What's New?

Well let's see... What's new? In the past month and a half, a LOT is new!

For starters...

Tom's green station wagon bit it. It was an awesome car for him for so many years. Honda doesn't mess around. Unfortunately, it's time had come. It is pictured here in the car auction yard.

We said goodbye to the green wagon and headed down to CAR WARS at the mall parking lot. Every car dealership in town was pricing their used inventory to move at this big event. Tom rolled off the lot in a totally pimped out 2009 Ford Fusion. It has mood lighting and butt warmers. And it talks to his cell phone.

Oh, what else is new???

The control panel on our furnace. (There were a few chilly days before it got fixed, but no biggie!) Turns out that when a turtle worked his way into our a/c system last summer and flooded it into the garage, the flood took out the control panel. Oops!

Then, a few days later...

The control panel on our dishwasher went out. Must have been something in the control panel air!

Never fear. A nice appliance technician (courtesy of our home warranty) came out and for a small fee replaced it. But he noticed something... There was a leak under the dishwasher. (Completely not related to the control panel) Darned copper piping. I guess it sometimes fails!

That probably explains the staining around the edges of my hardwood floors I had noticed the previous few days.

SO, we had a nice gentleman bring some giant air movers (not to be confused with fans. Seriously. You may offend the nice gentleman if you call it a fan.) He also brought some sledgehammers and serious cleaners and tore up the damaged hardwood floor.

BUT... the leak didn't just damage the hardwood floors... It leaked into our bedroom too! Oh no! The carpet!

More air movers.

Then we got to go to a store and choose new wood floors for our ENTIRE house (except bedrooms). We decided to try something new! We chose a 4 inch reddish dark brown hickory. We like it. We also got new carpet for the bedroom! (But we liked the previous color, so we got pretty much the same thing again).

We had to move out of our house (and into my parents' house) for a few weeks while the really loud stuff and heavy machinery were here. It just wasn't a good place for little kids to be.

Of course the dishwasher was unhooked for about 6 weeks. Somehow, this ended up causing our garbage disposal to form a leak. Not to worry! We got a new garbage disposal too!

The holiday season wouldn't be complete without a big guy on our roof.

So I called in a roofing expert after I noticed that every person on our block (no joke) is getting a new roof after the hail damage from summer storms this year. Turns out we need a new roof too! The insurance guy walked around up there and declared that we had some pretty severe damage, despite the fact that there are no leaks- yet. We'll probably wait until temps rise a bit and get the new roof put on this spring. In the meantime, we can contemplate our color choices. Who knew there were so many varieties of shingles?

It may sound like a giant pain in the rear end to have all of this stuff happen, and it kind of was. But we did get some beautiful new floors out of the deal. I met a lot of really great contractors and I now have business cards for just about any type of home problem that could come up. I'm hoping I won't need them anytime soon. Between our Home Warranty (which we got when we purchased house) and our Homeowners Insurance, we did have some out of pocket expenses for deductibles and service fees, but everything in the house was covered. Tom loves his (safe and reliable) new car and we're warm and dry. Who could ask for anything more?

Well... now that you mention it, I actually would love to paint our kitchen cabinets white, get a new faucet, sink, and granite countertops. But, that's just too much to think about right now. In time... :)