Your Monetary Priorities, Readjust Them

My dad, when I was young, was cheap.

We weren't poor or hurting for money. He just didn't like to spend it unless he absolutely had to, and he decided himself when things were worth spending money on rather than using common sense. This meant he was the king of DIY projects but, because he was nowhere near professional, they either took a long time to do (because he had a day-job, too!) or ended up going badly. He decided he was going to redo all the household bathrooms at once without actually consulting a plumber. I'm not saying you should hire a professional for everything, I'm just saying 'pee outside' is not an acceptable thing to tell everyone else in the house when all the toilets are sitting in the garage and you aren't going to have time to put them back until the weekend.

Neither is it acceptable to drive a car missing key safety features, like a floor, just because you don't want to spend money on a new one.

It took the man five years--five fucking years--to paint the front hallway. He did very little at a time and left the job half-finished and didn't return to it for two years, before my mom got the brilliant idea of letting visitors to the house vandalize the unpainted portions of the walls with Sharpie markers. This left my dad with two choices: finish the job he fucking started, or live with crude drawings and profanity scribbled in the front hall. He finished the job.

Home appliances are expensive to replace so I totally understand using them until they completely stop functioning. But maybe if you have a microwave old enough to sport a handsome 70s-chic avocado green colour scheme, and it's unreliable and weighs more than the car, and leaks radiation so profusely that it disrupts every wireless electronic signal in the entire house when it's used? Maybe you should just stick a crowbar in your wallet and buy a new one before everyone gets cancer or starts growing extra limbs.

Building a new back deck yourself is acceptable. Lots of people want to do that. It is not acceptable to leave it unfinished if the drop between the back door and the ground is five feet. No, putting a ladder there for ease of movement doesn't count as reasonable accommodation.

If you remove a door or window, you are honour-bound to put the new one in that day. You're not allowed to just nail a tarp over the hole in the house for a few days. Wild animals for which there are no exterminating services get into the house that way--like deer. And vultures.

My parent's dishwasher was recalled about twelve years ago because--I swear this is true--the recalled models tended to burst into flames. I am not fucking kidding. It happened to a neighbour down the street. My dad's solution to this problem was, "Well we just won't run it when nobody's home and I'll put a few fire extinguishers in the pantry."

I don't mean to suggest you should pay professionals to do simple jobs like painting. I'm just saying that sometimes there's a pretty good fucking urgent reason to replace something.