The Little Puddle that Could

The hubby and I have been living in this house for about a year and a half now, and we're slowly discovering lots of ridiculous shortcuts the builder made -- most of which we're having to fix/replace in order to resell this house.

If you've ever installed a faucet, you'll know that there is a bolt that holds everything in place. Instead of screwing said bolt into place, the idiots that installed this thing decided to solder it in place instead. This is all well and good until the homeowner (us) has to replace the cheap faucet that came with the house. Cheap, as in, you're doing the dishes and pull out the end, and it's no longer attached to the hose.

So here's the picture from about one year ago. I was pregnant with the baby girl and half-dead on the couch from morning sickness. Meanwhile, the hubby and his brother are experimenting with plumbing on the other side of the wall. I walked in to see why on earth they were cursing, and hubby's brother is on his back under the sink while the hubby is pulling the faucet from the top. Unfortunately, we chose a rather cheap model to replace it with, so it's already leaking (very slowly) from the hose under the sink.


Rule number one of plumbing: Do not go cheap.

The hubby has become quite the plumber (and electrician -- more on that later) and was able to complete the whole process on his own in about an hour and a half. Crosby helped.


Step one: Turn off water. You'd be surprised how many times people forget to do this. No, I don't have anything else to say about that.

Step two: Unscrew crappy faucet and tell it how you really feel. Hope to God that some stupid builder didn't decide to solder it in place.


Step three: Detach from water supply and remove fixture.

Step four: Get annoyed with your wife who keeps taking pictures for her "stupid" blog. (This is very important and imperative to correct installation.)


Step five: Insert base and then new fixture. Attach bolt! No soldering needed! Push hose through faucet and attach sprayer.


Step six: Turn on water! New faucet yay!

To-do and Cheerios

As I type, this is the scene before me. Though few to no Cheerios are actually making it to her mouth, I am thoroughly enjoying watching this. Better than any TV show. Yes, even better than RHNJ.


So besides deciding where we'd like to move -- more and more it looks like it might be San Antonio for at least a little while -- we've also been compiling lists of things we need to do before we can put the house up for sale or rent.

This is going to take a lot of work.

Off the top of our heads, to either rent or sell, we have a bathroom that needs to be re-tiled, the entire house needs a coat of paint and we'll probably need to replace most of the carpet -- this is probably just the tip of the iceberg if we plan to sell.

Saddest of all is that after we shell out a good chunk of change to do all of these improvements, we'll probably still just break even from our original purchase price -- and this was . Though I know there are people out there that are way worse off than we are, it's still frustrating.

All in all, we're probably going to need to save up at least $5000 in order to make these improvements and head out west.

This leads me to the introduction of a few other topics this blog will cover: couponing and other money-saving insanity (like how I drive the Hubby crazy every Sunday at CVS), home improvement, and, though I guess I didn't bother with a segue for this one, food.

Food, because I like to cook. A lot. And my cooking means we're not going out. And us not going out means saving money for important things -- like fixing up our house. And moving.

Yay moving.