Monday, May 25, 2009

Home Repairs and Fun

We are mostly moved into our new house and we are so excited! Two days after we moved in we had our new furnace and A/C installed. Our Realtor has a brother with his own company and he got us a great deal on the two together so we didn't have to deal with that blasted swamp cooler. Sweet! A lot of houses out here have swamp coolers and we had to replace the broken furnace anyway, it was a good way to get the central air as well. For two days they were here drilling and fixing and I was un-packing and dealing with a puking two year old. She screamed and cried and luckily missed the light carpet. Our furnace is now installed and it looks something like this:


I have opened our utility closet door more than once just to see the "pretty" furnace. The basement is cold no matter what the temperature is upstairs, but it is so nice not to have my kitchen be 90 degrees. Just a quick button push away and it all cools down. Now that we have A/C it was time to put some weather stripping on our door. The front door had an inch where from the basement you could look right outside and see who is knocking on the door. A nice feature, but not energy efficient. Robert said he feels very manly in using his tools and fixing the weather stripping. It looks great too!

I worked for days on putting brown contact paper in the cupboards because the old 70's paper would not come off. I finished that and loaded my cupboards with dishes. I was so excited though to finally use one of these- brand new too- after 4 years without one!

And then I was amazed when I used this without going outside, to the next stairwell, down the stairs, inserting 50 cents, setting my timer and coming back 46 minutes later. Instead I just stayed right here and turned it on. Beautiful!



The girls toys are all over the playroom and they really need some shelving for organization so I went to Target and bought this:

Perhaps it is not a bad shelf normally, but the parts did NOT fit and it was 2-3 hours of nightmarish fighting, screaming, pulling out hair until I gave up, shoved it in a box and will soon be taking it right back to Target. If anyone has any easy shelf ideas, let me know. I hated this one. We were tempted to buy one of these today:

We didn't, but we may. We have horrible reseption. We went from free cable to no cable- can't bare to actually pay for it. Now we are down to 4-5 channels total. Its been interesting missing out on my TLC and HGTV. Oh, well. More time to fix up my house!

Our living room has a solitary college dorm chair. College dorm because I got it for free from a room mate when I was in college 7 years ago. It is falling apart and is pretty ugly, but as of right now it is the only thing in there. So we went out today to find a couch. I forgot that I have distant relative friends who work at a local furniture store, but when I walked in it was nice to see familiar faces. I liked a couch that was white and was told it also comes in brown and my nice relative also gave me a friends and family discount. The microfiber couch that was already very discounted, was cut down even more. One of the best deals we have found all over town. In about 2-4 weeks we should be getting something like this delivered to our door, but in brown of course and a little different from this one.


We have also been over run with WEEDS. This home was vacant for awhile so the weeds have taken over. Tonight Robert sprayed them all and hopefully we should see their demise soon. It will be nice when we can get down into the lawn care and I can trim back my rose bushes too. I have to brag about my awesome husband who has been AMAZING at each home repair, cleaning, un- packing, etc. thing to do with this house. He has helped me every step of the way and I am SO impressed by him and have to tell everyone that I married the most awesome guy EVER! Next time we buy a house I will know for sure that it is complete when I have one of these with me:

And sorry I got the last one and there is no sharing AND I am the lucky one because I got the best model there is. Moving, home repairs and buying furniture. Its all fun and we have been happily busy doing it all.

5 comments:

Lori said...

Wow, what fun, Jessa! A new dishwasher and dryer. You must be giddy with excitement! And air conditioning. Hope the bills stay low.

Congratulations, again. Love your blog.

Anonymous said...

Cool! I can't wait to see your yard with grass! It is going to look great.

The Kooky Queen--Rachel said...

I can't wait to take Danny and the girls to your house!!! But do you realize I will *NEVER* be able to come to your house alone, EVER!!? You live on a HIIIIIIIIIIIIIILL!!! I'll die. Or slide back into your neighbor's Mexi-mobile.

Spring said...

Yes, yes, yes! It is SO great to just put your laundry in and not set a timer, and to use a dishwasher and ALL that! So happy for you!

Heather the Mama Duk said...

How exciting to be setting up your home!