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Brooke here.

This week’s post was supposed to be about the pollinator garden, but it’s nasty and overcast and I can’t get good photos. Fortunately, I remembered I was keeping a Livejournal when we bought this house. I went back and reread the entries when we were going through the purchase and…and…

I’m not sure what The Powers That Be could have done differently to warn us away. They did their best. For example, here’s the entry about the missing septic tank. Let me highlight one section of that entry:

I would like to point out that we are discussing a missing septic tank.

I would also like to point out that knowing the condition of the septic tank–a literal containment unit for hazardous waste–wasn’t perceived as a priority.

There’s also another post about another house, one with a crumbling foundation, that Brown and I decided we shouldn’t buy because it began raining while we were checking out the attic and the roof began to leak.

Bad foundation. Leaking roof. Sound familiar? Oh, right, you guys might not know about that yet. This is now what happens in our living room when it rains:

It’s a fairly recent development. It started around the same time we finally got the flooding in the basement under control, so my current hypothesis is this house is under a supernatural mandate that water must be coming into it at all times during a rainstorm. I’m toying with the idea of trying to sell this to our insurance providers to see if we can just get a stream permanently installed in the living room.

So now we’re thinking about new roofs.

(No, not just because of the waterfall in the living room. There’s leaking in multiple other places, too, and brown stains on the ceiling that are Not Yet Mold but are Threatening to Become Mold.)

We’re quickly becoming just freakin’ entranced by the idea of steel roofs. I personally hate the way they look: I think they’re tacky as hell. I also think they are nigh-invulnerable, better for the environment than traditional shingles, and won’t be as easily damaged in the crazy hailstorms we’re starting to get around here. However, they’re starting to make metal shingles. These have many of the same benefits of the standing seam metal roofs but look like traditional petroleum-based shingles. They are bitterly expensive, of course, but the prices will probably come down as metal shingles become popular and more companies enter the market.

So, yes. Warning signs. Leaking roof. I guess the takeaway message here is to always know where your septic tank is, and probably that it’s a good idea to take photos of the pollinator garden before they’re needed.