The Cost of Home Ownership - Part III

Well, lets see, in the past few months we've had...

The main high shelf/hanger in our master closet come completely off the wall, ripping large holes where the screws and nails were pried through. We had a couple of "closet companies" in for estimates but went with a cabinet maker who built to fit and customized as we requested. The result is a much nicer, much more expensive master closet. The cedar backing does make it smell nice in there now!

The dishwasher die on us, as I have mentioned before. The repairman said the motor was dead and for the price of getting it repaired we could have a new dishwasher. The result was a new dishwasher, which we like very much, thank you.

A number of faucets were having a number of problems. We got a plumber in and he fixed what he could. We special ordered faucets from Lowes, but they didn't come in on time and when they finally did come in, they were someone else's order. We canceled with them and went to a local store that does faucets, sinks, tubs and toilets only. We special ordered from them as well and our Danish faucets came in last week. They are very modern looking and makes us want to redo all the bathrooms. Maybe some other day.

We had people out give estimates for trimming our trees. One of the companies actually noticed that the birch tree near the front window of our house was cracking the perimeter walls of our lot, so we had the tree removed along with the vines that have been growing on our house for nine years now. They took out the birch, leaving only a stump.

Once the vines were removed from the house, we needed to get it painted. We had a number of painters come in and give estimates. Some plain scared us with how inexpensively they said they would paint the house. We ended up going with the most expensive, because he was the only one to show up at the house with paint all over him and the only one who seemed to know what he was talking about and the only one who could not paint the house immediately. The painting was scheduled to begin yesterday, but...

Last week our neighbor complained that our sprinklers were going haywire on the side of the house as we were sometimes flooding his yard with our water. We had the gardeners look at the sprinklers, but that was not the problem. The problem was the drain that runs along the side of our house was plugged somewhere. We called the plumbers back and they tried to snake the drain from both ends to no avail. They said it was blocked completely near the birch stump.

Today we had an arborist remove the stump and tomorrow the plumbers come back to dig out the pipe and hopefully repair it. With all this going on, digging, drains backing up, etc., we couldn't schedule a painter until this is handled. So, last week we called and postponed the painting. The painter is in such demand that he does not have another opening until February.

We still have electrical issues that need to be handled inside and out and the cleaning woman mentioned today that there is a leak so some sort in the laundry room.

Our house: ten years old, going on 100.