At the end of 2020, my wife and I bought a two-story brick house on a tiny block in South Philadelphia, near where we’d been renting for close to a decade. We liked the wood floors and the big front window, and it was basically move-in ready with no major repairs.
But for the first two months we lived here, we kept smelling gas. Three or four times the utility people came out, found a leak around one of the pipe fittings, which we’d get fixed, and then a day later, we’d smell gas again. We knew it probably wasn’t a big deal, but row house explosions in the neighborhood were not unheard of. The smell began to haunt our dreams.
