Being a homeowner sucks ass. Being the owner of an older home sucks... donkey ass. When we were looking to buy a house, other than a good price and enough room for us to grow, the main thing I wanted was to NOT get a fixer-upper. I wanted a NEW(ish) home that wouldn't need repairs anytime soon. And then we go and buy this freaking old creaky not-to-code when last renovated house.

The previous homeowners hid damage (that our inspector failed to see behind a sofa) that required us to remove and replace an entire exterior wall of our house. We knew about the mold in the master bedroom, so the house price was adjusted to give us the money to fix that problem. And we did. But our heating, plumbing, and electricity is all crap. The electricity to my office area (and Eric's, despite it being in a completely different area of the house) is on a flakey circuit. Right now we've got it so Eric has power and I don't - I use an extension chord to the bedroom to plug in my computer. The Christmas before last we had to replace the furnace because it is under the house in a crawl space that easily floods. Our carport is rotting away. We can't use the downstairs shower because the lever won't stay down. The upstairs is not connected to the furnace, so it's always either cold or hot up here depending on if you turn on the wall heaters. The upstairs bathroom sink is rusting underneath. The floorboards near the downstairs tub are rotten. There is no way to currently block access to the under-house crawlspace from critters - cats go down there to DIE. Critters are somehow getting into our attic - sometimes LARGE critters, but they never leave any evidence behind - we just hear them walking, running, scratching at the floor, etc. Half the burners on the stove don't work. The refridgerator, dryer, and dishwasher are all ancient.

My current headache is with said dishwasher. Water is not fully draining out of it, which sounds very unsanitary to me. So is it the dishwasher or the pipes? I got a plumber out here last night and we confirmed that the dishwasher needs to be replaced - it's old, falling apart, missing the trap, and now makes an interesting burning smell. However, he showed me how the pipes are configured in such a way that water cannot fully exit the system, so there's always standing water in them, making it easier for drains to clog and the dishwasher to back up. Buying a new dishwasher will be useless until the pipes have been reconfigured. We need something called an air-gap to help lower the water pressure as it exits the dishwasher. The pipes coming right down from the sink drains are very short, making clogging easy. Part of one sink is rusting, and a pipe is being abused by the high water pressure from the dishwasher. And to top it all off, the main pipe that the system dumps into to leave the kitchen and then the house, that pipe is higher than all the other pipes under the sink. It should be lower, so gravity helps force the water out. Right now, the water needs to go uphill to exit - so if there is no pressure behind it to flush it out, it just hangs out in the pipes just waiting to cause headaches.

New pipe configuration: $750
Parts for new configuration: $50
New dishwasher: $300
New faucet to make room for the air gap: $62

Total repair = $1162

We had budgeted $400 for either a dishwasher repair or replacement. Ye-fucking-haw!