That hairline crack in the stucco by our garage, the one that had been there as long as we owned the house, seemed to be getting bigger. I remember our youthful naivete as we looked at the crack on our first inspection of the property. We told each other that it was such a little crack, and that it was surely, surely no big deal. Fifteen years later that hairline crack had turned into a crevice large enough to hide small mammals.
Our house was 50 years old when we bought it which, by South Florida standards, virtually qualifies it as an antique. When we bought it, 15 years ago, the house was a foreclosure, shabby and forlorn, with peeling paint and overgrown landscaping. Because my partner and I were 15 years younger we painted and scraped and planted and fertilized with a youthful confidence in our own skills and our ability to get the old homestead looking like a showpace again.
Now, however, 15 years older and significantly more exhausted, with a totally misplaced confidence in my handyman skills, I went to Home Depot and bought some crack sealer, and awkwardly filled the crack. I then found some leftover paint and painted over the newly sealed crevice as my partner and I stood back to admire my work. It looked like I had painted a lightning bolt on the side of the garage.
“It looks a trifle odd,” my partner said tactfully, surveying the carnage of my handiwork. “And the paint does not match.” Of course he was right, so given my lack of skill or talent with the paintbrush, I got pissed and threw all my painting supplies in the trash and decided to hire someone to paint the house.
The painter was a craftsman of the old school, and he pointed out the scar by the garage and mentioned how bad the stucco looked everywhere, and that a coat of paint could only go so far. He suggested that we should have the house re-stuccoed. “It’s time she had a face lift,” he said.
The plasterer agreed that the house should be re-stuccoed, but was concerned about the landscaping. “It’s pretty overgrown,” he said; “there’s no way I can even get close enough to the house to put on the new plaster unless you have the trees and bushes cut back.”
The landscaping that we had planted so enthusiastically was awfully dense; after 15 years of non-stop sunshine and tropical rains you could not even see most of the house from the street. The landscaper agreed to remove the offending foliage, but it had just rained so the backhoe turned what we euphemistically called our “lawn” into a sandpit. Then, as his machinery was tearing out the overgrown foliage by the roots he managed to tear out most of our sprinkler system as well. “These things happen with old houses,” he murmured as we surveyed the carnage of our yard.
With the foliage, the lawn and the sprinklers gone, it made perfect sense to fix the underground sprinkler system before we replanted the lawn and the foliage. While fixing the sprinklers, the sprinkler man pointed out that our ancient pump was grinding alarmingly and suggested we replace it sooner rather than later. We decided to wait, but 2 days later the pump expired with a horrible grinding noise, and tripped its circuit, somehow managing to kill the electricity to the garage at the same time. The circuit breaker steadfastly refused to allow itself to be reset.
The electrician got the juice flowing again but now the garage door refused to open or close. The garage door man said the power surge had fried the circuit and of course we had to have the garage door opener repaired since my partner ’s car was entombed in the garage.
As the garage door was being fixed, we felt strongly that we were done. “After all,” said my partner , “what else can go wrong?” and before the words were out of his mouth the new garage door opener unit fell from the ceiling onto his car, destroying his windshield while the garage door man and my partner and I stared numbly at the carnage with our mouths open stupidly.
Six weeks later the freshly plastered, newly painted house looked fresh and clean and the new plantings were watered lushly by the new sprinklers. The new garage door opener was protecting my partner ’s newly repaired car and I took a break from obsessing over the carnage of our checking account to join my partner in admiring our fresh, clean exterior, both of us steadfastly refusing to mention the hairline crack that had appeared on the newly stuccoed garage.