Friday, April 30, 2010

Crossing Stuff Off!

Alright! I FINALLY just sat down to take care of some long overdue items. The first... sending in my form to our electric and gas company to get our rates lowered. When we bought our house (ummm....ELEVEN months ago) we were given this form and told that if we filled it out and had the builder fill out their portion, we would qualify for a lower rate on our utilities. The builder was offering a free "green" upgrade package on our house at the time we purchased, and that included a more efficient HVAC system, blown in insulation, radiant barrier on the roof, etc. I have absolutely no excuse for WHY it has taken me almost a year to request a lower rate on our largest monthly utility bill... but, there you have it! I'm excited now to see how much of a difference it makes on our bills!

Next, I contacted Time Warner Cable (my favorite people to call... note that is dripping with sarcasm) to get a price quote on having an additional phone and cable jack installed in the house. Apparently, in order to hook up our modem for the cable and the phone, they needed to have both jacks next to each other. This information might have been something helpful for the people working in the design center for our builder to know AND pass along when we were picking out locations for these things...but... I digress. So, the only room that had both jacks is our bedroom, but they aren't next to each other. So, our modem is sitting on the floor, and we have a super long phone cord running across the floor from the other side of the room. Very well thought out and planned on our part. Today I found out it will cost $85 to have the new jacks installed next to each other in our office. That actually isn't as expensive as I thought it would be. I'll be calling them back next month to get that taken care of so that we can get our office set up!

And finally, I submitted my first claim to the warranty office. We have one small issue and one possibly larger issue with the house. The first is that the veneer on the front of one of our kitchen cabinet doors is bubbling, so they need to replace that. The second is that we have MAJOR floor squeaks under the shower in our master bathroom and on the floor right in front of the shower. The project manager told me to have warranty look at it, but they might have to rip out all of the bathroom tile to fix it. This is most likely not an option I'm in favor of, BUT... I want to make sure that there isn't water getting down in there somehow and it's causing the floors to start to squeak. That's been going on for a while, but I guess I've just been putting off calling because in comparison to the myriad of issues we have at our rental house (which was built in 1920), this doesn't seem like as big of a deal!

I'm also really happy to be back home from North Carolina. I had a wonderful time, but am happy to be home and glad it's Friday so Matt doesn't have to go to work tomorrow! I'm going to spend my weekend picking out plants for the front of our house because according to our home owners association, I have to get them all APPROVED first! Sigh. I'm all for H.O.A.'s because I know they help keep the neighborhood nice and maintain home values, blah, blah, blah, but give me a break! They planted the crappiest plants EVER in front of our house, but I have to submit two copies of plans for what I want to plant where along with the size and color and have it approved?! Whatever. I will play by the rules. I guess the upside to this is that it will make me have a well thought out landscaping plan!

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