I have now owned my house for two years. I have not given it as much attention as I did in the first year, but it has received some major upgrades this last year. I replaced all the windows on the second floor and put on new siding. I expanded the garden and have started harvesting a lot from the whole property. Decorating is coming along pretty well, too.
This year should bring a bathroom renovation and, depending on how things go, maybe a new driveway / walkway / front porch. Maybe, just maybe, it will also see an end to the kitchen renovation and an end to Cabinet Guy in my life.
One of the many benefits of living here in Silver Spring, just a mile from the border with DC, is that lots of cool stuff is available to us. Montgomery County is a wonderful place and is home to many prestigious people which bring the much-less-prestigious of us some great opportunities.
Today, after much waiting and watching of market conditions, we took up one of these opportunities. We switched 100% of our electricity to wind power through a company called Clean Currents. The removal of rate caps for the big power companies has led to significant increases in our normal electricity prices. Today when I checked, the cost of wind power was $0.117 per KWH vs. $0.112 on my last Pepco bill. Montgomery County has a special program encouraging green power that reduces the cost by $0.005 per KWH so basically I’m paying the same for the wind power as for the existing power (likely coal out here).
Our price is now fixed for 1 year. I don’t mind if we end up paying a bit more if energy prices from coal drop over the summer (though I don’t know how likely that is).
We are very excited about this change. It’s great to be supporting the green power industry.
One year ago today, I bought this house! The house and I are very happy together, and we have made so much progress in the last year. We celebrated with cupcakes from Cakelove (an important feature of my neighborhood), presents, and quality time.
First, I spent about 5 hours cleaning this morning and I also finally finished painting that hole I patched in the bedroom like 2 months ago. It was quite a mess over here. I don’t know how neat freaks live with dogs. The fur everywhere drives me crazy, but I am not motivated enough to make myself vacuum every day. Plus the dust! It’s always desperately time to clean each weekend, and by this morning the tumbleweeds of fur were rolling around everywhere.
As for presents - since moving a painting from my bedroom to the basement, I’ve had an open spot that bothers me every day. Today, I stopped by Pier1 and found this pillar candle holder which goes very well with the votive holders by the bed and the sparkly red theme.
After two long days of bad-weather driving, I’m finally home from my winter holiday with my family Chicago. My house survived just fine. Despite a mountain of work that was heaped on me as I arrived home at 2pm, with a TODAY! deadline, I managed to get the xmas decorations down and unload the car. I still have a couple days of cleaning and house work to do, but it’s good to be back in my little house.
Growing up, my gramma had a galvanized milk box on her front porch. She would leave things for us to pick up in there, or sometimes keys if we were stopping by when she was away. My mom would tell me about getting milk deliveries in there when she was a kid. I always thought this was amazing and great.
This idea of delivered milk really appeals to me. It comes in glass bottles, so it will taste a lot better. It’s ultra-fresh. It is local, so it’s good for the environment and good for my local farmers. And it’s good for the cows because they are treated well, graze openly, and are well taken care of with no hormones or antibiotics.
My gramma brought me home after a failed 20-mile run early this week and I noticed the milkbox next to her garage. It reminded me to go online and check about milk delivery and to my delight, I found a dairy that delivers to my house!
So, starting this week, I will have fresh milk in glass bottles, butter, eggs, and fresh orange juice brought up from a small grower in Florida delivered to my house every week. I’m VERY excited about this. I’ll get my very own milk box and a milk man. Thanks, South Mountain Creamery!
It’s coming up on a year since I bought this house. It came with a home warranty. I got a bill today to renew it for roughly $450. I feel like this isn’t worth the money. I haven’t used the warranty so far. $450 is a lot of money. Any opinions from you more experienced home owners?
And just in time, too, because I’ve run out of stored-up blog posts to make it look like I was here. Except for the 24 hour visit, I’ve been gone for a full month. Overall, it was a good trip because I got to spend lots of time with my family, do some productive work traveling, and even take a mini-vacation.
The house survived just fine except for the circuit issue. I think the garden and lawn are quite overgrown, but that will be clearer tomorrow when it’s light out and I can examine it more closely.
I do love the way people marvel at my stories of the possessed fan and the sound of footsteps on the stairs of my house. I also find that the creeking and occasional bangs add character to the house, whether they are from a ghost, or just because the place is old. However, they make it difficult to hear if something much more worldly is creeping around my house at night.
