home. (again. and hopefully for good!)

hey y’all! guess what!

I’m hooooome!

Again.

Our *NEW* air conditioning unit was installed and hooked up to electricity on Friday. We decided to bug bomb the house on Friday night and let it air out on Saturday, and we moved most of our stuff back in our house on Saturday afternoon, then we spent the first night back in our house on Saturday night.

It. Was. Heavenly. I was so glad to be HOME and sleep in my OWN bed and watch television in MY chair.

Monday morning, we went over to my mother-in-law’s house to finish packing up the last of our stuff and clean the house/wash the laundry, etc.  We spent a few hours there cleaning up and packing the car, then came home and unloaded everything.

A few hours later, Stephen decided to go crawling under our house to look for a leak that we’ve been dealing with for a few months. Do not ask me why we did not do this earlier, or while we were out of the house during those 4 weeks. It will only aggravate me.

We knew that we had a leak because our water bill had been astronomical for a month or two before we moved out. While we weren’t living here, we shut the water off at the road in order to avoid the situation.  Well, Stephen immediately saw the leak – coming from underneath our refrigerator. (Which, coincidentally, was one of the things that I missed the most while I was living at my mother-in-law’s house.)

Apparently something happened whenever we got our new fridge installed and hooked up to the water line. And it’s been leaking ever since. It was kind of just dripping straight down, since we have a pier-and-beam house. We never knew.

So anyway, we ended up having to shut our water off and move BACK into my  mother-in-law house… on the SAME day that we had finished moving all of our junk out. I was super upset because we had seriously – just hours earlier – finished packing up the rest of our stuff. I cried. A lot. Mainly because I was mad because we hadn’t taken care of the situation already.

But we were able to get somebody out to the house today and get it fixed. And now I’m back in my house. Again. Hopefully for good. :)

There is a HUGE positive to the A/C situation. When it burned down, we got a lot of different people to look at it and give us their opinion regarding what we should do about it. While it would have been much cheaper to just replace our outside unit (which was the only thing that had burned) we discussed the possibility of replacing our inside furnace unit, as well. We have had a natural gas furnace since we moved into this house, but it is the only thing that is gas and it was very old and outdated and not really running properly. We had some scary issues with it last winter, and the unit was located in Christopher’s bathroom – right on the other side of the wall from his bed. I HATED the fact that an unreliable old furnace with a pilot light was basically right next to Christopher’s head. In the past, we had discussed replacing it with a newer furnace or an electric furnace, but it was pretty expensive and we knew that we would not be staying in this house long-term, so we had decided to “deal with it.”

When the A/C caught fire and we started talking about options to replace it, we decided to look into replacing the furnace. It was going to be about double the cost, but with the problems we’d had with it last winter and considering the fact that our insurance covered about half of it, we decided to go ahead and replace the old gas furnace with a new electric one.

The new A/C unit is MUCH more efficient! We can already tell that it blows harder and cooler! I am hoping that the heat will be more efficient as well. Either way, I am thankful knowing that we no longer have to deal with gas. The possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning always scared me.

Okay – now that I’ve rambled (or whined) on and on about our living situation, I just have to say that I am incredibly thankful to be home, and I am thankful that we had a place to stay while our A/C was getting replaced. I am also thankful to have a home and I know that things could be so much worse. Just wanted to put some positives out there. :)

While I was moving stuff back in to our house and (sorta) cleaning up, I discovered that I am a small addiction.

I have a love for febreze products.
don’t believe me??

let me add some febreze dust and shine furniture spray to that.

still not convinced?

I. Love. This. Stuff.

One day last week, Stephen and I went to pick up some half-price Cruizzers drinks before picking up Christopher from daycare. We decided to get him a Sierra Mist as a special “treat.” He has normally drinks water, milk, or apple juice (which I even water down to half water/half juice.) One time this summer when we went to Branson, we let him have Sprite for the first time and of course he loved it, but he has only had it that one time. He was SO excited that he had a special drink and sucked in down in pretty much no time flat. ha! After each big gulp he would go, “AAAHHhhhhhhh.”  It was too cute!

Christopher is SUCH a little boy. Over just the past few days he’s gotten several new boo-boos. He fell in my mom’s driveway a few days ago and scraped both knees. Then today he fell again at mom’s and got a second big scrape on his left knee. He’s going to have horribly scarred knees by the time he starts Kindergarten!

And last but not least – one of the first things I did while we were moving back in to our house was hang up my new Arkansas garden flag! I got this at HobLob one time this summer on sale cheap and have been looking forward to hanging it up ever since!

And now – I need to get back to doing homework catching up on 19 Kids and Counting. :)