Kleenex out
that switching out the knobs on an IKEA dresser from the bumped-and-bruised section for prettier ones is a real thing
that you can place a rectangular piece of finished wood on top of your radiator to make it a shelf
that vacuum cleaners have bags that you have to throw away
that I needed to learn to use a goddamn hex key
that you should occasionally run some white vinegar through a hot cycle in a top-loading washing machine
that it’s legal to put up a new toilet paper holder in a rented apartment
In my twenties I would dog-sit a lot, because living with roommates is emotionally exhausting when you’re the kind of person who never stops worrying that someone might be mad at you for a thing you hadn’t even realized you’d done. Plus my job at the animal hospital meant I had unfettered access to the kind of people who lived in mansions and didn’t even blink at paying seventy-five dollars a night for me to eat their cheese and introduce their dogs to Law & Order reruns, especially because those people believed that my proximity to veterinarians made me some kind of pet expert. At the very least, they could sleep tight in Tuscany knowing that I wasn’t going to spoon-feed onions and raisins to their borzois. The best part of that job, other than knowing that finally no one was around to judge my consumption of peanut butter straight from the jar, was getting to live in the kind of house I’d otherwise never have access to.
I had never had an alarm system (I