Comes around, goes around.

I left my old knob and tube wired home about a decade ago.

It was bittersweet. There was a host of junk that needed to be fixed that I never got around to because:

a) I didn't have the skill but never admitted it.

b) I didn't have the inclination because it was not important enough to me.

or the grand prize winner:

c) Fixing it would mean undoing about seven decades of original construction and subsequent fixes and at the end of the day it was easier and faster to patch it over than it was to undo and re-do it properly.

So it didn't get done and I went and bought a house that was less than a decade old and there wasn't anything to fix or tear out or re-do in a hurry before the whole damn thing rotted out from under you.

The windows closed. The doors didn't stick. You could wake up on a Sunday morning and stare at the ceiling without gauging how much the crack in the plaster had expanded and when was the whole thing going to come crashing down.

It was heaven.

At least I thought it was.

But every place has it's ghosts and demons and this new house wasn't any different. Sure everything worked but because somebody else had built it or put it in or designed it and your input was minimal, you cared about it a lot less. There was less of your sweat and tears and blood and invective in this place than there was the old place.

I kept a journal of my old house. All the things I built or re built. I started a journal for this house too. It basically has one entry detailing moving in.

Things change and this is no exception. Circumstances have dictated a move. I've bought a smaller house in the city. I saw it last Friday and bought it a few days later. There were other houses I looked at. New construction, capes from the fifties, ranches from the sixties, a farmhouse that was old sometime around the revolution. But I bought this new place.

It's old. It's about two years older than knob and tube palace. When I walked into the living room I saw the same ten inch clear pine kickboards the old place had and the new place couldn't equal with it's three inch boards. When I walked into the kitched, I sort of settled into the space in the middle of the floor in the middle of the room. I'll guess that if I put a handful of marbles on the floor, they'll settle in that one place too.

And when I walked into the basement, I looked up into the rafters and came face to face with an active knob and tube line.

I swear I heard that damned old house chuckle from four states away just then.