As The World Spins

Due to the nature of my husband’s job we’ve moved often-thirteen times to be exact. This meant we did not spend a lot of time living in any one house. Fast forward to retirement and the house we have now lived in for thirteen years. A record for us by far. And while staying in a house this long has brought us comfort and ease, there have also been a few surprises of the maintenance variety.

He Shoots, He Scores

My husband grew up at the hockey rink and the baseball diamond. This while his father built two family homes and a lake cabin from the ground up and at the age of 92 still knows how to fix pretty much anything. You see where I’m going with this? Yes, that’s right – he was and is a talented athlete, but a handyman, not so much.

Full disclosure – I knew this when I married him so I can’t really complain and honestly it was not really a problem over the years, because we never lived anywhere long enough to have to deal with many big maintenance or repair issues. Until recently, when it seems the time has come to pay the proverbial piper…

All Washed Up

For the last few years, we had a washing machine that sounded like a 747 landing in our house when it was in the spin cycle. I wish I could say I am grossly exaggerating (well maybe just a little) but you literally could not carry on a conversation in the vicinity of the washing machine it was so loud. And given that it was located just off the kitchen, this was a problem. After many months of this racket and my husband insisting that the noise wasn’t that bad, I was desperate. And you know the saying – desperate times call for desperate measures, so I started running the washer early in the morning while he was still asleep. I have no idea if this tactic is what convinced him we needed a new washer, but he did finally agree that after thirteen years it was time to get a new one.

I immersed myself in the details of making this purchase and quickly realized that things had changed a lot since I last bought a washing machine. You now need a degree in engineering in order to figure out which one to buy. Front load or top load, agitator or no agitator, wifi compatible or not, deep wash, turbo wash, and what the heck is an inverter direct drive motor anyway? After wading through all the decisions and reading way too many reviews, I finally made my choice, only to be told I would have to wait for two months for my washing machine to arrive.

Thankfully, it arrived last week and I felt like I had won the lottery! Peace and quiet were just the push of a few buttons away. As soon as the delivery people were out the door I was ready to do my first load, but not so fast. So many buttons, bells and whistles to figure out.

After resorting to reading the manual and some trial and error I think I now have the basics figured out, however I am still not clear on the difference between turbo wash and deep wash and why you would need the capability to start your washer remotely.

All Decked Out

We have a nice deck in the front and back of our house. One of the things that appealed when we bought our house was that they were both immaculate and painted white to match the house trim. They looked lovely until… a few years in, the paint started to crack and peel on our back deck. After several rounds of repainting and the paint again cracking and peeling, we began to feel like we were in the Groundhog Day movie. Clearly something had to be done.

I wanted to have the deck redone but my husband thought we could just put down a rug. So being the agreeable wife that I am, we put down a rug. But after still having paint chips from the deck tracked all over the house and one of the deck steps collapsing from water damage, I got my way. As of this writing the deck redo has just been completed.

I won’t bore you with the details but suffice to say, the three day project turned into a seven day project and it was a toss up who was happier to have it finished, the contractor or me. I may or may not have unleashed my inner Harvey (our father) and gone just a teensy bit overboard on the small details…

Water, Water Everywhere

Another feature about our house that really appealed to us was an automatic underground irrigation system. We’ve never had such a system before and so it was a real novelty to wake up in the morning to a well watered lawn with out lifting a finger. We lived with this happily for several years, and then for some reason it stopped working.

The short term fix my husband devised was to manually pull up the irrigation heads until there was enough water pressure to get the water flowing. This took two of us to accomplish which meant the neighbours often got to see me out on the front lawn in my house coat getting soaked and expressing my displeasure loudly.

After a few of the neighbours commented about this to my husband, he decided to find a work around so that I would not have to be out there.😁 It involves propping the sprinkler heads up with rocks until the water pressure will keep them up. As you can imagine this is rather labor intensive and so, I’m happy to report that fixing the irrigation system has moved closer to the top of the “things that need repairing” list. I hope that by this summer we will be back to our carefree, hands free, nobody gets wet, lawn watering.

The List Goes On

So I’m guessing by now you get the idea that we really are rookies when it comes to home maintenance and repairs. That said, we are well settled into our house and plan to be here for the foreseeable future and so will have many more home improvement adventures ahead I’m sure. Perhaps HGTV would be interested in a show about us, or maybe the Comedy Network.

And this just in – our recently installed new toilet now “sings” every time it is flushed. Will it never end?