Home sweet home

The house I grew up in was a monument to learned incompetence. My parents both had advanced degrees, yet we weren't allowed to hang pictures on the walls for fear of damaging the plaster (it was an old house). Apparently the technology to repair plaster was lost sometime after the fall of Rome and still had not been rediscovered.
You put white clothing in the hamper at your peril. It was understood that anything in that pile was doomed to mysteriously turn pink.
No one wanted to reveal that they possessed basic domestic skills. The masequerade went on for close to two decades.