The joys of today

We slept in quite a bit later (until almost 8am!) this morning (I still fed the cats at 6am because Tabitha is insistent about that). Since we didn't have to get to the house to blow off the sidewalks or other items to be ready for the open house, we took it easier.

When we got to the house, we found nearly a flood in the back yard. It rained a lot overnight, but this was bubbling out of the ground (picture Jed Clampett and the black gold bubbling up, but it was water, not oil). It seems that our sprinkler system controller valve chose sometime between yesterday afternoon and this morning to break. Interestingly, we had just had the system checked out by our sprinkler repair guy yesterday afternoon (he checked heads and replaced some that were not performing correctly, but the controller valve isn't something that really gets checked). Dwayne called him and he said he could get out Monday or Tuesday to work on it. We got the water turned off to the sprinkler system so the bubbling stopped.

The joys of home ownership!

We had stopped on our way to the house at Home Depot to get new filters for the HVAC system. The system tells us how long it has before they should be replaced (it counts down from 90 days) and it was getting into the single digits. When Dwayne went up into the attic to replace the filter, he found that the guys who replaced the furnace earlier this year got a little "happy" with the mastic sealant and sealed the door to the filter compartment closed. He called the company that put the new furnace in, the guy tried to talk Dwayne through how to get to the filter compartment (like we haven't been changing the filters for 15+ years on this system and it didn't change with the new furnace), we finally sent a picture of the filter compartment and the guy realized that he wasn't dealing with novices.

The door on the front of that Honeywell unit is supposed to open... but it wouldn't.

He came on to the house and saw the problem and managed to get the door loose. We could have done that too, but we wanted them to know the problem that they caused and, if anything broke in getting the door loose, we wanted them to be responsible.

The joys of home ownership!

We are thankful that they did not have an open house today when there was a flood in the backyard, and we are thankful that we decided to change the HVAC filter instead of leaving it for the new home owners so they didn't have to deal with that as a problem!

Finally, we headed to a brand new laundromat that has opened in Coppell.

Nice new washers - these were the smallest ones "2 load" washers, for $1.99/load. They have up to "6 load" washers, I think.

New dryers too, though they were having problems that none of the larger dryers were currently in service. I guess the difference between a new laundromat and an older one is that older ones always have a few machines here and there out of service. A new laundromat may have circuit issues that take out a whole set of machines. The dryers were $0.24/8 minutes.

 Now, you may have looked at those amounts and thought, "Wow, what a pain to come up with $1.99 or $0.24 in coins!", but this is a coinless laundromat.

You put cash value onto a card and use it in the machines. It is a little inconvenient because you put whatever amount on there (it is hard to know exactly how much drying time you will need), and you might have value left over. It is ok if you're going to be coming back to this location each week, but for us, it is a little less convenient. However, it is nice because you can put value onto the card from a credit card, so I didn't have to have cash with me while doing laundry.