home improvement

For those of you who lie awake at night, wishing for updates in the continuing stooooory of our air conditioning system:

We had a guy come out on Saturday -- we'll say he was from, uh, the HMS Fur -- to give us a competing estimate. I said, might as well check out the furnace while you're here. I know it's a good 30 years old, and have heard from the two other people to look at it (home inspection guy and coil maintenance guy) that its days are seriously numbered. Yep, he says, that thing's gotta be replaced, too. No shock that he would agree. So after several stellar price reductions, we get way down to $5,400 to replace them both. Woo-WHEEE!

As he's putting together paperwork for the interest-deferred (MATT: "Interest-free?" MR. FUR: "Interest-deferred,") loan, I'm thinking, well, this is it. Nothing else can go wrong in this dang house. Before we moved in, the water heater was replaced, as were pretty much all of the utilities (fridge, etc). Whoops, not the stove. Forgot about that one. We patched up the roof last fall. We found the badly-sweated pipe the week we moved in. This should about do it!
And then, mere minutes later, I shriek a little and jump up from the couch. A big bug of some sort just landed on the arm of the couch next to me. It looks like ... an ant with wings. Mr. Fur says, "Huh! That looks like a flying ant, all right. Probably a carpenter ant. Nasty beasties. Maybe a scout. They can eat a home right up." I'm mentally kicking myself and my smugness.

Sorry, God! We really ARE at Your mercy and grace. Not our own. Not our own efforts or promises of wealth or anything else. Forgive me. Please don't allow a pox on our house.

Now it's left to Matt and me to thumb-wrestle to see who "gets" to take a vacation day to lounge around the house whilst the servicemen install both systems next week.

In other repair: Matt *snicker* broke the stair out back recently -- it had been threatening to give way since we moved in -- so his brother came over yesterday, and they slaved away at crafting a new little staircase back there. Matt tells me, at an early stage, they said to each other, Hm. We're going to need a crowbar to pry these stairs off the house! Matt wiggled it experimentally. Totally gave way with ease in his hands. Turns out, the board -- which is part of the wall of our house -- to which it was nailed is rotten. With his gloved fingers, Matt poked a hole through it big enough that he could peer into the basement.

We no longer wonder how our cricket chorus found its way down there last summer.