This summer has been rough.
Never mind the fascism. It’s been personally rough for T and me.
The weekend of July 4th, T and I moved out of our house, a house we’ve lived in for twenty-four years, for what we thought, what we hoped, would be two months. The reasons for this are very bourgeois and not very interesting. (Our house is old, and our insurance company decided, not unreasonably, that if they were to continue insuring us, we had to replace the electrical wiring, getting rid of the original 1920s knob and tube wiring, and replacing it with modern wiring.)
On one level, this was a perfectly reasonable request, or really, requirement. In practice, though, what this meant is that T and I had to hire contractors to run new conduits to every outlet in our house. Privileged, fortunate us, our house is not small. This was no small project.
Add to that, after having lived in our house for twenty-four years, the housing code in our city has changed. And for a variety of reasons, this project necessitated a whole bunch of changes to bring us into compliance with the housing code, the largest of which is that we had to sprinkler the entire residence. Another not particularly small expense. We had to move some walls, remove a kitchen, install new windows. None of these changes, honestly, were changes we would have wished. None will particularly improve the quality of our home. At least, not for us, its current residents.
But in the aggregate, the primary effect of these changes has been a) we’ve had to vacate our house since the weekend of July 4th, and b) We’ve had to sink an amount of money in excess of 150% of the original purchase price of the home into these improvements.
It’s now the end of September.
Yesterday, we moved into our fourth short-term residence since we left the weekend of July 4th – my father’s home. That’s right. I’m not a young man, and I’ve just moved into my dad’s home for the first time since I spent three months there in my early twenties.
It’s still not clear when we’ll return to our home. As I said, this is a bourgeois problem. We’re very privileged, we’re very fortunate.
Also, we’re very dysregulated and tired. And we miss the comforts of home. A. Lot.