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i think i’m the new white trash neighbor
By heather | March 30, 2009
On Wednesday night, I came around the curve in my street and noticed someone in my driveway, fiddling around with our trash cans. It took me a second to realize that he was MOVING them to BLOCK THE DRIVEWAY. One side of our circular was already blocked, and he was dragging the second can over to the other side. Having lived in this house for almost 5 years and never having seen the guy before, I did the logical thing which was roll down my window and start yelling that he’d better get the hell out of my way and take that can with him before I ran his ass over. I’ve never seen someone that old move so fast, muttering about putting the cans away.
Granted trash day WAS on Tuesday and we Brett hadn’t yet rolled them back to their rightful place. (I don’t actually know where that is, nor do I want to for the same reason I don’t want to know how to use the grill – smelly, hot, dirty, etc.)
I drove to work on Thursday morning counting all the houses that still had thier cans out to reassure myself that it wasn’t a terrible crime against humanity to let your cans out a day after trash day.
“There’s one…HA! And another! Although, they do still have thier Christmas lights up…”
Then, Friday morning I walked outside and found this:
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| Oh hey! That’s the gutter… |
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| …just peeling away like Fruit Roll Up |
Umm…yeah.
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| . |
The best part is, I slept through the crash.
Our street is pretty nice, but the neighborhoods we drive THROUGH to get in and out are a little more…colorful.
When we first moved into this neighborhood, we spent a lot of time giggling at the antics of the people with a washer, dryer, and obligatory car rusting in thier yard who tried to unsuccessfully build a goldfish pond using a garbage bag as a liner.
Or the people who spent a few weekends one summer putting on a new roof, and driving by in the late afternoon could almost guarantee that you would a) get a roofing nail in your tire, and b) see the neighbor, his relative, and/or buddy passed out on the roof because they would have started drinking at 9.
Just this past weekend, I chuckled as I drove past the guy who had taken it into his own hands to cut down a giant tree and was currently struggling to free his tiny, toy chainsaw from deep within an eight-foot section of trunk.
As I stared at our dirty, mossy gutter swinging in the breeze, it occurred to me that we really should get around to replacing the middle number in our address. And maybe fixing the busted hinges on our fence.
When we bought this house, we drove up to it exclaiming, “Look at the mature landscaping! So much better than those new houses that don’t have any trees! Or flowers!” The problem is, I’m just not that interested in outside work because bugs, heat, humidity, dirt, and anything distasteful are just not my forte, and lovely mature landscaping requires WORK. Outside. Ugh.
No one told us that mature means OLD and IN NEED OF REPAIR/WORK.
The first year, that mature landscaping resembled a patch of the Amazon jungle.
The second year we tried really hard, and found that unless you fore-go work to spend your entire day into the evening gardening and planting and weeding and mulching that there was no freaking way to stay on top of things.
The third year we Brett mowed the gardens then sprayed weed killer on them. The end.
There hasn’t been a consensus on what to do this year, but I think one thing is pretty clear – our house apparently needs more maintenance than just doing the dishes, and we are totally out of our league in managing this.
I have a vague suspicion that we should have performed any number of things that will prove expensive and annoying in the near future, but not the faintest idea of what those things might involve. This is how it starts I fear…next thing you know we’ll be dragging a couch onto our front porch.
Topics: home improvement | 3 Comments »
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March 30th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
This is very funny, but don’t feel too bad – we had a gutter hanging from the front of our old house for a solid two weeks before we finally had someone out to fix it and we also had the same situation with the landscaping. Our solution was also to mow over the flowerbeds. But did we learn our lesson when we moved into our new place? No, no we didn’t. Because now we have mature vegetation out the wazoo, flower beds in the double digits (as in, more than nine of them), blueberry bushes, rhubarb, and herb garden and a bubbling fountain to keep up.
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March 30th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Ha…tell Brett to come talk to Jim. He has a wild hair up his rear to cut down everything and redo everything. He just randomly cuts down bushes and trees and took off all of our shutters. Jim will motivate Brett, as far as finishing things, well that is another story.
March 31st, 2009 at 10:17 am
Don’t forget the fridge too.
You could try xeroscaping. Ugly as it my be (sorry if I’m offending anyone) it’s low maintenance.
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