Cha-Ching

Home ownership. Totally sucks. The American dream. You know which dream I am referring to. The one where everyone should own a home. We thought when we got married, that it was the right thing to do. We purchased our first home, moved in and Matthew was born. It was our condo on Hope Street. Not bad. We moved in, we got a new roof. We didn't have to shell out any cash for it. Hey, that was pretty cool. Living in a condo, all the exterior maintenance, landscaping, snow shoveling, taken care by the association. Wow. I loved the American dream.

Then we decided, "Hey, Matthew needs a yard." So, we sold the condo, purchased a free standing home. With that comes, the major responsibilities... such as, snow plowing, landscaping, exterior and interior maintenance. So, we were in the American dream for about 2.5 years and then we rented out our home. We moved to China, didn't have to worry about "maintenance", since we had landlords in China and we were OK. Come back to the US and we had a few projects to do. We undertook expanding the deck, changing the garage doors, a siding project and a major rock removal.

That seemed to snowball into the roof project, complete with new skylights (five to be exact) and a new water system. We just waved goodbye to the roofing crew that were crawling all over the rooftop of my house all week, like goats. They would arrive, pull things off, throw things over the side of the house, and put up all new roofing shingles. Watching them maneuver like little monkeys on the roof was pretty fascinating. While that was going on, we had to replace the water system for the house. We had two contractors hanging out at the house, simultaneously.

I don't want to think about the large sizable checks that I wrote out to the contractors. In addition, we had to put all new plantings for the front lawn and, did I mention that a tree fell the other day? The tree just decided to give and crack and is now laying in the side yard. Can't resuscitate it at all, so that means, I have to call the tree company and have them come and remove it. Can you hear the cha-ching? Like I said, home ownership sucks.