The Inspection
I have lived in the same house for almost five years, and in that time I have come to understand something about the particular pleasure of a quiet street. It is not the absence of life. Quiet streets have dogs and children and lawn mowers and the occasional argument that drifts through an open window on a summer evening, the ambient noise of people going about the business of living. What they have that noisy streets do not is a shared agreement, mostly unspoken, that your neighbors are not your audience and you are not theirs, that the proximity of houses does not constitute an invitation to manage each other’s choices, and that the ordinary business of maintaining a home and a life can proceed without commentary from the people on either side.
My street had been like that. Past tense, as of about four months ago.
My name is Daniel Reyes. I am forty-three years old, I work as a senior project manager for a civil engineering firm, I have two dogs named Biscuit and Pepper who require more walks than I sometimes have energy for, and I have spent the better part of five years quietly and systematically improving a house that needed considerable improvement when I bought it. New roof in year two, after the first hard winter revealed some compromised flashing that I had missed in the inspection. Deck rebuilt in year three, when the existing deck finally reached the point where I stopped trusting it to hold weight and decided that postponing the project had become more expensive than doing it. The kitchen updated last summer, which required six weeks and nearly broke me financially and was worth every dollar. A bathroom renovation is planned for next spring, the budget already accumulated, the contractor already selected.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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