The Woes of Being a Homeowner

Being a homeowner is very different from what I expected. It's not nearly as glamorous for sure, and it's a lot of work. We're way behind where I thought we would be at this point. For that reason, sometimes I regret not buying a newer home. Sometimes I think we are going to end up spending just as much as if we had bought one of the new construction townhomes we looked at once we do everything we want to do. I know that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems that way sometimes. I have to remind myself that we bought the house as more of an investment than anything. The amount of money we were going to spend in rent for the 5-7 years we plan on being here was absolutely ridiculous (and that's just with a small 1 bedroom apartment...anything larger would have been even more ridiculous!), and we did get a good deal. Not only that, but I was just plan sick of apartment living. It was definitely a lot less responsibility, but I love having a place to call ours! And, even if we don't actually make money on the house once we sell, we've learned a LOT! There are things I know to look for now that I would have never considered before owning a home. There are things that I have realized are or are not actually that important when it comes down to it. I know this is going to be a great experience when it's all said and done, and I definitely wouldn't want to go back to apartment living, but sometimes it's just frustrating.

There are tons of changes we want to make to our house, from simple updates or renovations to adding a deck. By this time, I thought we would have our kitchen completely renovated. We're not even close. One obvious reason is money. Every project, big or small, seems to end up costing more than we think. There are those "little" things we need to get for projects that add up really quickly. Also, I didn't think about those things we would HAVE to spend money on, like fixing a leaky window or replacing a water heater (more on that later). Of course I knew there would be repairs, I just didn't think they would come soon. The other reason is TIME. There's never enough of it. Since we're beginners at this homeowner thing and neither of us are particularly handy, our projects always take longer than we plan. For this reason, we're making some changes to the way we plan for projects. We're going to plan for the project to take twice as long as we think it will and 1.5 times as much as we think it will cost. This will account for the numerous trips to Lowe's to pick up tools we didn't think we would need. Haha.

Now, back to the water heater, the main reason for this post. It went out on us. That's bad enough. What's worse? It went out when we had 4 guests in the house! I felt SO bad. Some of them got lucky and only had to endure 1 cold shower, others (sorry Hutch!) were pretty much screwed for 4 days. Josh researched some stuff and tried a few things on the water heater. In the end, the heating coil was corroded or something and the whole thing needed to be replaced. We did a bit of research and picked out a water heater. We decided to have it installed. Josh has learned very quickly that he hates anything plumbing related. He had already been trying to repair the thing for several days. He was just burnt out. Lowe's had same day installation if you ordered before noon. That worked perfectly. Josh ordered it on Thursday. Well, same day installation was $100 extra, so we decided one more day wouldn't kill us. They only had one in stock that they could deliver soon (and it wasn't the one we picked out, but at least it was cheaper). So, we were getting our new water heater on Friday. Yay for hot water! Nope, no hot water of Friday. The lady taking the order didn't think to tell Josh that someone needed to come in to sign a contract before they would send anyone out, and she didn't update the phone number on file with the number Josh gave her (they had Josh's phone number on file...Josh lost his phone). Mid-day Friday we still hadn't heard a thing. That's when I called to figure out what was going on. This is when I found out we had to go to Lowe's first. We went in after work to sign the contract. Someone finally made it out on Monday to install the water heater. So...several hundred dollars and a week later, we could take hot showers again!

Luckily, I have an amazing husband who warmed water on the stove for me to take baths rather than cold showers, so the bathing part wasn't so bad. Washing dishes was horrible, it's so much harder to get dishes clean with cold water! For this reason, we decided to put off brewing our Christmas beer for a week :-/ Hot water is definitely one of those things we took for granted.