Monday, July 26, 2010

The joys of owning your own house

Hello friends! Hope your weekend went well.
Mine did not. It was stinkin' hot and humid and we had a fiasco. 
First of all, our a/c has not been working right (as in when we get home from work it is 88degrees in the house and it will cool to 78degrees by 11pm) and freezing up, etc for months. So I was able to get someone to come and look at it. They cleaned the outside unit, added more freon to allow it to cool. They also told me that I needed to rebuild the wall that used to be between the a/c unit and the water heater. Ok. THANK YOU so much! I am not sitting in the house sweating now.

Problem is, once we got the a/c fixed, our water heater went out (the very next day). I had someone come look at it too, and they confirmed it was the water heater leaking, not the recently fixed a/c unit (thank goodness).
So now we have to find a new water heater (cheapest is at Lowes) and get it home (how do you do that in a car?). We were lucky enough to have lots of help for this one. We got a 10% off coupon from my husband's boss for Lowes. We were also able to talk to people and get a piece of sheetrock for the new little wall and borrowed a truck. We got the new water heater home, tried to drain the old one and found out that was not as easy as it should have been. It took a while with trial and error. Then we dried up the floors and stuck a fan in there to dry out the sheetrock walls so they won't mold on us. We thought everything was going good, so we called to ask friends if we could shower at their house since we were done for the night. Once we got back home we checked again and one of the copper pipes was draining water...still...on the floor. Great. How do we make THAT pipe quit draining water? The water to the house is turned off! We tried hooking the hose up to it, tried sealing it...all to no avail. Finally hubby was able to poke a stick in it to make it quit. Mostly. Sometimes the most basic of fixes are the ones that work.
We went to bed (after needing another shower and not getting one) at 1:30 am.
We woke up the next day hoping to find a dry floor and walls so we could install the new water heater and be done. Problem is we didn't get the new plastic drain pipe to replace the one we broke taking it out, so we had to make another trip to Lowes. This time we got everything. Get home and install the new water heater, turn on the water and a faucet and let the thing fill up. Then we flip the breaker back on for the water heater. WE HAVE HOT WATER! Yah! Everything looks good. I start cleaning the kitchen, running the dishwasher, washing dishes by hand...hubby starts working on the yard. We get cleaned up and ready for bed and we check it out once more before calling it good. We see that the top connectors that we are not using are leaking now. Sheesh! And to top it off, we have to go buy a tool to tighten it, because we don't have that particular one needed (previous note that we had everything we needed: scratch from the records). Thanks Whirlpool.
I can now say that we have cool air and hot water. It took a lot of sweat and frustration, but we got it.
Hope your week goes well!

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