FD, IA - Deferred Maintenance

There were many things on Lug’s mind during his last years but maintenance on his home was not one of them. He had a girl friend and he enjoyed being with her and helping her out around her home more than he enjoyed fixing the plumbing in his own home. Well, who wouldn’t? He loved writing letters on his computer and single-handedly keeping the post office in business. He also enjoyed giving money away to deserving people and groups. And, would any one of us say that those things were not more fun than scraping and repainting an outside window, or replacing a gutter or rerouting a sump pump pipe? If you disagree, please call us because we have some plumbing issues, a few windows that need scraping and painting, some quarter round that needs to be put around the wooden floors and a few other things on his house before we sell it.

Hmmm. I hear a volunteer: Tom, Cathy’s husband, has volunteered to do the quarter-round. Do I hear any other voices?

Gary has spent several days working on some of the major issues that we think should be fixed before someone else owns this house. There is the matter of the sump pump which drains out the side of the house and then across the front stoop. There’s the window where the only thing that separates us from the outside world is two thin sheets of clear plastic with rips in them. There’s a clog in the main drain that fills up after only one shower. Yep, the typical issues that an older house has - and I’ll bet that many newer houses have.

Today we awoke to the temperature above, shivered a bit as we got packed the car, and arrived in to Fort Dodge about 10:00, in time for the 1:00 appointment with the painter Cathy found who is making a bid on painting the inside walls, the 2:00 appointment with the plumbers who are going to ream out the main drain and the 4:00 appointment with the furnace man to repair a small drip. Meanwhile he’s multi-tasking by working on that window, that sump issue and some other problems.

Remember that this house is empty? Well, there are some cleaning supplies here and we’ve borrowed an air mattress from Cathy and Tom. Chairs? Nada. Tables? Nope. Silverware? Nary a piece. Cups and plates? If you count paper. Well, you get the picture. In fact here’s a picture of one of the rooms. And this is representative of all the other rooms. Yes, we have a refrigerator. Yes, we have heat. Yes, we have electricity. Gary keeps calling it camping out but my idea of camping out involves a well-equipped RV and palm trees. Not an empty house surrounded by snow. Here’s Gary sitting in the family room eating dinner. Right now he is sitting on two cushions from a sofa which we later gave to a local charity. When those left, we had to bring some cushions from home to sit on. 

Preparing meals then becomes a problem. Not pots and pans, no utensiles, no microwave. There you have it. I do have an oven so this is the go-to tool. I need meals that can be cooked in an oven: casseroles, pizza, roasts (well, maybe not these.) Today we had pizza that I had made in West Des Moines in my very well-equipped kitchen. Tomorrow we’ll have a casserole, which, you guessed it, I had prepared at home right after the pizza. I also made sandwiches and a cold salad for lunches. We have some home-made muffins for treats and some other items should we just want to nibble a bit.

Here is a picture of what we will not be having. Lug left these two in his freezer and, since they are not too old, I thought we’d eat them: one for Big Gar and one for me. But, we didn’t eat them last time we were in FD and today I looked at them and decided that I just couldn’t eat them. The pictures are pretty, the foods are normal foods but the salt content, the fat content, the extras are not what I think I can eat. And, besides, we don’t have TV trays and no TV to watch as we eat. TV dinners while reading news on our I Pads just isn’t right.