Having good friends makes the whole process easier. What process? Well, just about any process involved with your home. Helping to pack up your (way too many) belongings, helping you move, helping you unpack, helping you rearrange furniture, helping you put furniture back together, helping you eat your food; there all kinds of things made easier by having friends available who are willing to help out.
Read the rest of this entry »

My fiancé and I are both brewers, and our wedding is coming up very soon. As our wedding favors for our guests we are giving bottles of our light beer, which is one of my favorite recipes. For the children and those who do not drink beer, we are giving out home made root beer. This was our first attempt at brewing root beer, so we were not quite sure what to expect.

Rather than requiring our guests to keep their root beer bottles cold, we decided to force carbonate the root beer. If you use yeast to carbonate the root beer, it will have a tendency to explode if you do not keep the bottle cold. The way that we force carbonated the root beer was to fill up a 5 gallon cornelius keg and put it under pressure. We kept it in the refridgerator so that the root beer would absorb more of the carbon dioxide and made sure that the pressure was kept high for a few weeks.
Read the rest of this entry »

We have ants in our house, and I do not like ants because ants do not belong in the house. So far, we just kill them when we see them and toss them in the trash. Except for the cat; if she kills one she generally just leaves it on the floor for us to pick up. Normally she will ignore them, though.

The other day I went to step on an ant, but it was no longer there. It was about 2 feet in front of my foot. “Wow, that’s a speedy ant,” I think to myself. So, I went to step on it again. The ant must not have liked that idea, because it jumped away Incredible Hulk style. One leap, and it’s up on the counter, another leap, and its on the window screen, another leap and I lost sight of it. I had never seen anything crazier before that entire day.
Read the rest of this entry »

When we bought the house, the previous owners left a gigantic air conditioner in our pantry. We did not want it, so at the closing I told them to come pick it up the next day so that we would not have to find a way to get rid of it. It must have weighed about 140 pounds, but we got it out of the house and they took it with them.

This was on April 1^st, when it was not quite as, ahh, warm, as it is now. Just sitting around encourages sweating, which means that much more to clean. But I do not mind. I have a few fans that I set up now and again, especially when we are cooking inside on a hot day and I want to blow the heat out the window. We are much better off for not spending the electricity on the air conditioner all day, though.

I still have to learn how to do without the cold showers, though. Perhaps I should try jumping into the brook out back. I have not done that yet.

I enjoy mowing my lawn. I liked mowing the lawn when I was a kid, too. For some reason it relaxes me. Today I especially enjoyed the lawn mowing. I am a marathoner, and so I run a lot of miles. My training currently has me running twice a day most days. I have had some minor aches and pains that needed attention so I took the day off from running. Mowing the lawn was the only workout for the day.
Read the rest of this entry »

I am not a big fan of ants. They get into everything, and everything includes my house. For a few months now, we have been seeing them in every room of the house. The cat has tried playing with a few, but since most of them can not fly she is not very excited by them and usually ignores them now.
Read the rest of this entry »

Home Depot is a large supermarket of a hardware store. It can be conveniant to go there and get a lot of your home maintenance and construction needs in one place, and they often have decent pricing if not always the best. I am not a huge fan of their website, however.
Read the rest of this entry »

One thing that amazes me is how much more space there is to create a mess now that I have a house.

Our basement is definately a mess; when we moved in, all the boxes just got dumped down there haphazardly by myself and my uncles. The biggest problem was keeping them from blocking all the doors. Our haphazard way of unpacking hasn’t helped clean that up any. Add to that the lack of actual unpacking going on with our wedding plans in full swing and it is not a pretty picture.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner by David Bach was not exactly what I expected it to be. I was expecting a book that was about how to leverage your home as an investment with maybe a few chapters on buying a home, but it wound up being the other way around. As such, it was not very useful to me. That being said, had the book been published a year earlier, the book would have been very useful to me.
Read the rest of this entry »

A spider has adopted our bathroom window for its web. In a heavy rain or particularly windy days its web can get pretty trashed, but the spider never lacks for food there. The insects are attracted to the light through the window and get stuck in the web. Even if they manage to get to the screen in the window, when they leave there are good chances that they will be caught on the way out as well.

The trick now will be making sure that I keep an eye out for egg sacks, since I do not want a lot of baby intelligent spiders in my bathroom. I will either have to keep the window shut or else get rid of the web if I see it sporting an egg sack at any point.

Click on the picture for a larger view of the web where you can actually see it..