La maison spéciale

The whole experience with my new house has been a bit of a disaster. On the very first day I came to look at it, I almost walked away crying. The walls had holes in them; the plumbing was a disaster; there wasn't a kitchen; the whole place smelled; the layout was strange; and so on and so forth. The list of things that were broken and/or horrible about the house could have been a mile long. Yet a friend of mine convinced me to give it a chance, and for some reason I did.

A group of workers and shop owners descended on the house and the work began almost immediately. The walls were repaired and painted (the colors weren't completely different than the ones I picked); the broken windows were replaced and given new screens; a sink was built to create a kitchen, and shortly thereafter a refrigerator and stove arrived; gardeners cut back the weeds and plants that had overtaken the yard. Slowly, as all of this happened, I began to see the house's potential. When things settled just a bit, I ordered furniture and shopped for pots and pans and dishes and sheets and pillows and towels and mosquito nets and everything else you could ever imagine needing for a house. Finally, I decided things might not be so bad.

Yet even now, after living in the house for two months, although the house is completely livable, things still aren't exactly settled. For example, when I realized there was a leak somewhere in the plumbing of the house, someone came to the house, dug up all the pipes in the yard, and then replaced them, but, in the process, he switched the hot and cold connections to the house so that now even the toilets run on hot water. The house also has a cockroach problem, even after being bombed with pesticides, and, on occasion, a mouse appears. For the last three weekends, the water has been cut off for no apparent reason, and, on a fairly regular basis, the electricity goes out as well. At this point it's just amusing.

It's gotten to the point that whenever something ridiculous happens, I just look at my domestique, shrug my shoulders and say something like "beaucoup de problèmes" or "un autre problème" ("many problems" or "another problem"). A couple days ago, the kitchen sink quit working even though the rest of the water in the house worked. This time she looked at me with a half smile and just said "la maison spéciale" and it was the perfect description of this place - "the special house".