Carlo Rotella: Previous Owner 3/24

I've never met the guy who owned my house right before me, but I feel that I know him. I know only a couple of facts about him. He's a plumber, and, like me, he has a wife and two daughters.

The house itself tells me more. You can read an autobiography of the owners in the condition of a house. When the basement flooded in the big storm the other day, the sump pump failed. I'd never looked closely at it before, but I should have. The float was gimmicked with a tennis ball to prevent automatic shutoff, and the tiny outflow hose couldn't handle any serious volume of water. Also, the outflow was illegally hooked up to the house's waste discharge. So the pump ran and ran underwater and accomplished nothing other than using electricity and breaking the law. That's this guy in a nutshell.

As I've discovered during the five years I've lived in the house, he rigged everything with that same blend of cleverness, laziness, and impatience. Anything in the house affixed to anything else with screws will be fastened with three or four different kinds, some Phillips head and some not, and at least one will be inserted at an awkward angle and half-stripped. You can feel his hurry to get the task over with, to gesture at doing it, and be away--to play with his daughters, or drink beer and watch TV, or get to the next half-assed fix-it job that couldn't be put off any longer.

Now, I don't have one-tenth his technical competence, and I share his impatience with work around the house. Having grown up chafing at the duty of standing there, supposedly helping my father clean the gutters or fix a radiator, I've made my own bargain with owning a house: if something needs doing, I'm happy to write another magazine article or radio piece so that I can pay an expert to do it right.

So it's not that I'm aghast at the previous owner's sloppiness. Just the opposite. Even as I struggle to remove a stripped screw, cursing his memory but never quite motivated to acquire a decent set of tools myself, I feel an unwanted intimacy with a kindred spirit. Yes, a guy who made his living with his hands should have taken more care to do things right, the kind of care I try to take with my paragraphs, but my resentment of him is mostly resentment of the same impulses in myself. Why didn't I check the pump before? I suppose I could say that I had something to write, or a class to prepare, but it's just as true that I wanted to play with my daughters, or drink beer and watch TV, or get on to rushing through the next half-assed job of work around the house.