When we decided to buy our new house we knew we were walking into a long term project that would take many years to complete. Not only were we going to be living in this house for the foreseeable future, but we were also looking at it as an investment. And after a few days of settling in we were ready to make of our first (of many), trips to Lowes. We moved from Standale to Lamont, which doesn't seem like a big difference but wow, driving into Grandville felt like we were on a road trip! We really are in the country now and will have to plan our outings to consolidate errands together.
The first and most pressing thing on our list was toilets. The house has three bathrooms and two of them were having functioning issues (we won't even talk about the zebra print wallpapered tub or purple walls yet!). Getting these two bathrooms usable was a project my father-in-law, Don, was willing to tackle and we were more than happy to buy him all the parts he wanted! We also picked up a couple light fixtures (more on these later), and then we filled up the cart with miscellaneous things like a rod to put in the master bedroom closet, which didn't have one (seriously?!), and a new, heavy duty shop vac to clean the pellet stove.
We've never had a pellet stove before, but with a house that's almost 150 years old and around 3,000 square feet, we knew we had to use the one that was in the house, in order to keep our gas bills from being insane. The stove we have is an insert that goes into the living room's fireplace and it seemed pretty straightforward to run. HA! This thing is temperamental and it quickly became the bane of Nick's existence. He finally narrowed his troubleshooting down to improper ventilation/air flow and we may need to do some duct/chimney work on it this summer. For now it's working, more or less, and I haven't heard the old, 80% efficiency furnace running too much, so hopefully it's helping us keep our gas bill down!
And then we also had to deal with the non-working oven situation, (we had also discovered three of the five burners didn't work). The house came with a home warranty on appliances, but after I did some research on the company we decided to not even bother with it, because of the horrible reviews and numerous claims against the company submitted by unhappy customers to the BBB. So, an unexpected $500 later, we now have a new stove. I really like it because it has the fifth burner with a built in griddle. That will definitely come in handy!
We also had Stanley Steemer come out and clean the air ducts. They were here for almost three hours, and while clean ducts are not something you can physically see and it was another $500 out the door, it feels so much better to know that the ducts are now clean and the air quality in our house is better. Since they've been cleaned Violet's puffy eyes have calmed down and no one is coughing anymore!
The first and most pressing thing on our list was toilets. The house has three bathrooms and two of them were having functioning issues (we won't even talk about the zebra print wallpapered tub or purple walls yet!). Getting these two bathrooms usable was a project my father-in-law, Don, was willing to tackle and we were more than happy to buy him all the parts he wanted! We also picked up a couple light fixtures (more on these later), and then we filled up the cart with miscellaneous things like a rod to put in the master bedroom closet, which didn't have one (seriously?!), and a new, heavy duty shop vac to clean the pellet stove.
We've never had a pellet stove before, but with a house that's almost 150 years old and around 3,000 square feet, we knew we had to use the one that was in the house, in order to keep our gas bills from being insane. The stove we have is an insert that goes into the living room's fireplace and it seemed pretty straightforward to run. HA! This thing is temperamental and it quickly became the bane of Nick's existence. He finally narrowed his troubleshooting down to improper ventilation/air flow and we may need to do some duct/chimney work on it this summer. For now it's working, more or less, and I haven't heard the old, 80% efficiency furnace running too much, so hopefully it's helping us keep our gas bill down!
And then we also had to deal with the non-working oven situation, (we had also discovered three of the five burners didn't work). The house came with a home warranty on appliances, but after I did some research on the company we decided to not even bother with it, because of the horrible reviews and numerous claims against the company submitted by unhappy customers to the BBB. So, an unexpected $500 later, we now have a new stove. I really like it because it has the fifth burner with a built in griddle. That will definitely come in handy!
We also had Stanley Steemer come out and clean the air ducts. They were here for almost three hours, and while clean ducts are not something you can physically see and it was another $500 out the door, it feels so much better to know that the ducts are now clean and the air quality in our house is better. Since they've been cleaned Violet's puffy eyes have calmed down and no one is coughing anymore!
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| New Stove |