Mar 22, 2019 4 min read

This computer screen is looking a bit wonky right now, the result of my spending the day going cross-eyed doing taxes. By “day” I mean literally all the daylight hours; by “taxes” I mean I was figuring what we spent getting the old Victorian house in shape to sell.

This is about reducing what is owed in capital gains tax. The rules fill whole books, but I know just enough about how taxes work to have kept all the receipts from the work we’ve had done and that the farmer did himself. We’d hang onto everything and sort it out later.

How do I describe what five years’ worth of Home Depot and Lowe’s receipts look like? Picture a big bowl of Frosted Flakes. The bowl is the box and the flakes are the paper receipts. There are hundreds of them.

Knowing that April was coming, I got to work, first moving the box from the corner of the basement to the bottom of the steps. The next week, in an admirable burst of productivity, I moved the box up into the office. There it stayed for long weeks, its rogue receipts poking out from under the lid like hamburger lettuce. Each time I passed by, I thought “not yet.”

But this week brought me within three weeks of the April 15 deadline, and I could procrastinate no longer. I gathered up the box of receipts, put on my strongest reader glasses and dug in.

As I examined crumpled receipts, one after another, the story of the last few years unfurled before me. What does it take to install new hardwood floors, plant trees and roses, install carpet, upgrade closets, replace windows and add new lighting?

It takes thousands of dollars in hardwood and glue, caulk and nails, wiring and mulch, planks and drill bits, pieces for a scaffold. At least a dozen pairs of work gloves. And, apparently, countless little bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. There’s a reason they put bags of those on the displays near the checkout counters, even at hardware stores.

The job would have been easier had the ink not disappeared from some of the receipts. One item from 2016 indicated we’d spent $535 on something, but the name of it had faded to nothing.

“Do you remember what that would have been for?” I asked, but the farmer didn’t know. The receipt went into the trash, a lost opportunity.

There are phone apps that would have saved all this trouble. The farmer could have entered each item as he bought it. If he’d done that, preparing the taxes would have taken about an hour, tops. But he was busy making that house sparkle. Each of those receipts represents not only a trip to the store, but also hours of work when he got back home.

“Look at all you did,” I said, tossing a handful of receipts into the air. “Wanna help me figure this out?”

The farmer walked on by. He’d put in the years of skill and physical labor; counting it all up was the least I could do.

“I have a question, though,” I said. “What’s with all the Doritos?”

“They are tasty,” he said.

Tasty, yes, but not deductible. If I’m reading the tax rules correctly, crunchy snacks are not included in the list.

Which doesn’t seem right, considering. If a man had to climb down off a scaffold to drive to the store for the second time that day to get more glue, he’s earned a bag of chips. Or three.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.