The Full Suburban: When your house loses its new home smell for all the wrong reasons

“We almost burned our house down today,” my friend said after Logan and I joined her and her husband for dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant a couple weeks ago.

We couldn’t believe it. Their house is gorgeous and it’s also brand new; they painstakingly built most of it with their own two (four?) hands and moved in less than a year ago. We looked to her usually unflappable husband for confirmation.

“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” he said. And then the story unfolded.

They have baby chicks, and the chicks were too small and vulnerable to be put outside just yet, so they had been temporarily living in a plastic tub inside the house, made cozy with wood shavings and a small heat lamp. This setup had been going on for weeks with no problem; the chicks were thriving, the house wasn’t burning down, all was well.

But that day – the almost-burn-your-house-down day – no one was home when the heat lamp somehow slipped, landing among the shavings and slowly melting through the plastic bin. The chicks managed to huddle themselves in a corner and were completely unharmed, but by the time our friends came home that afternoon, their house was filled with smoke, all the fire alarms were going off, and the heat lamp was burning its way through their wood floor. They shuddered as they talked about what might have happened if it had gone on for even a few minutes longer.

Logan and I listened, wide-eyed, because we could certainly relate. We had a run-in with an overheating extension cord that melted itself into the carpet of the very first home we ever purchased, on the very first day that we owned it, no less.

But the home-related catastrophes aren’t limited to smoke and fire. Oh no. The universe is very imaginative when it comes to ways that your brand new and expensive property can be destroyed.

When we had been living in our current house – at the time also brand new – for maybe a month, we had some out-of-town family stay the night in the guest room in our basement. The next morning, one of them came upstairs.

“I’ve been trying for a while now, but I can’t seem to unplug your toilet,” he said. “I don’t know if one of my kids did something to it or what, but I can’t get it to flush for the life of me.” This particular relative is not one to leave a mess or give up easily, so the fact that he was flummoxed set off some alarm bells in our heads.

Logan headed down to the basement to see if he could figure out the problem and – dun-dun-DUNNNNNN – discovered that the floor of our nearby utility room was covered with a couple inches of sewage water, which was quickly seeping up into the hallway carpet. Toilet water in your brand new house – could anything be worse?

Quick-thinking Logan was able to open some valve outside and get the nasty water to go down a few minutes later, but the damage was done. The problem turned out to be a mis-installed baffle in our septic tank (or something like that – I think I passed out from the gas fumes while it was being explained to me). But anyway, long story short: our builder got everything cleaned up and replaced in no time, and our new house only smelled like sewage for about a day.

Why do these catastrophes always seem to happen in new houses? Is it the universe trying to tell us that nothing is permanent and nothing can stay pristine and perfect forever, so we’d better get used to it – and here’s a fire/sewage starter pack to help us on our way? Maybe these little accidents are actually favors, the “first dent in the new car,” so to speak, so we can get past the walking-on-eggshells part of living with something new, and actually move on to living with it.

Regardless, I wonder if new-home catastrophe is just a phenomenon peculiar to the Dittos and their unfortunate friends, or if others have stories of their own to share. Please let me know; the person with the best story gets a free baby chick and an overnight stay in our utility room.

Julia Ditto shares her life with her husband, six children and a random menagerie of farm animals in Spokane Valley. She can be reached at dittojulia@gmail.com.