Seriously, they make life SO much easier.
When we first decided to get this place I had several friends comment that the tile floors would be horrible, but I love having them. They’re so much easier than carpet.
The previous owners left us steam cleaners, and a Swiffer wetjet so I didn’t even have to buy anything special to clean them with, and especially now that we have a cat AND a two-year old, they’re a Godsend.

Any time the munchkin whips off his diaper and marks his territory or the cat decides she wants to puke up a lizard on the floor while it’s gross, it’s not a four hour repeat dab/clean job, just wipe and wash.

I remember when the munchkin was a few months old and I had carelessly left barbeque sauce out within his reach we were cleaning that carpet stain for MONTHS and it was still there when we moved out, the other day he spilled twice as much barbeque sauce and you can’t tell!

It’s great. I don’t think I’m ever going back to carpet.

It’s dangerous for me to go into home improvement stores. I see so many things I want to buy and get, but it’s just not feasible. I have to remind myself that the house doesn’t need all these things right now we can get them gradually.

Sure it would be nice to have patio furniture for the deck, an ornamental fountain, start a fruit and vegetable garden, put plants around the borders of the yard, and even buy a hot tub (something my husband wants to do) but we don’t need all that.

I saw a really nice outdoor bench and table at Ace Hardware yesterday which was only $90, but how would I get it home in my dinky car? and the $90 is better served going towards food for Saturday and gas for today. It’s easy in this commercial era of immediate gratification to let your wants become your needs, but especially when hubbie and I are trying to get our debt to income ratio down, down DOWN, we need to stop spending. Besides once we’re sorted there’s a good chance we could find half the stuff we want through something like FreeCycle, and let someone else reuse things that we don’t need in return.

One of the problems we’re experiencing in our house is lack of storage space, or more accurately storage space of the wrong type. There are many things that we need to store but can’t use certain cupboards and cabinets for because of the almost-two-year-old tornado (the munchkin). For example, we have some liquor and it would be great to use wine racks for that, but I’ve seen at his grandparent’s house that wine racks are disastrous if they’re kept at lower level, and we have no where stable enough to keep a wine rack at a level out of his reach, so all the liquor is on top of the fridge, which disrupts the use of the above-the-fridge cabinets.

The other night he tipped over one of the DVD cabinets we have, well, actually, the only remaining DVD cabinet that we have (the rest of the DVDs are on wall racks). This cabinet stores the DVD box sets which won’t fit in the wall racks because they’re too wide. Now the glass door is broken off and the cabinet is essentially a shelf now. I’m just thankful that he isn’t all scratched up from the glass breakage, because as I was telling the man at Ace Hardware yesterday you can’t put a price on your child’s life.

I was ordering some wire fencing because we ran out and have only done half the fence, and he says, “Well, that’s our most expensive by-the-foot, just so you know, we have some other that’s half the price,” and I said, “Yes, but if I get that with the bigger gauge, he’ll be able to climb the fence easily, but the other with the tiny squares (1/4 inch) he won’t be able to climb, and the whole point of the fence is to keep him in the back yard so he doesn’t escape and get run over on the street,”

“Good point,” the guy replied and cut me 25 feet of fence wire, because it’s so worth $75 of fence to know my son’s safe, right?

The last project that we have going on right now is sorting some things out in the yard. We’ve got a fire pit dug and have been lining it with broken paving stones which apparently used to be under a shed which the previous owners had taken with them. Well…we actually wonder if it wasn’t a grow house with some of the things we hear about them ;_; but anyway…

I’m not really up on too much garden decor, but I do want to put the fencing up as I’ve said many times, and I want to clear up some of the jungle that we have. I’m not sure if we’ll do much more otherwise except get a BBQ pit that doesn’t look as though it should be used as a torture device, or maybe get a swing set or mini playground for the munchkin. I don’t envy any plants that we try to grow because he’ll probably just destroy them riding around on his tricycle, or Nimue will dig them up looking for a place to pee.

As many of you probably know owning a house is a lot of work. We’ve been fixing up the yard recently and need to put a fence in, still. We’re probably going to have to get some air tools before we do something like that, and some fencing.

