My home was built in the 70s
Published on 2024-12-03
Our crisis of the last month or two has been a major leak in the pipes in our kitchen. Our landlord has taken his time in sending people to come fix it, including travelling the ten some odd hours it takes to get from his place in the next province over to see the issue first hand—a somewhat rare occurrence. As a result, the leak had enough time to completely saturate the subfloor, to the point that water was literally oozing out of the tiles. A month later, contractors finally arrived to assess the damage.
So, they took a look at our floor, removed a single tile to discover another tile super glued beneath it, which they dated as having been installed in the seventies. Right then in there, they got up an left, pending an investigation that'd occur a few days later to assess if our floor had any asbestos in it. Fortunately, it didn't, but as we held our breath, I thought about how strange it was to live in a home that's been around for so long.
I've probably written before about how alien it felt to me, back when I was living in campus residence, to live in a building that'd been built only a year before I arrived—and more broadly, in a campus where most of the buildings had been put up less than a decade ago. Everything felt new. Nothing had history. It was as though it'd fallen out of the sky. Contrast this to other campuses that have been around for a century or more and you can feel the difference.
This, I suppose, gives me the opposite feeling. Especially since this house has been rented out to many tenants in the past, there's a sense of continuity, of shared experience over time.
We don't build a lot to last these days. Our housing projects tend to be cheap and pragmatic (pragmatic is one thing, cheap is another). There's an expectation—in fact, an imperative to constantly build new, replaceable houses or apartments that people will drift through before they're inevitably demolished or destroyed by the forces of nature in short order. There's something nice about living in a place built to last—reconciling with your environment. It's the difference between "living" and "visiting". It feels rare to be granted the right to really "live" somewhere, rather than to just visit it.
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