Owning two houses is great, right? We have more equity, more space—lots of advantages! Imagine the two houses are built right next to one another and that both of them are two-stories high. Great! But wait, who’s going to clean them? Keeping a house up is a big deal: floors to mop, bathrooms to clean, paint to keep from chipping, rugs to vacuum—it’s no small task (it’s not hard to see why so many people prefer renting). Could we hire a maid? Maybe, but most of us don’t have that kind of money. We’re going to have to manage both houses ourselves.
So, we spend a day cleaning the house! Well, a house: all the work we put into one house has nothing to do with the cleanliness of the other. It sure would be nice if this wasn’t the case, but this is life. We put our head down and get the job done…
One house sparkling, we go to bed, wake up, and get to work on cleaning the next house. Well, for a few minutes—we have a job, after all. So we drive to work at the wholesale and try to squeak out a living, come home tired, and realize we hardly started cleaning the upstairs bathroom. There’s black mold. Black mold is bad.
A month goes by, and we’re exhausted. But, somehow, we manage to get both houses completely cleaned! We’re thrilled with ourselves. We sit outside on our porch and enjoy (one of) our yards. Did we lock the windows upstairs? We tell yourself to stop thinking about it. Wait, is the car inspected? When were quarterly taxes due? Hush, hush! Just sit and enjoy the evening! We sip on some sweet tea and, finally, our mind calms.
What a good day.
That night, the electricity goes out. In both houses. We call up the power company, and they assure us they’ll get right on it. And was that a trashcan falling over? We look out the window; the neighbor’s dog is enjoying hotdogs from last night. The neighbor comes over and apologizes, and trying to be sociable, he asks why we let the grass get so tall in our (second) house. We say it takes hours to cut and weed-eat one house, so we alternate week to week. He reminds us it’s our duty to keep both of our houses looking pristine, basically implying we’re lazy (when there’s always something to do).
We go to one of our houses and sit inside and think about how we never get a vacation. But we have a lot of equity! Well, that only manifests if we sell one of our houses, and that means someone must want to buy. Surely that day will come eventually, right? For now though, we see all the mail on our table and realize we have bills, yard work, and dishes to do—and what we do for one house won’t help us with the other, and from the neighbor’s point of view, we hardly work on our house at all. After all, there’s always one we’re not working on…
We sit back in our chair and look up at the ceiling. Could we sell one of our houses? The price was hardly above what we bought it for, and considering all the time we put into it, we practically lost money. Maybe we could downsize? But then not as many people would be as interested in buying. We sigh. Before we started our second house, did we feel like we had a home? Maybe we’ll feel like we have two homes soon enough.
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