What Being a New Home Owner can Mean for your Wallet

We’ve now been in our new house for a few months and for the most part we haven’t had any major issues, just a few little things here and there. Up to this point the biggest thing was filling the holes in the half wall, the holes from the old alarm system and a few other holes from stuff they had hanging up. The hardest was an outlet that was coming out of the wall. The electrical box was broken so it needed to be replaced. And where does everyone go now when you need to learn how to fix something…YouTube of course. After watching several videos, I found the perfect one that explained perfectly how to replace the outlet box and the outlet itself. Below isn’t the exact video I used but it’s really close. And if you are ever trying to tackle an electrical job I can only recommend you check out this channel.

Once the electrical box and outlet was replaced, I needed to repair the wall because the dry wall was all cut out too large for the size outlet that was installed. And not that I had all this experience from the half wall I was pretty confident I could fix it and make it look somewhat professional.

With the smaller repairs mostly out of the way, Bea and I decided we should try to clean up the kitchen. We started with the oven, considering it had a fair amount of build up from the previous owners. So being the person I am, I saw that the stove/oven had a self clean feature so I turned it on. After about an hour of the self cleaning mode on, Bea started to notice a burning smell. I told her it was most likely just the old baked on stuff burning off and the oven would be clean so much easier after the self cleaning ran its course. Now this is the point if you are a home owner, you are most likely going to know what happened next. It turns out the burning smell was not the baked on gunk being cleaned off. The oven its self was starting to discolor on top and was starting to catch on fire. Great! I just ruined the most important appliance in kitchen and all I was doing was trying to clean it. Once again it was off to Lowe’s to start the search for a new gas stove. I started on their website, along with google trying to research and learn more about gas stoves since they are all new to me. I ended up settling on a nice Frigidaire five burner stove in stainless steel. And we were in luck it happened to be on sale and they happened to have it in stock. We only had to wait about two weeks, and the new stove was delivered and installed.

The oven has now been the most expensive thing we have gotten for the new house. And it was not an expense we were expecting after only a few months of living in the house. I just wish we would have known this was just going to be the beginning of things falling apart.

It’s the beginning of April and the new stove is working great, so much nicer than the one that came with the house. We were still doing a little painting here and there and everything seemed to be looking up. Then come the end of the month the next thing in the house decided to break. The garbage disposal. Now this isn’t as big of deal as the oven was, but it’s still an appliance we use pretty often. Back online I went to find an exact replacement, thinking it would be a straight forward repair. I found the exact Insinkerator on Amazon for a few dollars cheaper than the local hardware stores did, now just had to wait for it to show up. Delivery day came and while I was under the sink unplugging the old one I found that the plug under the sink was cracked somehow and it needed replacing. Since I was already replacing the outlets already around the house I had some extra ones on hand. So I switched out the cracked outlet for a new one and got the new disposal installed. I flipped the switch and pop, the breaker blew. So I went outside and reset the breaker and tried the switch again. This time the disposal turned on but it wouldn’t turn off, then again pop. I fought with this damn thing for like two months.

I took a break from the disposal and started working on our son’s room some. I replaced all of the plugs in that room, but when it came to the plug that is controlled by the wall switch I couldn’t get it to turn off. Back to YouTube I went, and I learned that you had to break off one of the tabs on the side and that would make it so you could flip one of the outlets on and off. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks! That’s what I had to do with the plug in the kitchen to get the garbage disposal to work. Of course when I learned that we had a friend over and I didn’t want to wait, so I spent most of the time they were here trying to fix that stupid plug. In the end I won, it may have beaten me a few times over the last months. But I won in the end.