The House that Jack Built

Didn’t there used to be a children's song about the House that Jack Built?

I thought that it would be a good metaphor for our house.  I thought the song was about a house where everything kept breaking down and falling apart and generally being painful and expensive to live in.

When I googled it, though, it turns out to be about a rat eating grain, a cat killing the rat, a dog killing the cat, and on and on until some miserable moo gets married to a raggedy man and the vicar is woken by a rooster.  Don’t ask me.

Not a good metaphor for our house after all.  Except for the part about the miserable moo marrying the raggedy man I suppose.  No matter.  The point I’m trying to make will become clear, I’m sure.

The moral of the story may as well come at the start as at the end, and it is this:

Never ever buy a house because you like the fact that the whole estate is painted sunshine yellow and looks like something out of Toytown.  Or because you’re just dying to live in the country, and at least you can afford this one – maybe.

Our house was brand new, and had never been lived in.  It was bought from the plans by an investor and sold on to us a few months later for about fifty thousand more than he’d paid for it, with absolutely nothing done to it in the meantime.

We’re such a pair of complete morons that we relied on this investor’s snag list and assumed there was no need for an engineer’s report.

And now, seven years later, our house is making my teeth hurt.

First of all it was the water, which was so hard that it ruined the electric shower, the washing machine and the fecking taps. 
The lime rotted the washers, and swiftly got to work on the brass parts inside. 
We’re on our third kitchen tap now.  Despite the fact that we spent quite a few hundred euro on a water softening yoke some time ago.

And the tap in the bathroom under the stairs is on at full flow at all times.  The efforts His Nibs and I made to cut off the water supply to it failed so utterly that we’re lucky to still be married and not living underwater, never mind to have fixed it as well.

The fridge freezer keeled over a few months ago.  The new one wasn’t delivered for two full pigging weeks, so that I had to keep the milk and wine in an ice bucket.  By ice bucket, obviously I mean the mop bucket, with bags of ice from Centra being thrown in at regular intervals.

Then, as my kind regular readers will know, the heating collapsed, just before Christmas.

Now it’s the washing machine.  It has taken a turn against us, and while it’s willing to wash the clothes, it is completely unwilling to drain at the end of the cycle, or to spin.

Last weekend the pair of us stood together, in front of the bathroom sink with the running tap, squeezing the water out of clothes that had just come out of the washing machine.

When we went to get the clothes out today (yes, we continued using it - I'm not going back to my days using a launderette), they were still sitting in a puddle of water.  So I set the machine to Drain, and waited patiently for it to do what it was originally asked to do.  It took off washing the clothes all over again.

I waited another hour and a half for that to complete, and then set it to spin.  It just took off washing for the third time.

Annoyed beyond reason, I dragged out the dripping clothes and put them in a wickery type laundry basket.  The water started running out of the bottom of the basket and across the kitchen floor.

It’s a good thing I have friends.  I had to put the dripping heavy clothes into a black plastic bag, and put them in the car.  His Nibs’ car, obviously, not mine.  I’m not a complete eejit.  I don’t believe a plastic bag is waterproof.  And with the amount of dust and dirt in my car, if there was any kind of escape of water I’d end up with a mud slick on the back seat.

Then I had to put a bag of dirty clothes on the passenger seat, go to my friends house, and put on my begging face so that she’d let me in and let me take full advantage of her hospitality, and her white goods.

She was very kind, and let me do my worst.  She did, however, suggest that if what I was trying to stuff into her washing machine counts as one load in our house, maybe that was the problem with our own machine.

The electric shower is acting the mick as well.  It’s now a matter of dancing around the shower cubicle, either burning or frozen as the shower springs its constant surprises.  And His Nibs, by his own admission, broke the holder for the shower head last week, so now a shower entails dancing around with the deadly shower head in your hand.

I wonder why it is that when we lived in little one bedroom rented apartments, I dreamt of living in a house, with a spare room, and a garden, and where we’d never get a letter saying that although we were completely up to date on our monthly payments, that we had to move out anyway, because they wanted to sell the flat or whatever.  And I wanted a dog.

Until we bought this house I knew absolutely nothing of how to buy a fridge.  Cubic capacity and energy ratings and frost free abilities were completely beyond me.  These days, I find myself calling plumbers and electricians and handymen more often than my own family. 

When I was much younger I thought that it would be lovely to buy an old house, that needed some work but would be full of character and personality.  But I thought better of it, on the basis that it would cost so much money to get it re-wired and re-roofed and re-plumbed that it wouldn’t be worth it.  So we bought a new house, and ended up never being finished fixing something in it anyway. 

Maybe my mother was right yet again.  Be careful what you wish for.