Upkeep

My house has a little side porch opening off the kitchen.  There is a door from the kitchen to the porch, and steps from the porch down to the ground.  The door used to open, but the lock somehow seems to have frozen shut.  But the door does have a "cat door" -- an opening with a flap -- through which my feline friends can pass in and out.  The porch bears a number of old mops and brooms dating back to one of Seattle's earlier glacial epochs.

No, wait!  Don't leave.  There's more!

My point is that the porch doesn't get foot traffic.  Just paw traffic.  And because no one ever uses the porch -- other than the cats -- I hadn't really noticed that the steps to the ground had begun to sag to the right, and that the wooden risers were not only covered with moss but were, as the saying goes, "rotting."

But my insurer noticed.  Some eighteen months ago, I discovered a polite young man wandering about the exterior of my house, writing notes.  Soon afterward, I received word from the insurance agent that the insurer wanted (1) all moss removed from my roof, and (2) the porch steps replaced.

"Ah, geeeez!  Do I have to?" was my initial mature reaction.

The moss was easy to eliminate.  Seattle has a lot of moss, and also has a lot of companies who are delighted to remove roof moss.  I wrote a piece on the moss situation fifteen months ago.  But I had a problem finding someone who wanted to do something so trivial as to install four new steps.  And then -- like a deus ex machina -- the pandemic arrived.  My agent said he understood how the pandemic might create problems, blah, blah, blah, and gave me another year to mull over the situation.

Finally, a former legal colleague of mine recommended someone who had done work for her family and probably would be happy to replace my four steps.  After another four months of procrastination, I gave him a call on Tuesday, he came to look at the situation the same day, and he and an assistant arrived with their tools this morning.  It took five hours, but the job is done.

It looks great.  Or as great as four steps up to a never-used side porch could ever look (photo above).

One of my earliest blog posts, back in 2007, was on the subject of procrastination.  An on-going issue with me.  It took me 18 months to get around to finding someone to fix the steps, and the work was completed four days later.  That's how procrastination has usually worked for me, but at least in 2007 I had been procrastinating for a couple of weeks on writing a lengthy appellate brief.  Not for 18 months on making a couple of phone calls.

But the same philosophy was at work in the back of my mind in both instances: 

 "Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now."