Okay. Owning your own home can be awesome. You can paint the walls any colour you want. You can paint your front door red if it takes your fancy. You can invest in radical stuff like curtains and carpet, permanent fixtures like fancy light fittings and wardrobes and shower heads and decent kitchen appliances, oh my!. You can put holes in the wall to hang your artworks and pictures where ever you want to. Put stickers all over the place if you like, hell you can even paint a trompe l’oeil in your entry hall if you have the skill and inclination… because well, they’re your goddamn walls !
However, it can also be a right royal pain in the arse. The hot water system will die, and likely in the middle of winter and likely when the bank account can least handle a sudden unexpectedly large infrastructure bill. Tree roots will start destroying a fence or cracking some paving requiring an expensive tree surgeon. Your fly screens/security screens need replacing and you have to find the coupla thousand dollars required to get new ones. The motor in the roller door in the garage will die in the arse just after you’ve paid your ever inflating power/rates/insurance bills and you have to find the dosh to replace it. Then for some mysterious reason your house will start tripping every time you turn on the microwave and the electric kettle at the same time and you will have to call an electrician to come and investigate who won’t even have the decency to bring his own lube!
BUT, if you’re living next door to Azerbaijan and any of these things go wrong… you can just call Q-Build and they rock up in their little white vans and come and fix it for you. I can’t describe how depressing it is to see those Q-Build vans in the driveway next door and know that all their homeowner woes are being taken care of by the government at the tax payers expense. Sigh. Sometimes it feels like the harder you work to get ahead, the less help you get. The less work and more hand outs you get, the ever increasing help you seem to get. Where’s the balance in this situation?