One thing leads to another

I am so happy with the house that Jason and I purchased.  Honestly, I never dreamed I would own a grown-up house, I always had this feeling that the place I was going to be able to afford would be a little "less than".  It turns out, when you stop comparing yours with the house that Bill Gates lives in you can look at your own with a more realistic sense of pride and value.  I love our house, it has great light, there is plenty of storage and our kitchen is fabulous.

No offense to Jason's condo, where we lived together for about a year, but this place feels like my home.  We are having fun making it ours. We've got the furniture we like, the play areas (TV... not anything dirty) set up and are now just working on the details.  Even though the house is new, I am genuinely shocked by the list of "to dos".

When we did our walk through we immediately identified that we wanted cupboards above the counter in the fun walkway between the kitchen and the dining room.  Heck, we even priced them out, but have since opted to wait.


Our list changed to less visible things like power.  There was a circuit in the kitchen that made the lights over our table flicker.  There is a fabulous closet in our master bath, but no light so it is DARK DARK DARK in there.  It was so dark (how dark was it?) that we had a battery operated camp light hanging so we could find the extra toilet paper.

Other things on our list are a modification to the deck/patio in our back yard.  This will likely be a next summer activity because yesterday we had a heat-pump installed.  A heat-pump is a step up from an air conditioner.  A/C has one job, cooling.  A heat-pump does the cooling but also pulls warm air out of the outside area to keep the inside warm.  If the temperatures drops too much the back up heater will kick in.   Heat-pumps provide more consistent house temperatures and use less energy.  The energy claim I find hard to understand, but there were charts and figures. 

A/C was in our future no matter what, and I'm pleased we were able to come up with a solution that works for us year round rather than just a few weeks during the year. 

While I didn't want to learn anything about A/C or Heat-pumps I wasn't able to sit back like the princess I think I am and just have it installed.  We ended up getting multiple bids (4) and doing lots of reading about products and installers. In the end, we found a company and a product that we liked.

Yesterday, there were three huge trucks at our house and at one time I counted 6 workers.  In addition to installing the heat pump thing outside, they had to move the existing heater in our attic to make room for whatever connects to our system and we had an electrician on site who fixed our strange kitchen power situation and installed a light in the bathroom closet.

It was a long day (with them doing the work) and me trying to focus on my job.  I will say, they were as quiet and as unobtrusive as you could imagine, but I was READY for them to leave last night.

So, our list of "things we need" is getting smaller, but we noticed this morning that the ladder they used to get into our attic did a number on the ceiling access area and it really needs to be repainted.  Because of my time at Daly's I am the resident in-house painter, so on our next free Saturday I'll be on a ladder with paint in hand.

I'm hopeful that when I'm up there paining that I don't spot anything else that we need to do.  I'm sure, like all home owners there will always be some maintenance project - but I'm pretty confident that we'll get to get the bikes out and play.  The house won't be our only hobby.

I do apologize to you if you were hoping for a HOT HOT summer.  Because we've had the heat pump / a/c installed Jason and I pretty much have jinxed us for a gray and cool summer season.  Sorry.