I’m in First World Hell

Dust off your tiny violins for my woes

Oh, Medium. I miss you.

I haven’t written much since I moved last month into my new, post-divorce home. This house is a fucking hot mess.

Let me add the disclaimer that I’m very hashtag-blessed that I could afford a detached home in Southern California. I’m not in the ghetto (well…I’m ghetto-adjacent). There are homeless people or families all crammed on a mattress in the slums.

But like for real…my living situation right now sucks balls. I straight-up hate the previous owners of this house. It’s like they went out of their way to make things as shitty as possible.

The door from the garage to the backyard is an interior door. It’s 2 inches too small all around (that’s what she said) the door frame. In the absence of cash to get a proper door installed, I have adhesive floor sweeps around the gaps and foam insulation to shield from bugs and dirt.

The previous owner, Mark, stained the kitchen cabinets. Which would have been great if he had considered wiping the dirt and hair off the cabinets before painting them. When I bought the home I budgeted to reface them; after assessing their grossness, I opted to nuke. The worst part? Homeboy paid to have the counters replaced…that’s like putting diamonds on a Mazda 323.

Mark decided to paint the entire house with flat matte paint. I’ve already scuffed it in dozens of spots and am unable to wipe it clean, even with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (a new homeowner’s best friend). Like bro, you paid a fortune for this house to be professionally painted and you used fucking flat paint that sucks the moisture out of my hands when I touch the walls? It’s like a chalkboard covered in dust.

Speaking of dust, Mark did splurge on some sweet-looking engineered hardwood flooring. Except he skipped the bathrooms and kept his urine-yellow travertine tile. He also kept them in the kitchen. But…the downstairs bathroom is off the kitchen…he didn’t just keep the urine-colored travertine in there. Oh no, my good friend Mark used two different colors of tile that don’t even match to compensate for a weird sink he placed in there.

I have to give him props. Mark found a way to make every doorknob in this house be mismatched. Even better, the bathroom doors lock with a key. Because everyone keeps a key upstairs to lock their bathrooms. Except in his brilliance, he put the locks the wrong way. So someone on the outside can lock someone in the bathroom and if that poor soul doesn’t have a key in the bathroom, they’re trapped.

There are only two ceiling lights. The dining room chandelier is so ugly that as soon as my kids walked in, they yelled “so when is that getting replaced?”. It’s on a dimmer switch that is a yellow dial. The other switches in the house are yellow and dingy, using technology that was probably top-of-the-line in the 80s.

I’m in the middle of installing can lights in the rooms because these rooms have high ceilings and having 3 lamps per room to create a horror movie shadow show wasn’t cutting it. My bedroom ceilings are quite high and I need my bedroom to be blindingly bright like I’m walking into the gates of Heaven. It seems halfway along my ceiling there’s no access, so I can’t put can lights in and have to do some track light situation along the middle beam. Meh. This is throwing off my aesthetics game but I need effing light.

Speaking of electrical, the lighting guy pointed out that it’s a shock my house hasn’t caught on fire for the way the wiring was done in my bathroom. So that’s…good?

As my kitchen is gutted, the contractor noted that the electrical in there wasn’t up to code. “Well, the home was built in the eighties,” I tell him. “Uh no, this wasn’t code even for back then,” he replies. To save money and not run electrical wires through my house for dedicated circuits to the electric panel box, there is now another electric panel box on the other side of my house behind the kitchen. Ghetto? Yes. More affordable? Also, yes. At least my janky contribution brings the home to acceptable safety standards.

Most of the outlets are so old, I can’t plug anything in without the cord flopping out of the socket. Not ideal where’s no fucking ceiling lights and all I’ve got are floor lamps.

Mark cut the cable cord when putting in the flooring to make the house look nicer. Of course, that asshole sold this house without internet wiring. I paid my internet provider $100 to have someone set up a new wire (which should have been free since I’m more than capable of setting up a fucking modem) and even worse, the spot that Mark had originally chosen isn’t near an outlet. I can’t blame the original owner; the internet wasn’t a thing back then.

When I had my bedroom TV mounted, both installers were in shock at how dumb it was to have the cable coming out of the wall at the furthest spot from electrical outlets. I had to run a 12-foot extension cord to power the TV because I’m too broke from fixing everything else to afford a new outlet.

Around the house, Mark put blank wall plates to cover whatever monstrosity is behind the wall. However, he didn’t put solid plates. He reused switch plates. Meaning, I have random light switch plates throughout my house with rectangular holes in the middle. That’s like hanging up artwork to cover a hole in your wall and then piercing a hole through the glass. Like bro, don’t be a cheap asshole. Splurge on 98 cents to get a proper wall plate.

The fireplace had two random columns of decorative bricks up to the ceiling which prevented anything from being hung above the fireplace.

Mark painted the fireplace. He chose to paint it fireplace brick red. That’s like painting your tires black. I hate the guy. I really do.

When I moved in, I cursed my neighbors for having an entire wall of endless ivy growing over my fence and into my yard. Until they brought it to my attention that I’m the jackass growing the ivy. My neighbor offered to rip it out on my behalf; he must have hated Mark too given how the vein in his head almost burst.

After the kitchen remodel is done, I’ll change out the lights in the kitchenette area. That’s because homeboy installed a fucking ceiling fan. Do you know what I love when I’ve cooked a nice, hot meal? To have a fan directly over my head pointing down onto my dining table to cool my food. Especially when the fan light looks like it came from an 1850 western saloon.

Perhaps the best gem is the glass blocks Mark installed on his bedroom wall. They aren’t stylized in a way that replaces the wall. It’s like he didn’t want artwork and decided warped glass embedded in the wall looked cool. Except the glass is on a wall that leads to the bathroom. It cuts into the shower tile. Is there ambient lighting from the bedroom that needs to pour into the bathroom? Given that the latter has its own window, I don’t think so.

So now when I go to bed, I stare at blocks of glass partially covered with a new TV. When I’m in the shower, I stare at blocks cutting into my tile. It’s like Mark thought, “what can I do to make this house look even shittier?”

I could write an entire article about the three disgusting toilets Mark barely cleaned. My face has gotten disgustingly close to the bowls as I scrubbed with endless products (and loads of gloves) only to discover the brown on all of them is permanent. I have paid endless amounts to the home warranty company (the generous “gift” provided when purchasing a home) to fix every single toilet that I might as well have replaced them.

One toilet had a slow leak. I replaced the toilet seat lid because I was too disgusted to ever sit my bare ass on the existing one. Another toilet has had endless repairs to stop it from running continuously. Mark was kind enough to replace the original toilet seat on that one, however he got a kind that manages to trap gross bathroom dirt in unreachable crevices.

The final toilet creates such a foul odor that I’ve given up completely and ordered a new one. It has a smell so bad that I even tried scrubbing the toilet tank. Courtesy of the Covid supply chain issues, it’s taken a month for the new one to arrive and the installation will cost a small fortune now that handymen know how fucked we are without their services.

Speaking of handymen, the one I hired to fix this crap got into CSI Forensics Mode to determine what the mushy goo is on the side of my tub that should be grout or caulk. After a while he determined it was foundation. As in, of the Cover Girl or Maybelline variety. Fucking makeup mixed with some paste was smushed along the side of the tile.

Mark, I really do hate you.

It’s 1:30 am. There are words upon words that I could continue writing about this shitshow of a house but I wouldn’t want my readers to think I’m high-maintenance (yes, Facetious is my middle name). Instead, I’ll go to bed hoping that Mark is enjoying his retirement I funded with his price gouging in a seller’s market.

And by “enjoying”, I mean, “steps on broken glass every day”.