Day 12: Home Sweet Home

When we moved into our house about 3 and a half years ago, things didn't go quite as smoothly as we'd have liked. Our air conditioner broke and stayed broken for a month (in JUNE) while we fought with (and lost to) the home warranty company. We also found out that our backyard was riddled with fleas, as evidenced by the small army that attacked our poor dog and made her reluctant to go out into her new, huge playground. I was downright discouraged by this sequence of events and struggled to remain grateful during those first few weeks of living in a new-to-us house that wasn't living up to my idea of the American dream.

Fortunately, the air conditioner FINALLY got fixed, and we eliminated all the fleas. We were able to start enjoying our home and making it ours, and I am so thankful for it. It's not very big (in fact some days it feels entirely too small), and it's in need of some updates, but when I walk in the door, I feel at home. That's enough for me.

Our backyard this summer. It's awesome.

Challenge Update and Home Sweet Home

I just can't seem to get back into consistent blogging! I sincerely apologize, as I know my updates are sporadic and rather random. Unfortunately, I can't say this one won't be more of the same.

First, a quick rundown of my progress with my goals:

1. Exercise 4 times. SUCCESS! This is the first week I've managed to do this in a while, and I am really proud of myself. The total minutes I exercised were just a little over 2 hours, but that's better than ZERO, if my limited math skills are correct. :)

2. Log all my food 5 out of 7 days. SUCCESS!

3. Read my Bible every day. Mostly a success. I did this 6 out of 7 days.

All in all, I am proud of how I did, especially compared to the week before last. I am hoping this week will be another solid week.

This weekend Stephen and I went to visit his family in Illinois, and we had such a great, relaxing time. His parents are always so welcoming, and his mom had lots of yummy food for us to eat. It was great to see them, but sadly we didn't take a single picture! It seems like that happens almost every time he or I go to visit our families, and we need to break that pattern!

Speaking of pictures, I have FINALLY uploaded some pictures of our house to facebook. Here are a few of the highlights:


Living room


Master bedroom


Guest bedroom

Kitchen

Dining room



I thought I'd try out the new riding lawn mower. :)

Can I just say having a house is immensely more enjoyable when the air conditioner works?? It is so nice to look forward to coming home instead of dreading it! I am so thankful that all the A/C drama is behind us (as I am sure all of you are, so I'll stop talking about it).

I hope you all had a great holiday weekend and are striving to reach your goals!

At Least It's a Downward Trend, Right?

The good news is when I did my final weigh-in for June, the scale said 167.6! That's almost 94 pounds I've lost!

The bad news is that my starting weight for June? It was 167.8. So I lost a whopping .2 pounds for the month. But hey, it wasn't a gain, and considering the fact that I was 170 not too long ago, I'm glad to have ended the month with even the tiniest of losses. Still, I need to stop losing and gaining the same 2 pounds!

But now for more good news: We have a working air conditioner!! The part came in Monday afternoon, and the company came over and fixed it on Tuesday! By the time Stephen got home from work, it was a cool 75 degrees in the house! It has been AMAZING to have cool air in the house. The first night I just kept exclaiming with awe about how great it felt. I'm so happy to have the whole mess behind us, and I hope that the unit keeps working for the rest of the summer. Someone asked me yesterday if I knew whether or not the heat worked, and I don't even want to know the answer to that! We'll worry about that when it's not 90 degrees outside.

I'm super excited about the upcoming 3-day weekend and am hoping that they let us leave work early on Friday. Stephen and I are going to spend a few days with his family in Illinois, and we are really looking forward to spending time with them and relaxing!

What are your plans for the weekend?

Trying to Keep My Cool

I know all of you are just DYING to read more about my air conditioning saga, so here I am to deliver. :) Last Thursday I posted that we might have the air fixed this week, but that's looking like less and less of a possibility. We had a guy come out last Thursday and give us a second opinion on the unit, since the first company that the warranty company sent said we needed a compressor. Of course the warranty company wouldn't cover that, so we wanted to make sure it really was the compressor before we got it fixed. Sure enough, the compressor is shot. And while he was here, the repair man said that he thought that our brand of AC unit may come with a parts warranty. He said he would look it up and let us know.

Friday he called and said that we do in fact have a 10 year parts warranty, which means we don't have to pay for the compressor, only the labor and addition of Freon, which saves us a LOT of money! The bad news is that the part had to be ordered, and that's what we're still waiting on. We paid for expedited shipping, so the part is supposed to arrive within 5-7 days. I kept hoping and praying that by some miracle it would come today, even though it's only been 4 business days, but it didn't come. I would LOVE it if it came on Friday, but it's more likely to come next week. Fortunately, we are going to Memphis to stay with my parents for the weekend, so we'll get a break from the whole ordeal.

