house house housey house

We are all moved in! We spent Sunday doing the final packing and deep cleaning, wiping off millimeters of sawdust and decades of grime. The walls are whiter, the cobwebs are gone, and on the inside it's less obvious how much the place has been disdained and neglected. It's still pretty obvious on the outside, since there are cobwebs on everything, but we had to clean the inside before filling it with us and our stuff.

Carlos the handyman wasn't able to come over this week, being at the hospital for some reason, so we wished him well and had an actual plumber come over to look at more plumber-suitable things: re-connecting the stove's gas, installing the dishwasher, looking at the garbage disposal that had worked but now just hummed angrily, fixing the shower which we suddenly discovered this morning wasn't working. While he was here, he discovered that

1. Carlos installed the sink plumbing backwards and upside down, and if we had used it much more, it would have started leaking all over the area where we just had everything replaced because of the decades of the sink leaking.
2. The garbage disposal was humming angrily because it was full of solidified grout, from when Carlos and his guy grouted around the sink.

So if we continue to use Carlos, it will be for things like removing trees, rather than anything super complicated, delicate, or nice-looking.

The plumber apparently didn't charge the full time he was here, perhaps correctly reasoning that a couple who can afford a plumber, who know nothing about plumbing, who live in a house full of substantial projects, will be in need of a plumber for many years to come, and this is a good business relationship to cultivate.

Continuing my strange experience of seeing potential changes that would make the house better, I'm starting to see how we could gut and re-arrange one end of the house at a time. Not sure what to do about the bathrooms, still.

This place is enormous. I grew up in a 2,000 square foot 4-bedroom house (not unusual for suburban Massachusetts), but I've spent the past decade in California-sized houses and apartments. Our palatial 3-bedroom condo apartment that we just left was 1,130 square feet; this house alone is 1,390 square feet, with lots of walls and doorways, plus a garage. If you're looking for someone, they could be anywhere on 5,000 square feet, with lots of places to hide. Finding the kid will be a challenge, if he doesn't want to be found.

It's home, though.