That's My Bix!

Did you guys know that things break on houses? It’s absolutely true. But did you know that they all conspire to break at the same damned time? Also completely true. Case in point: Casa Bix tried to pretty much mutiny over the past several weeks.

We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, actually, so we were really to blame. The house felt our hubris and decided to teach us a lesson, undoubtedly. You see, after more than a decade of dissembling our horrible refrigerator every three months (I don’t mean cleaning it out, I mean we had to actually empty the freezer, remove the back panel and the defrosting unit — using wrenches and stuff — and chip away the ice that had built up inside the mechanism, causing rot water to drain into the fridge part and onto all of our food), we had found a fix for the design flaw and haven’t had to fight the fridge funk since. Victory!

Except…

First, the dryer stopped working. Well, it kind of stopped working. You see, when we bought the house, the dryer was the only appliance we could afford to buy new (and only because Esteban was still working for a big blue box store and had a crazy pants great discount) and while we’ve since replaced the other appliances with varying degrees of success, our Maytag has lived up to that brand’s storied dependability.

Until it didn’t. Except when it did.

And we weren’t sure if it was just time to buy a new dryer (after all, we’re talking 14 years here… man I’m old) or what. It was very very frustrating, because you’d run the dryer and then find an entire dryer full of still mostly wet clothing. Most of the time, it all needed to be rewashed because by the time we realized it hadn’t dried properly, it was permeated with the funk. You know the funk, right? You put on clothes that are saturated with the funk and blammo, you smell like a cross between a bum and a drowned rat that washed up under the pier.  Bum rat soaked mold clothes, you do not make for sexy times, let me tell you.

Esteban tried replacing the whosits and the whatsits, and it would seem like that was it, but it wasn’t, and we were starting to look at the mate for our ridiculous hippy washing machine, which was going to cost fourteen million dollars. But then, during one of our many poolapalooza sessions this summer, Ward took sympathy on our state and decided to look into the matter. He found out that the thingy that the whoosit was attached to was ALSO a problem for this dryer. So he replaced it. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. The VERY SAME NIGHT, the hippy washing machine threw a code. Yes, a code, because while our dryer is circa 1996 and uses the same technology was 1970 dryers, our washing machine has the pants of fancyness. It has CODES, people. Codes that tell you nothing.  We basically will do anything to avoid another visit from the Hippy Washing Machine Repair Guy, if only because his Mercedes-Benz makes my Murano feel ashamed of itself. Again, to the internet, where the root cause was either a Faboozle or a Schlamozzle, but to get to those things, Ward actually had to build wooden stands so that they could tip the washing machine on its side. I am not making this up. The man built temporary wooden STANDS to fix our washing machine.

Thankfully, that should have been the end of it. Except not less than a week later, as we did our preparations for autumn, it became very apparent that both our chimney was about to fall down and also, the roof was going to pour great flumes of water into our bedroom until the entire bedroom ceiling let loose on our heads some evening in the very near future.

Here’s a secret: We’ve redone almost our entire house, but our bedroom still looks exactly like it did when we bought the house in 1996 (this December 6th is our 15 year anniversary in Casa Bix… have I mentioned that I’m old?) with yellowed and stained staple-up ceiling tiles and warped, badly installed 70’s rec room paneling. I hate it in there. No, I LOATHE it in there. However, until we got it to stop leaking, it wasn’t worth fixing it. And believe me, we’ve tried everything, shy of a new roof. So, yeah.

We went through the entire process of getting roofing estimates and many learned opinions and then we handed over another four million dollars and a bunch of guys (many of whom did not have teeth and made me feel very awkward when I bought them doughnuts) tore off our roof and then put a new one on. Woo! I did a sigh of relief, because at that point, we had now replaced or dealt with everything in our house that could possibly be a nightmare, right?

Within minutes of the roofing trucks departure, Esteban noticed that the toilet had departed this earthly plane. Yes, that would be this 1949 bungalow’s sole toilet, and he discovered this while getting ready to take a shower. Why does Esteban end up doing plumbing while naked? Apparently the universe has decreed that it should be so. I would take the time to enjoy it, but usually he’s not in a fantastic mood while doing his naked plumbing, so I try to keep my sarcastic and/or bawdy comments to a minimum and decided to be nice and hook up the dishwasher for him. I even stroked the appliance and assured it that it was very pretty and wonderful and I loved it very much. I really didn’t want the 9-year-old dishwasher to shit the bed too. I think Esteban would leave me if we had to slog through manual handwashing all of our dishes. I am truly a messy cook, and if I haven’t used every single surface and every utensil, then I don’t really feel like it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Finally, he managed to get the toilet to stop hemorrhaging water and took his shower. However, when I detached the hose for the portable dishwasher (reason #5748 not to buy an old house) I noticed that while it normally burned me slightly, the water was ice cold.

Uh oh.

“Hey hon, did you have hot water for your shower?”

“Well, now that you mention it… it was pretty unimpressive toward the end there. I figured that the dishwasher just used all of it up.”

Except no. No.

Bye hot water heater. We hardly knew ye.

You know what’s awesome? Living like an Amish person for the weekend. Luckily we had the washing machine fixed… except we couldn’t wash any clothes! Or any dishes! It’s like a fortune cookie saying or something. I felt bad about my missing roof until I met a toilet that couldn’t flush. Or something.

Esteban fixed the toilet, and then four days later, we got a new water heater.  And now I am very poor. Very very ridiculously poor. On the bright side, I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing left to break in our house.

At least until we crank up the original central air unit next May, that is.

No whammies, no whammies, no whammies!

Whenever I start feeling bad for myself, I think about this dog, whose owner dressed it up like a chicken. And then I laugh because my god. A chicken pug. It will never stop being funny.