Trials, Tribulations, and Sucesses of being a homeowner.

Wow, has it been a loooooooooooong weekend. I spent nearly every waking hour of it working on my house and yard, and I’m still nowhere NEAR being close to finished with it. I knew it’d be a lot of work when I bought it, but I failed to realize just exactly how MUCH work it would be. Live and learn, I suppose.

Despite the amount of work, I’ve found that I actually have enjoyed myself. There’s a sense of satisfaction at getting a job done and seeing the end result, and knowing that it serves to make what you own even better - that’s an amazing feeling.

Friday night, Ann and I finally got around to moving my oversize chair and ottoman out of storage and into the house. It’s the first time I’ve actually been able to USE the thing since I bought it from my sister Beth’s then next door neighbor (who was moving and couldn’t take it), for a ridiculously low price of $100 (it was bought for over $1000, easily, and in excellent condition). Beth was right, it did fit ann and I both comfortably while we watched a movie in HD on my home theater system (Live Free or Die Hard, for those who were curious). It was actually quite nice, relaxing there as a nasty severe storm raged outside.

Saturday I got up early and met up with Ann and headed to Lowes to pick up a weed whacker, and a gas powered lawn mower (the reel mower I bought last week just couldn’t handle the tall grass I had in my yard, so I had to bring in the heavy artillery to beat the grass back into submission. I bought a fairly cheap lawn mower, knowing that it would only be used when the reel mower wasn’t capable of cutting it, and a Troy Bilt 4 cycle gas powered trimmer. We got it all home, and assembled, to find that while the mower worked great, the trimmer wouldn’t start - no matter what we did. I mowed the lawn (figuring out the hard way that the mower wouldn’t work at all if I had it cutting at the shortest setting - I had to set it to the tallest setting to get it to work - due to the length of my grass - and even then it was fairly well bogged down. Mental note - don’t let the grass get that tall again.)

We tried the trimmer again, even calling Ann’s dad who is a wizard when it comes to such things, and still - no dice.

We made, and ate, dinner and then I spent (read: wasted) the rest of the night trying to replace my thermostat with a programmable (and controllable via my computer) one. I got the old thermostat off the wall, making note of which wires went to what (luckily they were properly color coded), and got the new one wired up. The only problem was that when I went and restored power to the system the thermostat remained dead.

The issue there is that it requires a C Wire (Common Wire) to the air handler, and there was none. Now, that’s not to say there weren’t other wires there, there were a few unused that were present, but none of them was the C Wire. I went to the wiring block at the furnace, and found that there was only a single wire hooked up to the C terminal, and that went to the A/C Condenser unit. I found the wire bundle coming into the furnace that (should) go to the thermostat, and picked an unused wire (blue) to hook into the C terminal. Sounds great, right? Wrong. I got everything hooked up on both ends, turned power back on and…. nothing. Still no power to the thermostat. It was about this time that I realized something, and I didn’t like it. The wire bundles - the one at the thermostat and the one at the furnace, weren’t the same. For starters, the wire bundle at the thermostat had an extra wire that the one in the furnace did not (black), but beyond that - while the wire colors were the same, the shades were different. One had a dark blue wire, the other a light blue wire. One a dark green, the other a light green. It would appear (though I’m not an HVAC tech, but I do know wiring) that someone, while installing this stuff, decided it’d be a great idea to SPLICE two separate wire bundles together. I have NO idea where, though, as it would appear that it is now somewhere behind drywall. Adding insult to injury, though, it would appear that the same person didn’t splice ALL of the wires together, just those he was using at the time. INSURING that there would be no upgradability in the future. Nice. Thanks asshole.

I’m still trying to figure out a good solution to this problem, so if anybody has any ideas or thoughts - I’d love to hear them.

Now, on to today. I got up and again met up with Ann to go run errands. We went back to Lowes and returned the weed whacker to exchange for another of the same model (mistake number 1), and picked up an area rug for my great room (mistake number 2, though minor), get a hose and a flashlight. We got it all together, then ran up to target (I got some clothes, looked at some other stuff), grabbed lunch and then headed back home. We got home and while I put the trimmer together Ann gave Poppi a bath and swiffered the great room floor in preparation for the rug. The second trimmer suffered a similar failure as the first - refusing to start at all. I also noticed that the plastic housing around the engine was cracked and pretty battered, definitely good cause for returning it.

I went back inside and Ann was just preparing to roll out the rug. And we did. And were surprised. It was much smaller than we thought it would be.

I called Lowes and found that I could indeed return both items, so we loaded them up and headed back to Lowes. I returned both items, getting a gift card for the trimmer (I needed to buy more stuff, this was OK with me and ended up working out) and a refund to my credit card for the rest.

Ann and I then picked out a different trimmer - a Black and Decker cordless electric trimmer, 18 volt with two batteries and a charger. It was $100 cheaper than the crappy Troy Bilt ( Anybody buying a trimmer - FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING GOOD AND SACRED AVOID TROY BILT!!!), and will likely work light-years better.

We went then on a wild goose chase to find a fireplace screen to prevent Poppi from finding her way into my fireplace and getting soot all over her (as she’s done TWICE now, hence the bath earlier), only to find that it’s considered a seasonal item (why this is so I don’t know, do people not need screens for their fireplaces all year round?) . We then got some food and headed home (I was going to make dinner, but due to erroneous thinking we pushed that to Monday, only to remember as Ann was heading home that she has class and won’t be able to make it. oh well.)

When we got home we decided to start washing my deck, as it was covered in mildew and looked nasty. Ann’s dad had told her about a cheap way of making deck wash, which we were skeptical about until we tried it: A bucket of hot water, about 6 scoops of OxyClean and a little bit of Dawn dishwashing soap, mix it all together. Wet the deck down with a hose then use long handled scrub brushes (can be found at Lowes, probably home depot too) to apply it.

It honestly cut RIGHT through the mold and mildew on my deck and cleaned it up pretty well. It requires a bit of work, and you’ll likely tire out fairly quickly, but if you get a few buckets and a few brushes and convince some friends to come help (might I suggest offering alcoholic beverages?) you can probably get it done pretty easily and fast. It’s supposed to be more ecologically friendly than the deck wash you’d get at a home improvement store. It’s also cheaper.

After that we rolled out the new rug (larger, but still not PERFECT, it’ll work though), and installed a keypad dimmer switch in my bedroom ( look on ywgav for details about that, and the thermostat issue, in the next couple of days).

Now, Ann has gone home and I need to start heading to bed. I should have NO problem falling asleep now.