Amazing What a Lick of Paint Can Do

We've lived in this house ten years now - built it - and things have been slowly needing to be done. You build a house and you quickly realize that nothing's going to be perfect, that you're going to be dealing with things, in some capacity, regularly. That's part of the deal of homeownership, what you offer in exchange for not dealing with landlords, with shitty neighbours across the wall.

We've largely been lucky. Nothing terrifying. The usual nail pops, a cabinet that wasn't anchored properly and started to lean forward, and the most serious, water penetration issues four years in, the combination of mistakes made during the build, and bad landscaping, and general settling. All that dealt with. Since then, it's basically been fine. Except, the interior paint. It's always cracked easily. We assumed it was maybe cheap paint. This year we started getting a bunch of paint peeling on the ceiling in one of the bathrooms, and noticing some cosmetic cracks elsewhere. I didn't feel like dealing with the stress of doing it all myself. A couple months ago, I hired someone. Their schedule being what it was, they weren't able to get in till yesterday. But they did great work. The bathroom peeling, they said, might've been due to painting directly over the drywall without priming. Wouldn't surprise me.

To anyone else it'd probably look about the same, but to us it looks so much better, and my stress levels have gone down a lot. I'm not sure I'm cut out for homeownership, but it beats the alternative of precarious rental housing and dealing with awful landlords like the one my partner had when she first moved to the city.

I don't know what's next. Probably the hot water heater? We've repaired it once already. Maybe the appliances. We've got a few years left on the mortgage, and then we're hoping to travel more. Did the responsible thing and put down additional annual payments in our mid 30s (and every year thereafter) instead of doing the travelling we wanted to do. Deferring the good stuff. Hopefully our reward's coming up soon. Europe. The Caribbean? The parts of Canada we haven't been to yet (the territories)? We'll see.