Lately we’ve been doing some home improvements: new sofa, hanging pictures, rearranging furniture, considering painting our son’s room with the paint we bought two years ago, before he was born, and never got around to using. And this morning I came across this in the A.M. Homes story “Adults Alone,” from her 1990 Collection The Safety of Objects.

She feels like she’s been having an extramarital relationship with their home. It isn’t even an affair, an affair sounds too nice, too good.As far as she’s concerned a house should be like a self-cleaning oven; it should take care of itself.
The last time she was happy with the house was the day before they moved in, when the floor had just been done, and they hadn’t paid for it yet.

I know just how she feels. Our house looked better on the day we bid on it, when it had been elegantly staged by the realtor and there were no window coverings, so the light shown in through the big, curved front windows. Then we moved in with our furniture and our books and our food and our lives, and things began to get messy.

The exercise:
Write about a character who fails to maintain something.