77 articles in this category
Tessa
77 articles in this category
The stain showed up on the upstairs hallway ceiling the morning after a March storm, about the size of a coffee saucer and the color of weak tea. Nothing was dripping. It just sat there being brown. The first roofer I called stood in my driveway for four minutes, looked up, and said I needed … Read more
It sounded like a rifle going off in the garage at 6:40 on a Tuesday morning. One flat bang, then nothing. I went out in a robe expecting a collapsed shelf and found the door crooked on its track, my car trapped behind it, and the steel coil above it split in two. The first … Read more
The doorknob went through the hallway wall on a Tuesday, and I want to be honest about what I did next: nothing, for eleven months. I hung a picture over it. Learning how to patch a drywall hole properly took me one afternoon, and I had spent almost a year avoiding a job that was … Read more
The first interior house painting service to quote this house described the entire job in five words: “Paint walls, ceilings and trim.” Five words. For a week of somebody living in my house, moving my furniture, and putting a finish on every wall I look at every day. I got three bids for the downstairs, … Read more
The furnace in this house is a 2009 builder-grade gas unit that lives in the basement behind a stack of storage bins, and for eleven winters I ignored it completely. Then one January morning it ran for about ninety seconds, clicked, and quit. Ran, clicked, quit. Over and over, while the house slid down to … Read more
Last August the same company that sold me a $389 capacitor on a Sunday came back for the follow-up visit, put gauges on my 2011 outdoor unit, and told me the compressor was drawing locked rotor amps. Then came the sentence I had been braced for since the first visit: “At this age, honestly, I’d … Read more
It was a Sunday in July, 97 degrees, and the outside unit was making a low hum like a fridge with an attitude while the fan sat there doing absolutely nothing. I called the emergency line. Ninety minutes later a tech named Dev swapped out a silver cylinder the size of a soda can and … Read more
The pry bar went behind the casing on the second-floor bedroom window and the whole bottom corner came away in my hand like wet cake. I had budgeted a Saturday and one trip to the lumberyard. I got three weekends and a carpenter named Ray who did not laugh at me, which I appreciated. Window … Read more
Year three, north corner of my deck, on my knees with a bucket and a stiff brush. The boards had a green film on them that a hose would not touch. I bought these because the box said no sanding, no staining, no sealing. Nobody printed the word “scrub” anywhere on it. Low maintenance composite … Read more
The first bid I got for the back corner of my lot was $4,900. The second was $2,650. Same 150 feet, same four-foot fence, same lumpy yard. I sat in my kitchen with both sheets side by side for an hour before I found the difference, and it was not the fence at all. It … Read more
My kitchen faucet dripped for a summer. I told myself it was the aerator, because the aerator is the thing you can reach without lying on your back in a cabinet. It was not the aerator. It was a $38 cartridge, and the whole repair took me an hour and ten minutes once I finally … Read more
I bought my outdoor pumpkin decorations on the last Saturday of September two years ago. Six pumpkins, $38, hauled up the steps in two trips. By October 12 the biggest one had folded in on itself on the top step like a punctured basketball, and there was a wet orange ring on the concrete that … Read more
