The three trials of our house

The kids and I were hanging out with some friends today and one of them asked how we were all doing. Great!, I said. And we are. Things are good. Good, good, good. Except, I somehow forgot about the relatively major home ownership issues that have cropped up recently. I think I might be in denial, because I didn't even think about the fact that I could have mentioned them until I was driving home. We're hoping 2010 will be a better year home-wise, because the last part of this year has held more than its share for our poor casa.

1. The unbloggable thing, which is moving slowly towards resolution. Very stressful, but thankfully not as disruptive as it could have been.

2. The roof. We have a great roof over 95 percent of our house. The last 5% is a flat roof over the porch and front room. When we bought this place, the inspector mentioned that we might need to replace it at some point, but we figured that was a ways off. Turns out, 2009 is a perfect time to replace it, because it is buckling and leaking and in bad shape. We've gotten three quotes on fixing it and the last guy, upon climbing down the ladder from checking things out, informed me that he had been able to lift up the roofing material and plywood with his hand. That was a great moment. We're just crossing our fingers and praying that there's no major water damage underneath. If there is, at least we're catching it now, but ugh. It will be costly.

3. The sewer. In addition to the new house being built on one side of us (which has been all the entertainment I thought it would be, and more), our neighbor on the other side is about to start some major remodeling to his house. In the process of getting plans together, he had his sewer line scoped and the contractor discovered that we have a shared sewer line, which is a no-no. Said contractor reported this to the city and now we both need to get new sewer lines. As there is no access on our street, we have to go all the way through said neighbor's yard to connect to a main line. Again, stressful and expensive. Argh.

Bad things come in threes, right? So, hopefully, nothing else is about to come out of the woodwork!