We’re trying to find a way to get things sorted out for cheap. I love to recycle materials when I get a chance, but I think we’re going to have to get things new if we want the fence to be any good. I’m looking at options online so that I can see which the best way to set things up would be. The intent is that the munchkin will have a place to play with access to the deck in the back yard and some of the yard but not the fire pit and not the road where our neighbors are sometimes not so cautious.

Slowly, but surely our house is getting fit and ready.
I spent the last few days sorting out the blinds and putting them in the bedrooms. We don’t have anything as fancy as roller shades, but the previous owner had left the venetian blinds in the garage, and I’ve been able to work out which one fits where, and also got new curtains for the living room and the screen doors that aren’t all nicotine stained.

We’ve got to decide if our next big project is the stairs or the fencing in the back yard. I think the back yard will probably be it, because that’s more up for the munchkin’s safety. He can’t seem to grasp that he can’t run out of the yard and into the street, or that he can’t just go running up into the neighbor’s yard and take their things. We also have some bushes we need to take out of the front of the yard because their berries are toxic.

…and not a drop to drink. At least that’s what we have if you believe RainSoft.

Sometimes a free gift is not worth the hassle. Home Depot told me we could get a $20 gift card if we had them come out and test our water. So, I agreed. We’ve been spending a lot of money at Home Depot lately. Well, the guy from “them” showed up to do a presentation about RainSoft water. He showed up at 1 p.m. and was here for about two hours bumbling around, putting water in cups mixing it with other things, and testing to see what was wrong with it.

He was mortified that we had sulfury water and didn’t want to run certain things so he didn’t clog his system up with sulfur. He showed us that we have some iron content which will stain our clothes once the washer and dryer are installed, but said that we have fairly soft water around a 4, and 3.5 is the top end of ideal according to his little charts. He also said that he thought the reason we keep having air making the water sputter out of our taps is because there might be a breach in the line somewhere, so we should have that checked out.

But not to worry he can hook us up with a system to fix all of our water problems, put an air purifier on too and add something else to our a/c to stop pollution and allergens and all the rest of it, plus give us 5 years worth of soaps, cleaning supplies, shampoos and conditioners, laundry detergent and membership into a shopper’s program as a “thank you” and it would be $14000 plus $1300 install, but oh, if we fill out a survey on his presentation he can get someone to do the whole thing for around $8500, no money down. Eeeesh.

They’re good at their bombardment of information, because he almost had us agreeing to it. Man, would that have been a mistake. I’m all for fixing the water so that we can get away with using less chemical products in the house, but not at a monthly price that’s going to mean we can’t live in the house, aside from the fact that we probably don’t need to put three tanks in the back yard and all the rest of it.

We have a friend who works for a different water company, a local branch of Ecowater, and our original intention had been to listen to have him come up and test the water some time, before I got suckered by the gift card and everything.

I’m not really sure how the systems the RainSoft guy was talking about worked. I don’t think he was either, really, he mentioned humidifiers and burm and ultraviolet lights and warranties, and coupons. He kept going on about the evils of sulfur and zinc and what-have-you, but anyway.

Today we had our friend come out and test the water, and he sat down with us and went over all the results, there’s no sulfur, there is some iron, but really not that much and the water hardness according to his color scale and meter is around 7-8. He did another test to see if there was any bacteria or things like that in the water and that came out with some, more if he had on the hot water. So, he feels that the reason we have the sulfur smell is that we have some kind of bacteria in our hot water tank feasting on the iron and the sulfur smell is being generated when their waste decomposes.

We’ve also found out that the problems with our well are because it’s a shallow well and the Florida water table is about a foot low so it’s having a harder time pumping.

RainSoft called today wanting to schedule an install. I had to go through this whole mess with someone on the phone because, “They hardly ever have cancellations, and so they’re very worried that their rep may have offended us in some way,” because, of course, no one would ever not want their system because it’s ludicrously over-priced and half of it is unnecessary anyway. They were saying that if we changed our mind they could have someone out today or tomorrow to install the system. That we’ll get a cancellation notice in the mail and it’s still not too late to change our minds. We theorize they may call us again in a few days and try to cut us a better deal. They did that with my parents five or six years ago, and they tried with my father-in-law also I found out today, and he found he could fix his problems himself by spending only $400 at Home Depot for a water softener.

