Putting a band-aid on something can mean doing a temporary patch rather than addressing the real problem.
I owned a house in the country once that had been vacant for at least ten years. The previous owner, an old lady, had abandoned the house to live in a trailer next to the house. After she died, her far flung children carted off the trailer and sold the house with its two acres for a little bit of nothing, which was what I got when I bought it. Flies and snakes inhabited the walls. Dessicated long-dead birds filled the woodstove, which was about four times the size needed for the house. Strange odors filled the corners. When you walked through the rooms, you could feel the structure tremble and you wondered if the great armoire left in front room would tip over on top of you.
A couple things seemed ok, like the well pump, but the plumbing consisted of a strange maze of pipes that ran around the cellar aimlessly making right angle turns. The first time we turned on the water, an enormous waterfall filled the cellar. My husband spent several days under the house fixing every t-intersection and even insulating the pipes that ran out into the crawl space under the bathroom. But at the first freeze, every single joint popped right open, the toilet cracked and we shut off the water entirely.
We didn’t actually live in this fine residence as we had a house in Baltimore. However, the country house was two miles from work while the city house was 70 miles from work. The idea was to have a place to sleep close to work so as to avoid running back and forth 140 miles every day. After other failed attempts at patching and fixing, we bought a kerosene heater and hired a kid to punch a window into the coziest back room. We sealed off the rest of the house, furnished the room with a bed and camped out there a couple times a week.
Eventually, while I was expecting, I decreed that no babies were going to be raised or even brought into a house no running water or kitchen. Peeing out back and showering in the college’s locker rooms were fine for a childless couple, but the line had to be drawn.
The reader may be wondering at the connection to band-aids. Well, the band-aid prompt reminded me of the woodwork in that decrepit house. I had gone to the hardware store and procured a whole boxful of brightly colored paint remnants in tiny cans. I decided to paint the woodwork. I spent hours and hours delicately and perfectly painting the trim with fanciful combinations of stripes and patterns, so mesmerized in this project that I barely even noticed that the whole structure threatened to collapse when I moved the ladder. I never took pictures in those days, but I can assure you that the result was over-the-top. I once described it to someone and she said, “Arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, were you?”
We sold the house to a young couple who actually made it inhabitable, and even raised children there to judge by the swing set that later appeared in the yard. I never met the couple, but the fact that they painted all the posts on the front porch to be the same color (white) makes me think that they just painted right over my crazy paint job.
