We recently spent three months living in Mazatlán Mexico as an experiment in living away from home. We’ve previously written about our goals, the cost of living, and running our businesses from a remote office, but what happens when something goes wrong back home?
A little roof problem damages the ceiling
Our housesitter sent us this photo of our second-storey ceiling crumbling as a result of a roof leak. Fortunately, this didn’t present a serious problem, but a few emails back and forth sufficed to fix the problem. Our housesitter coordinated with our handyman to diagnose the severity of the problem, and concluded it wasn’t serious. We asked the contractor who worked on our roof to coordinate with our housesitter to fix the underlying roof problem, and he did so free of charge, since his previous roof work created the problem. Finally, our housesitter told us that the roof no longer leaks, and relayed from the contractor that we needn’t bother fixing the ceiling hole until we decide to renovate the entire ceiling. All this required no more than about 15 minutes of our time and energy. For a small problem like this, we didn’t have to worry much, but what about a more serious problem?
Making our basement more flood-resistant
Fortunately—in a strange way—the Universe tested us on this, too. Not long after we left, our basement flooded quite vigorously. We had 30-40 cm of water in the basement as a result of an old sump pump, highly saturated ground, and thawing snow. Once again, we managed to coordinate everything from the road: our handyman coordinated with a plumber to install a new sump pump, confirm that they drained the basement effectively, and even raised our basement appliances 20 cm off the floor to avoid damage from any similar flooding in the future. All this required less than an hour of our time, and while it put a little more stress on us, our housesitter sent us photos of the work to satisfy us that the plumber had done the job well. Even something as annoying as a disintegrating mailbox only required a few emails and 10 minutes of our time to resolve. We managed to do this with a combination of email, Skype, headphones, a trustworthy housesitter, a good handyman and local contractors. I think that as long as none of our important records suffer from flooding, leaks, or other damage, that virtually nothing that could happen at home would prompt us to return. We do still need to spend several hours finding housesitters, but the more people we engage, the easier time we have of finding the next one. Sarah still feels considerable stress finding housesitters, but the Universe has so far always found a way to send us someone we can trust.
When we returned home and could inspect the damage for ourselves, we found no further problems with the leaky ceiling on the second floor, a sump pump that actually works well, a dry basement floor, and a general appreciation for coming home to a house in slightly better repair than when we left it.