I haven't handled this trial all that well, to be honest. I have shed tears over this (more than once!), and part of me is ashamed of that. Even calling it a "trial" is silly because I know there are millions of people in the world who don't even have the luxury of air conditioning. But when it's summer in west TN and there have been several days when the heat index was over 100, not having air is a challenge. It's a challenge to try and be grateful, but I am trying. The Lord has blessed us with much, and so I am encouraging myself to "be joyful always, pray continually, and give thanks in all cirucmstances." With that in mind:

I am thankful that we were able to stay in a hotel for two nights and enjoy air conditioning and a little relief from the sauna that is our house.

I am thankful that back when we lived in our first apartment (a townhouse), my parents bought us an in-room air conditioner to use because our upstairs bedroom was miserably hot in the summer, and so now we can use that in our bedroom to keep the temperature in there more tolerable.

I am thankful that the unit is under warranty so we don't have to spend more money.

I am thankful that we don't have to buy a whole new unit.

I am thankful to have parents who live in Memphis and who willingly let us leave our dog with them because we were worried about how the heat was affecting her.

I am thankful for friends and family who love us and have been praying for us and the situation.

I am thankful that I married such a loving husband.

There is so much to be thankful for.

I feel better already. :)

An Update: Weight Loss and Moving Woes

I'm happy to report that I managed to shed those 3 pounds I gained earlier in May, and I ended the month at a new low weight of 167.8! That makes a loss of 3.4 pounds for May and a total loss of 93.6 pounds (up until the moment I wrote this post and actually calculated the total, I thought it was 94.6 pounds. Just shows how awesome my math skills are.).

Probably the only reason I managed to lose those pounds is because I was so busy with packing and moving that I didn't have time to eat constantly. I certainly didn't do any "proper" exercising, although I definitely was very active despite dealing with a nasty cold or sinus infection. I did try to keep my water and fiber intake up, so that must have helped some.

I wish I could say that everything is great now that we are moved into our house, but to be quite honest, I'm feeling a little deflated about the whole thing. The first disappointment was realizing that our washer and dryer do not fit into the designated laundry area but are just a few inches too wide. We'll have to either get a new dryer, cut into the wall so the area is a little bigger, or have the washer in the space and the dryer just outside it, which is the current setup.

The second disappointment was realizing that our dog has gotten fleas from being out in the backyard, a backyard that she initially loved to romp around in but now hardly wants to go out in at all. That makes Stephen and me really sad because we were SO excited for Bailey to have a yard to run around in after always having to be leashed, and now she's miserable because of the fleas. We have sprayed the yard and sprayed the house, swept and vacuumed and washed rugs, pillows, blankets, etc., and bathed Bailey with flea shampoo, all to no avail. She was already taking Frontline, but that seems to have done little to help. The last remaining course of action we can think of is to have the lawn professionally treated for fleas. If that doesn't work, I don't know what we'll do.

The biggest disappointment has to do with the air conditioning. I noticed that it didn't seem to be cooling down too much last weekend when we were moving in, but I just chalked it up to having the doors open so much as we came in and out and hoped it would improve. However, by the time that Stephen's parents left on Tuesday, it was 80+ degrees in the house even though the air was set to 74. It simply wouldn't cool, except in the middle of the night when the outside temperature went down. We contacted the home warranty company on Wednesday, and to condense a long story, the 5-year-old unit had not been serviced or cleaned at all, and the condenser coils (or whatever they're called) were almost 90% blocked because of all the dirt and grime, which resulted in the compressor pump not functioning at full capacity, which caused the unit's inability to cool properly. So we have to have the unit cleaned, which the warranty doesn't cover, and if that doesn't fix the problem, we'll have to replace the compressor pump, which would cost around $1200, and the warranty also won't cover that since this problem existed before the warranty. What's especially awesome annoying is that we had an HVAC inspection before buying the house, and supposedly everything was working fine, so it's really frustrating that basically we're having to deal with other people's negligence.

However, the house isn't all bad, and I know once we get these situations figured out, we'll feel better about everything. We love having a garage, our bedroom is huge, the kitchen is wonderful, and we have lots of ceiling fans that are helping us stay cool. It's just disappointing not to have this rosy, ecstatic feeling about the house we'd looked forward to living in for two months, especially as someone who has watched countless home shows on HGTV where the couple buys the house and it's perfect and wonderful. But as I write that, I am reminded that 1) it's TV, and nothing is perfect and 2) ultimately my satisfaction should not come from the temporal but the eternal, and that only in Christ will I find true contentment.

May you too find contentment in Christ. I hope you are all doing well. I will return to my regular, less whiny blogging sometime in the near future. :)