— If you stare too long at a 100-year-old galvanized steel water pipe in your basement – one that runs 200 feet to your well and that would be very expensive to replace – it will begin to leak. No physical contact is required. Just a steady, nervous, leak-producing gaze.
— Floors and doorways and stairs that are crooked do not, every spring, suddenly de-crookify themselves with the arrival of the same warming sun that releases, into many rooms of your crooked old house, dark clouds of ladybugs and houseflies.
— Perfectly reasonable girlfriends will cheerfully suggest that you tear down your beloved, problem-filled old house and build a new one, presumably funded by some soon-to-arrive lottery winnings. This produces … tension.
— Owners of old houses spend sleepless nights pondering this series of questions: “Which is healthier? Living in a 100-year-old house built with materials and chemicals and lead paint used in the 1920s? Or living in a new house built with modern materials and petroleum-based plastics and newfangled chemicals and drywall sourced from unregulated Chinese factories?”
—Despite intense mental effort, it’s not possible to transform the rhythmic nighttime sound of mice running and scratching inside your walls into a benign, almost quaint, ready-for-Netflix story about a family of cartoon mice – smart and civilized and religiously using the tiny toilets they’ve built inside your walls, as opposed to, um, not using tiny toilets – who are rehearsing their blockbuster Irish clogging extravaganza, “Mice: Tiny Lords of the Dance.”
— Touching anything in an old house – radiator valves, wiring, plumbing fixtures, windows, certain walls – brings with it the possibility that said thing will instantly dissolve into dust. Visually, this resembles what happened to 50 percent of people at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War.” Oh, wait. Was I supposed to put “spoiler alert” earlier in this paragraph? Sorry! But don’t worry, it’s cool: Everyone comes back to life in “Avengers: Endgame” so it’s all good! Oh, wait. Darn it.
— Perfectly reasonable girlfriends grow weary of hearing your hours-long, non-riveting tales of things fixed and DIY projects completed. As a general rule, they are less interested in the history and mechanics of World War II-era water-pressure tanks and ways to address insufficient attic ventilation than in you offering to make dinner after her long, exhausting day. Strange, but true.
— When anyone praises the “quirky charm” of your old house, you feel good about your living situation for several seconds. But that momentary feeling is no match for the constant fear that, whenever you flip any light switch in the house, some antique wiring made from horsehair and molasses (that you failed to locate and replace) will burst into flames, taking the house – and quite possibly you, your pets, and everything you treasure – with it.
— When budgeting for home improvements, multiply any contractor quote by ten to accommodate the inevitable “discovery” of “rot.” To wit:
ME: Wait, what? You need an extra [RIDICULOUSLY LARGE SUM OF MONEY]? Why?
CONTRACTOR: Yeah, see, once we started opening things up we were surprised to find some rot. And if you know anything about rot, once you find some rot in an old house there is always going to be more rot. And there was definitely more rot. I have never seen so much rot! And you can’t just ignore rot. Oh, no, rot must be addressed quickly – especially if it’s discovered near the end of the month when my alimony and credit-card payments are due. See, unaddressed rot begets more rot, which begets more rot, in an endless, Biblical-sounding feedback loop that concludes with your house collapsing into a 150-foot sinkhole. Which is exactly what happened to a house owned by Noah’s son Shem, as described in Genesis chapters five through nine. A lot of that rot was caused by that big flood, obviously.
ME: Sorry, but [RIDCULOUSLY LARGE SUM OF MONEY] seems excessive.
CONTRACTOR: Well, as we contractors like to say, “Rot means a lot, ha ha ha!” Once we got past the fourth level of rot, and my triplets’ spring semester tuition bill arrived, we found a wormhole to your houses in other dimensions. We’ll need to address the rot in all your houses across the multiverse to solve the problem. Rot is powerful; it can traverse the space-time continuum in ways even Einstein could not fully explain.
— Old-house owners spend thousands of hours watching online videos of other old-house owners resolving an infinite number of old-house problems. These videos vary in quality, production values, and the accuracy or usefulness of information provided. In my experience, at least 97 percent of online-video advice will nullify your homeowner’s insurance and put your life at risk, e.g., let’s all agree that there are some things duct tape just can’t fix, friends.
— The best way to permanently eliminate crooked floors and doorways and stairs in an old house is simply to live there for an exceptionally long time. Why? Because as decades pass, and you get older and increasingly crooked yourself, a beautiful, zero-sum, perfect alignment of house-human crookedness naturally occurs, and everything will appear to be level and square. This assumes, of course, that rot and horsehair-molasses wiring and 1920s chemicals and the unhealthy toileting habits of step-dancing mice don’t get you first.