Ah, well, you live and learn.

Right now I’m working on recopying the “Spread the Word” list directory into the post from my site. I was trying to do an update on the list this morning because it’s been several months since I checked on it, and the entire content of my post wound up disappearing instead. I’m not sure what caused it.

I’m taking a break from unpacking boxes. We seem to have a never-ending supply. I’m trying to find a couple of things that we have to turn into the old apartment complex in order to be done with them; but they seem to have disappeared completely. It’s very frustrating. I want to be done with them. I’m mentally done with them already…but this is hanging over our head at the minute.

Other things are going well. Hubbie and I are trying to decide which upgrade we’re going to do to the new home first. We lack a washer and dryer at the minute, but we also want to do work in the back yard so that we can fence portions off and let the munchkin play out there without so much risk of him running out into the street. I think the washer and dryer are winning at the minute though. I think the people who have the house next door to us are doing some major renovations. The place was for sale when we bought this one, and had been on the market for a bit as well, but looked in pretty grungy condition. I’m not sure if they’re new owners who are just bustling away to do real estate flipping or if it’s the original owners who were waiting to do all the work for whatever reasons. The house is a lot cleaner now, and they’ve painted it bright orange. I feel bad for them right now because this place is now looking a bit dingy given the yard is completely over grown as we haven’t had chance to tackle that yet. I didn’t think it looked so bad and then I went for a walk down the street and it looks like someone dropped a jungle over our house.

I think our things which have been left at the old apartment are multiplying while we’re not there. I swear it looked as though there wasn’t that much stuff. My husband even told me there wasn’t that much stuff…yet despite being there a few hours yesterday we only got the munchkin’s room and the main bathroom emptied. We got most of the spare bedroom cleaned out too but my husband’s weight lifting equipment had to stay because it was too heavy for my Mum and I to wrangle.

Last night I went and got some more things. I’m planning on doing a champagne breakfast this morning for hubbie and I but I had forgotten until last night when I was over at a friend’s house doing holiday get together with them that as of yet none of the cooking utensils had made it to our new house, so I had to swing by and get them and figured I may as well load up the car with other things while I was there.

We now have a tree up and a bit more holiday decorations. I wrapped some tinsel (garland) around the stair rail and hung up a couple of ornaments which are too heavy for the “chibi-tree” on the curtain rods in the front of the house. We look a bit more festive and it feels nice to have these things up, like this is really going to be our home.

Today I have to make a trip to Home Depot. I figure I will see if I can’t grab some more things from the old place while I’m in that neck of the woods. We should have the phone being connected and we’re going over to my FILs to do Christmas things there given my SIL has to fly back to NY tomorrow morning because she has work on the 26th.

We were told the cable company would be here between 4 and 7 p.m. to hook up the internet, so I figured that meant we would be waiting at almost 8 p.m. wondering where the heck he was, but he got here just before 5 p.m!

He was really thorough and even left me a USB wireless adapter so it would be easier for the computer to access the internet given one of the two cable jacks is up in the loft area, and we would have had to run a cat5 cable from the loft through the stairs and down and it would have looked ugly. That was really cool of him.

We’re all exhausted, of course, but the munchkin settled down really well considering it’s his first night in a strange house, but we made sure that the stop sign came in the first truck load so that was up in his room right away so that things would look as familiar as possible.

It’s going to be a lonely first night for me, though because hubbie’s on duty. I’m torn I want to get everything out and up and away but I’m tired and want to go to bed too…

We have to give huge thanks to our friend Jer who came over to help even though he’s suffering from a cold and got most of the truck loaded given our movers were delayed by a burst water main, and my Mum who brought breakfast and stayed until 9 p.m. so that we could get the munchkin’s crib in as it was too wide for the door into his room and had to be dismantled and reassembled.

We still have stuff to get from the other place and the whole thing to clean from top to bottom before we can turn the keys in BUT all the big stuff is in, and I put up a little bit of decorations. I’ll post some pics tomorrow.