This, combined with the fact that I travel a lot (102 days on the road in 2007, though I’m cutting way back this year), makes me nervous. Though I live in a good neighborhood where I don’t worry about leaving the door unlocked when I run to the store, I worry about a lot of things . What happens to the girls if there is a fire when I’m gone? I worry about someone breaking into the basement windows. I don’t have much to steal, but if someone stole the dogs I would be devastated and I would stop feeling safe in the house. If someone broke in and tried to attack me, I’m sure part of me would feel bad about kicking them in the head and breaking their legs (so don’t even think about trying, Theoretical Creepy Blog Stalker Guy - I have a black belt).
Thus, this week I bit the bullet, shelled out a big chunk of cash in what will hopefully be my last big expenditure for a long time, and got the whole house secured. Doors, windows, motion detectors, panic buttons, smoke alarms, two-way voice communication through the keypad, keyfobs, etc. Here, we can see my fancy new panel:
And here is the sign for my new security system with my primary security system standing at the door looking at us
This is not a post about my house so much as what is in it. Friday was a very expired day for me. I live alone, so after dinner I took a swig of milk out of the carton. This milk was dated July 7th, but was VERY expired. It was gloopy. Thank goodness I spit that out in time.
Later, I went to make myself a peach soda with seltzer and some very good Bellini mix that I picked up at World Market. That apparently had also been in the fridge too long, because it tasted a bit like a wet washcloth. Unfortunately, I swallowed that before I realized what was happening.
Now, it’s about 1am, and it could be that I’m getting a cold or my body is just upset about the spoiled food, but I don’t feel so hot. I don’t get sick often, but when I feel this bad, I go for nyQuil. That is good stuff. I took my trusty bottle of red stuff out of the cabinet and, for kicks, wondered when I had last been sick enough to need this. Apparently it was a long time ago because this bottle expired in November. November of 2005. I don’t know if that goes bad, but I’m not going to risk it. It’s too bad, too, because this was the good stuff that still had the pseudoephedrine in it. I guess I’ll have to go with the more recently purchased dayQuil for now.
It is 3am as I write this blog post. I went to bed at about 2 (usual time for me), ready to enjoy my fan. I laid down, turned off the lights, and then heard a noise. It sounded kind of like drumming fingernails in the attic. Mind you, I have a cape cod, so the attic is a really tiny space, inaccessible from the house. It’s not like I could go up there (nor could a crazed attacker).
“DAMN!” I yelled, startling the dogs. I figured something must have gotten up there somehow, maybe through the siding or some bizarre thing. Just what I need - large invading creatures. It was a significant noise. Not tiny mouse scrape scrapes. There were some scrapes, but loud ones, and also this drumming sound, like a person tapping her fingernails on my ceiling.
I dragged myself out of bed, got dressed, and listened. It was there. Now there are a LOT of sounds in this house at night, and I have never heard a single thing before up there in the attic. My theory was that maybe having the fan on was vibrating something up there that was in turn disturbing the creatures (or ghost). I got my flashlight and went into the secret rooms under the roof that I can access from the dormers. I can’t see into the top-of-the-roof attic part from there, but I thought perhaps there would be some evidence of something. There was nothing. The worst thing I saw was a tiny spiderweb.
While I was doing this, I had turned off the fan. There was not a single sound from the attic. I banged on my ceiling hoping to disturb the creature (or ghost). Still nothing. I turned the fan back on and it started right back up, over by my closet. I stood there, head close to the ceiling. Suddenly, the sound seemed to move and get very loud. And then it showed itself to me. It was creatures - 7 of them:
It was the dog painting. It is hung with a wire on a nail, but wasn’t quite flush against the wall. Plus, the fan was on reverse (earlier today I must have accidentally hit the wrong button on the remote). This was pulling the air up toward the ceiling, pushing it out toward the walls, and down behind the painting making it move back and forth. It would kind of vibrate, making the drumming sound against the wall. I took down the painting, and the sound stopped.
Mystery solved.
An hour of my life for that (plus 15 minutes to blog it because I have to tell SOMEONE). It’s a good thing Cabinet Guy is always late; I’d hate to have to drag myself out of bed before 9am to be ready if I actually expected him on time.
