As my wedding approaches, my thoughts inexorably drift to the obvious next big project: buying a house with my new husband. The details of this imagined home — such as where, when, how much, how big, and how we will pay for it — are still a bit fuzzy, but some things are clear as a bell, such as what color I want to paint the new dining room (either hunter green or colonial blue, with white trim).

Although I revel in my homeowner fantasies, talking to my friends who actually own homes is making me consider renting for the rest of my life. It all sounds a little too much like work. They tell me that the hell of buying a home is just a sniffle compared to the consumptive disease that is owning a home. Aside from the financial and maintenance burdens, there is one issue that no one ever expects, and while it’s not as expensive as a leaking roof or an exploding furnace, it can do almost as much damage.

I speak, of course, of homeowner-etiquette challenges. When you rent, the sphere of people you could potentially piss off comprises only your landlord and the people with whom you share walls. When you own a home, you can piss off an entire neighborhood.

Take, for instance, my friend John. John recently purchased a new home. It had a "virgin in a tub" in the front yard. For those unfamiliar with this item, it’s a homemade monument to the mother of Jesus. The monument features a cast-iron, porcelain-covered white bathtub, which stands up on one end, secured in a concrete base, to form a protective shelter for a small statue of Mary. The tubs are usually painted blue inside, and often are decorated with plastic flowers. Though touching, they are, by definition, a visual assault of nearly unparalleled proportions.

John is not philosophically opposed to virgins in tubs (what man is?), but when one resides on his lawn, he takes exception. The previous owners obviously anticipated selling to someone like John, because they secured the base of their tub in a block of concrete that John says weighed, conservatively, 2.8 tons. John discovered this when he attempted to remove the monument. Suddenly, the project required a jackhammer. Imagine, if you will, the sight of an agitated man jackhammering a virgin in a tub in the middle of a very nice family neighborhood. Even the Jews next door were visibly shaken. John committed a profound etiquette faux pas from which he is still recovering.

But this particular blunder suggests just the beginning of the many horrors that await homeowners, if my friends are the reliable litmus test I believe them to be. James, for instance, regularly fights an internal battle every time it snows. Now that he’s a homeowner, he wonders: how much snow is required before he shovels? How far up and down the sidewalk past the borders of his own property should he shovel? If he stops at the edges of his property, he looks like an antisocial schmuck concerned only with his little corner of the world. If he shovels some of his neighbor’s sidewalk on one side, he must go an equal distance for the neighbor on the other side, thus rendering him exhausted, and with no promise of future snow-shoveling payback. What if he just waits for the neighbor with the snow-blower who sometimes does the whole length of the sidewalk? How many houses away does an elderly person have to live before one is no longer morally responsible for shoveling her out? It’s enough to give Emily Post a case of shingles.

James also wrestles with the question of when to take down the seasonal decorations. He doesn’t want to be one of those people who leave the holiday cheer hanging until it’s time to put up the Valentine’s Day cheer, which segues into Presidents’ Day cheer, which morphs into Easter cheer, etc. But if James makes only a weeklong perfunctory stab at holiday merriment, he’s a buzz-kill and a Scrooge. How long is too long for the plastic blow-up Santa to stay on the lawn? At what points do you cross the lines from holiday dilettante to sincere reveler to neighborhood psycho?

Which leads us to another etiquette dilemma, this one ignited by the swarm of yellow ribbons that sprouted up on homes, trees — indeed, anything vertical — all over the country in support of the troops fighting in Iraq. As someone who supported the troops but not the war, what was the appropriate thing Rachel should have hung from her front porch? The American flag was already there, and had become as ubiquitous in her neighborhood as grass. But she couldn’t bring herself to hang the yellow ribbon. Her hand was forced one day when a neighbor, hanging an ungodly large piece of yellow ribbon from his front porch, offered Rachel the extra footage so that she could put one up, too. What would you do? Stick to your profoundly held political beliefs and politely decline? Or cave in and accept? Rachel did the only thing she could do. She accepted the ribbon and hung it, albeit half-heartedly, from the front of her house. She justified it this way: by accepting a less than ideal situation, she was demonstrating the type of compromise, diplomacy, and intercultural understanding that our government seemed unable to muster in its failed diplomatic efforts with Iraq. In this way, Rachel soothed her own conscience while preserving the opportunity to use her neighbor’s in-ground pool this summer.

I haven’t even touched on the minefield that is tipping the mail carrier and newspaper-delivery person. Nor have I delved into the rules regarding borrowed lawn equipment. And don’t get me started on garbage cans; regional wars have actually broken out over this etiquette Waterloo. The opportunities to permanently alienate those who own land contiguous to yours is limited only by the number of years you own the home. So, for now, I will content myself with visions of colonial-blue dining rooms and dutifully, happily, write our rent check. The less I own, the better I sleep.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at k.frieswick@verizon.net