Wish for Disposal Drains Budget

The fateful statement sounded innocent enough: “I’d like a garbage disposal.” Even now, I’m not sure how many thousands of dollars it all ended up costing.

When we began house hunting, we agreed that we wanted a place that needed only paint and new carpet. We didn’t want a fixer-upper. It wasn’t until after we moved in that I noticed the holes in the kitchen linoleum. I could insert a knife up to the handle without ever reaching the bottom.

And the glaring pink-and-maroon kitchen tiles were a little difficult to face early in the morning.

But the clincher was that I really wanted a garbage disposal.

The solution seemed simple enough: get a new sink that would accommodate the disposal. Only the sink was so old that no sinks are sold in that size any more. So that meant having to take out the tile to reframe the sink area.

That was a good excuse to get tile with softer, more updated colors. But while the tile was ripped out, it seemed a good idea to do away with the plumbing fixtures, which looked all of their 50 years.

Since the tile man and the plumber were already at the house, we asked ourselves if it might be the right time to put a shower in the bathroom--which had only a tub with a plastic shower hose rigged to it.

We definitely wanted a shower, but that meant hiring a handyman to wall in the big bathroom window and install a small window up a little higher. And while he was working at the house, why not have him hang new doors and do some minor cabinetry work? Of course, that meant taking all the kitchen cabinet doors off and having them stripped and repainted.

Meanwhile, in stripping the cabinets, the painters discovered a previously undetected wood design across the top that had been painted over for so many years that it was merely a bump on the cabinet. Their work restored some of the beauty found in the details of the old house.

Cracks, holes, dents in the wall, markings from previous baseboards--these all needed to be filled in and smoothed out. In the end, the painters used 20 pounds of Fix-all and five pounds of Spackle to fill in blemishes we had never noticed.

The pale light of new love had caused us to overlook all these things whenever we had visited the house. Such things are noticed only in the harsh light of daily life. And, too, being the source of the flow of cash from one party to another sometimes makes the object of one’s desire seem much less attractive.

A new bathroom cabinet was also called for--something less rusted and with a mirror that still offered a reflection good enough to use for shaving. After shopping around for a new one, we learned that bathroom cabinets don’t come in that size anymore.

I had to go to the neighbor to whom we’d given the old one and ask for it back. A little sandblasting, painting, and replating the mirror and it was serviceable.

While reinstalling the cabinet, my husband decided to widen the opening in the wall a bit to put in a new electrical outlet. His pounding knocked the plaster off the wall in our bedroom--a problem that was remedied in the short run by the strategic placement of a book case.

While we were getting to know the tile layer, the plumber and the handyman, we began to realize that every “solution” created or uncovered an additional problem. We called this “the law of unintended secondary effects,” those effects, of course, leading to additional expense and the hiring of yet another tradesman to attend to some new area that needed attention.

We were reminded of the lyrics to the song “Dry Bones:” “The thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone, the knee bone’s connected to the shin bone. . . .” We have since discovered that most people who’ve done any work on their home share a similar sentiment.

Besides the tile people, the plumber, the handyman, the house painters, the carpet layer, the linoleum seller and the linoleum installer, we realized that one particular trade was not yet represented. Then it came to our attention that the new garbage disposal needed an electrical outlet.

So, since we had to call the electrician out to the house anyway, we had some extra switches and wiring run in the kitchen and in the garage for the laundry.

The electrician was called back a day or two later when we realized that the official garbage disposal switch did not activate the garbage disposal. Instead, turning on the disposal was a two-person job. Person A had to stay at the sink running the water while Person B went out to the garage to flip the switch that actually made the garbage disposal turn on. This problem was easily remedied, however, by correcting the wiring.

The second gaffe also involved a delay in the discovery of the problem. Because our house was old, it had some odd wiring. From behind the fuse box, a couple of wires ran underground to parts unknown. Since these wires had no apparent function, the electrician cut them as we all were leaving on a Friday afternoon.

It wasn’t until the next morning that we discovered what the wires were for.

Our new neighbors approached us for the first time and inquired if we might have done something that resulted in them having no electricity for the previous 16 hours. We quickly ran a series of extension cords between the homes while anxiously making attempts to contact the electrician.

The wires he had cut had run underground and then over to our neighbors. It was their electrical supply. The problem was amended by each house getting its own independent service, wiring and circuit breakers as part of the process of coming up to code.

The odd electrical hookup between us and our neighbors was paralleled in the plumbing arrangement. We discovered this during the first plumbing crisis a couple of months after moving in.

The plumber “snaked” the toilet in an attempt to clear the pipes of whatever was causing everything to back up. He finally cleared the problem after using 150 feet of snake. Our lot is only 40 by 50.

As the plumber drove away, our neighbors came out to thank us for improving their plumbing, which had been getting progressively worse over the last several days. Our plumbing was all connected, as had been the electrical work.

We realized then that we had reached the end of our home improvements. There’s only so much one can do, and redoing the neighborhood plumbing was too much.

In the end, we were pleased with our “new” old house: the shower, linoleum, tile, wiring, the new window, some new plumbing and fixtures, plus the painting and recarpeting.

And yes, the garbage disposal.

We were lucky in that we had bought a small place, which meant less materials to buy and less time to install them.

But we were also spoiled. We had been able to do some minor remodeling and put our own imprint on the house even as we moved in. We know that we could never afford to do it again.

Still, while visiting a friend in a more expensive neighborhood last weekend, we dropped in on an open house. As we wandered through and realized that we really liked the floor plan, we also gazed sadly at the kitchen tile, which was decades old.

I turned to the realtor, already knowing her answer to my question: “Does it have a garbage disposal?”