A little of life lately.

The Engineer and I are itching to get a new project at the house going. It has been a while since we have done any serious work or projects. We took a little time off after we got the sod down in the back yard and in November we took our crazy awesome trip around the world <3 When we got back we spent December with friends and family enjoying the holiday season.

But it's 'bout to be 2015 people. I still have some more trip recaps for you, but lets be real, its time for some work on the house.

Unfortunately...we had to start with some fixes. Grump. Welcome to a 1950's house I guess haha. On the list:

1. Our well for the sprinkler system is on the fritz. Excuse me, our newly installed well is on the fritz. We believe the (brand new) check valve is getting clogged and needs to be cleaned out. That means we have to dig up the well and the entire drop pipe to get to said check valve. Thankfully this time around it is PVC and not galvanized so it will be easier once we just bite the bullet and dig it out. In the meantime we can prime the well by hand and run the sprinklers or use a little spray fan that attaches to the hose to water the lawn.

2. We called in our home warranty (we had a one year one included when we bought the house...and thank goodness because it has been beyond worth it) to fix some components on our stove. The range is gas and when the repair man was trying to figure out what was wrong, it seemed that something was loosened and that gas was leaking after the burners were turned off. He had to order parts so we had several days to wait for him to come back and re install those parts. Since we didn't want our house filling with propane for days, we turned our gas off. No burners for a few days is no big deal but our problem was that there is not an independent shut off for the stove. We had to turn everything off and deal with no hot water too! Eek! At least it made us go to the gym to shower :-D

3. Once we got the stove fixed we turned our gas back on but the water was taking a long time to heat up. We figured it would be fine in the morning buuutt it was not. The pilot light on the water heater was re-lit and you could hear the burner working, but we were not getting hot water anywhere. Sigh. The Engineer went down into our crawl space to inspect and I directly quote, "Oh this is really bad. This is really really bad."

Gulp.

Apparently we had a geyser of hot water under our house. To top that, it was coming from the one and only spot in the crawl space that is inaccessible. Really? You had to be right there huh? I guess all The Engineer could see was water gushing through a little grate in the concrete block wall down there. To top that topping, we found this on December 24th...they day before Christmas...the day before my parents were coming to stay with us...and two days before we were hosting a late Christmas dinner for both our families. Classic.

Luckily, unlike the stove, there is an independent shut off for the hot water heater so we just cut the water and gas to it and still had the range. We dealt with no hot water via boiling water in the microwave and hand washing lots of holiday dishes (dishwasher is hooked to the hot water so that was out of commission too). The dishwasher does double as a nice drying rack though!

Thanks to a great suggestion from my dad, our temporary fix has been to cap off the hot water line before the leak which gives us hot water to the kitchen and one bathroom. We contemplated re-piping the whole house since we have a lot of old galvanized pipe. Since it is so old we don't want to keep putting band aids on it. For now, we are just going to bypass the leaking area entirely and run new pipe to the laundry room and second bathroom. When we get another leak somewhere else we will re-pipe that area.

Hopefully we will finish these few tasks quickly so we can get to some fun new stuff!! Do we get any credit for decorating the house for Christmas? I think we should :)

Thanks for stopping by!