This Old House

One thing I'll never tire of is telling people that for most of the 2010s, I didn't pay rent. Not a cent. I mean, I paid someone to live someplace, but my employer paid me more to live there, so I usually came out ahead in the deal.
It was incredible.
Sure, I was living in a petrostate theocracy under the rule of an absolute monarch who practiced benevolent dictatorship for some and just dictatorship for others, but the rent was free. And so was the plumbing. And the electrical. And the pest control. Apartment living in a fully furnished, serviced apartment was honestly maybe the apex living condition of my life. There I was, on the 33rd floor, overlooking the Persian Gulf (shout out to Kharg Island and the Strait of Hormuz) and having someone come in and spray my apartment for bugs monthly, unclog my toilets on the ready, and change lightbulbs as necessary.

Dream state, honestly.

Compare that to my home in South Minneapolis.
We've hired people to repair all these things because I'm wordy, not handy. The anxiety I'd need to have treated in therapy, caused by thinking about DIY projects, is not covered by my personal billable hours metric. Paying someone, whatever it costs, tends to always be a better option for my mental health.

Some of the people we've hired have been good, some of them did good work but were bad. Some of them were bad.

All of this is a preamble to our current scenario: ants. Carpenter ants.

Growing up, I spent a lot of my summers at a cabin (called a cottage) on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan. The house was half in the woods and half on the beach -- a perfect combination for humidity, elements, and bugs. This was when I was introduced to carpenter ants. They're called that, I assume, because they, like carpenters, love wood. I think these ants like rotting wood, which I bet carpenters do not like, but the naming stopped at the link to wood and not the quality of it, I reckon.

I think in the '90s, the only way to treat carpenter ant infestations was to vacate the premises and do what I assume is that thing where you see a tent put around a house and they just pump lots of poison into it in hopes of eradicating the nest, which undoubtedly is in the walls or joists somewhere unseen.

It doesn't seem like they do that as much anymore, at least not for ants.

I've seen six ants in about seven days.

The first one I saw downstairs in the kitchen. A big one, and I stomped on it, not thinking much of it. Damn, must've ridden in on a shoe or something.

Then a few days later, one crawling on the upstairs bedspread. Huh, weird place for you. How'd you get here? SPLAT.

Then, Leen reported she saw one, also upstairs, near her makeup table, and me, this morning, at the foot of my desk.

I am now convinced the ants will gnaw their way into destroying my foundation or roof or who knows what. Then the value of my home will plummet. Then as a means to salvage the loss I'll be forced to take the whole family back to the Middle East. There, I'll seek to re-apex my living situation in a high-rise, serviced by pest control and other tradespeople around the clock.

I hope it will not come to that.
I've signed a 12-month contract with a pest control company to "treat" the potential infestation. I don't know if exterminators recently discovered the monthly membership business model akin to how Costco makes their money, but this one seems like a racket.

Hopefully it works.

We had a mouse problem. We called Orkin. Their traps caught zero mice. I got a cat. She caught zero mice. I bought three electrified mouse traps and I think I took care of the problem on my own.

Ant traps, I've heard, might work, but with the carpet boys, getting them to traipse this poison back to the nest seems an uphill battle. I'm going to do it, don't get me wrong. I'd rather overpay for "wasp protection" as the salesman promised if it means I don't see big black ants making their way around my living space. Again, this is one of those situations where you pay for peace of mind.

Four areas of concern

We were fortunate to buy a home in August of 2020, a few months after we left Qatar. I'd argue the house was turnkey, and it definitely had some curb appeal that lured us in faster than other homes we toured.

This one had a cute fenced-in backyard, a finished basement with a bathroom, and an en suite master bathroom (sans bath, but beggars can't be choosers, ya know?). And in the five-plus years we've lived here, each one of those features has come back to bite us in the butt.

Fenced-in backyard? Well, the bozos who put the fence in didn't anchor the poles to anything, and they rotted away, started tipping, and eventually came down. They also built the fence on the property line and through a stump that eventually rotted out from ash borers, and that section of the fence had to be repaired.

Finished basement? All well and good until the downspout they buried under the paver patio disconnected at the base and water got into basement , costing Leen a wedding dress and us a headache of reflooring the area.

And the upstairs bathroom? Well, I don't know why, but they didn't put in a bathroom fan upstairs. Sure, they didn't even put in a door, so the bathroom is creatively separate from the bedroom, but the steam has to go somewhere from the showers, and so, up it goes. Last year on Super Bowl Sunday, we returned home from a party to find a bubble in the ceiling. A few weeks later, a contractor cut a hole in the ceiling to find that our insulation had slipped out of place and the condensation from the shower was vacating through that panel, freezing in the attic and dripping back into the upstairs bedroom. Cool.

We honestly proactively put a new roof on because we'd seen some slipped shingles and I didn't want to come home to water damage, only to put on a new roof and end up with water damage anyway. Will be par for the course, or something worse, if that water damage in the roofline is now also the area our carpenter ants have claimed as their new home. Again, the people who put in the bathroom but not the bathroom fan could end up being to blame, arguably, for the water damage and the ants. What's the statute of limitations on suing someone for idiocy? I probably don't have a case. I will not be the first to be duped by a DIYer who did 90% of a good job on "fixing" something in a house only to pass the buck onto some other unsuspecting schmuck, and I won't be the last.

In spite of it all — the fence, the flooding , the ceiling bubble, the ants — we're probably not going anywhere.

We like our house. We like this place. Even after the year we've had, one of the hardest parts to any “should we leave discussion” was always “but what about our house?” That should tell you something about what our home means to us.

The boys have a yard even if it’s full of Creeping Charlie. We have a functional garage even if it means perfect parking to get two cars in. We're ten minutes from three parks, even if it means none are closer and five minutes from school by car even if that means we’re just outside of walking comfortably.

There’s a pond nearby, and Pokemon gyms aplenty, and empty parking lots where two boys can scoot around like they own the place.

We like our neighbors — even the new ones from Arizona.

We love Minneapolis. We adore our home.

I just wish, sometimes, that someone else was in charge of the upkeep.