I never wanted to live in a house. I was happy living in a condo where I barely had to worry about anything. Sure, there was no backyard and limited floor space, but there was no shovelling, no dragging bins to the sidewalk, and most of all — no major repairs.

Our current house has, until now, not been too bad. But the longer we’re here, the more we realize that the previous owner seems to have done a bunch of work on the house himself, because a lot of stuff just…doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.

A couple months ago, everything just seemed to go wrong at once:

• Our kitchen sink began backing up. We called a plumber. He snaked it and fixed the cheater, which had been installed below the sink water level.
• Unrelated to the kitchen sink, water started dripping through the basement ceiling. That seemed to be related to a shower hair clog, as best I can tell.
• When I turned on the water supply to the backyard, I noticed a leak in the water line. I noticed it because it sprayed me in the face. The plumber fixed that too.
• Also while “opening up” the backyard for the spring, I realized there was no gas getting to our grill. When I had the deck cleaned last year the cleaners must have unhooked the grill, and not hooked it back up properly, and now it’s jammed so hard into the side of the wall (another gift left behind by the previous owner) that I have yet to be able to re-attach it.
• The basement toilet suddenly isn’t flushing properly. Or, rather, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.
• I had a roofer in to repair the disintegrating roof over the vestibule of the house. He checked the main roof and said there was a big problem with the fascia, even though the last guys to go up there said the roof was fine.
• Our old patio furniture, for which we overpaid when we moved in, has basically started disintegrating, so we had to buy new stuff. We ordered it months ago; it arrived at the house in the middle of all this, and now I need to figure out a way to truck away the old stuff. At least the new stuff is really nice, weather resistant, and easy to clean.
• The neighbourhood raccoons have redoubled their efforts to turn our rainwater catch basin into their local latrine.
• Worst of all, maybe, is the fridge. It started acting up months ago — first the water line and ice cube maker conked out, so I called a repair company. They showed up, said they just needed to order a part and it’d be fine. Four months later and many phone calls on my part, they’ve never called me back, nor shown up with the part, nor refunded my money. Slowly, the fridge died completely, and became a big hot power-sucking box in the kitchen. We ordered a new one, an updated version of the same model, and they showed up, only to inform us that there was no way to get the old fridge out of the house. As far as they can tell, the last guy brought the fridge in and built the kitchen around it. They kindly took the fridge back, charging me only a restocking fee, but we were left with no fridge and no path forward. This one is still very much ongoing; in the meantime we’re living out of a cheap dorm fridge. It’s fucking ridiculous.

Sure, the fridge thing could have happened in a condo too, but the rest of it is house bullshit. I’m not handy enough to fix it myself, and I have too much on the go to project-manage it all. Surely there’s a service for this?

Did I say “joys”? I meant “suck”.