Not My Mother

That can’t be right, can it?

I’ve been trying to work out what’s changed and really our use of water is no different. (It will be, soon, when I go on maternity leave. Eek!) But, this house is about 20 years old while the last one was only about 6 and built with different standards and with newer, more efficient appliances. I think a lot of it can come down to that:

• the toilets in the last house were water efficient, while these ones… aren’t. They do at least have a half-flush option, but it seriously uses more water than the previous toilets’ full flush.
• evaporative cooling: 18 months ago we installed a system in the last house which only used 10 litres of water per session and didn’t dump it until an hour after you turned it off, in case you changed your mind. Old systems are much less efficient and also dump the water regularly while running. I’m not sure how old the system is in this house, but it’s not new, and it’s been a hot summer.
• we have an automatic watering system that comes on at midnight for 15 minutes, twice a week. This is new to us and might need to go.

Other than that, we’re using the washing machine, dishwasher and showers the same as we used to. So can all of this really add up to an extra 200 litres usage per day? It’s hard to believe. So I guess that also leaves leaks in the system, and errors in the bill. We have just been given a new water meter, maybe something went wrong there. It’s all stuff to investigate.

We do have the option of making changes like installing newer toilets and hooking the automatic sprinklers to the water tank. There are companies around that can come and do an assessment of your home and suggest ways you can improve the energy efficiency, for example by changing insulation or windows, or installing solar hot water systems or panels. A friend recently had this done and it’s something I’ve been meaning to do. The Australian government also has a Green Loans program where you can borrow up to $10,000 interest free over four years to help fund the changes. We should qualify for that, assuming it doesn’t run out of money soon.

Ah, the joys of owning a slightly older home. On top of this I want to get an electrician in to do an inspection and a few odd jobs, as it turns out we don’t have a trip switch on the fuse box and the spa may not be connected properly. Plus we’ve got some vines heading into the roof space, with possibly some damage there. These are all just little nagging maintenance issues that are annoying and I don’t know how much they’ll cost to sort out, which is a bit stressful right about now.

I suppose this is where some people would start the argument for renting instead of owning, but I wouldn’t want to go back to renting. Right now we’re in a home that we love, where we can change anything we want and are not at the mercy of shonky landlords. No one cares if we put up a shelf or paint a room or let the garden go. We can fix our wireless internet problems (the house is very long, and the wireless range doesn’t cover the whole of it) by wiring everything up instead. All of this adds up to a lot of freedom. Besides, I like nesting and making a home, and I like the idea of being able to change things we don’t like and improve them. We can see ourselves being happy in this house for 10 years or more, so the idea that we can make it just the home we want is pretty exciting. Is it the absolute best frugal financial decision? Probably not, but it makes us happy and it matters to us. We can be extra frugal in other areas instead.

Anyway, if we were renting this house we’d still have to pay the water bill, and we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it :-) I guess I’ve just got another fun home project on my list now. You know, in all my upcoming spare time.

Still, it’s a lovely surprise, even if my statement says I’ve got unpresented cheques (unlikely, since I’ve always had direct deposits done), and that Dave’s dividends are supposed to go to the account that he closed a couple of months ago. Oops.

*

Christmas was a great success. Everyone had a lovely time (or at least lied and said they did), and I got by with the minimum of screaming matches with my mum. We got some lovely pressies too. My favorite was the complete boxed set of Friends DVDs from Dave. When we lived in London Friends was on about 4 times a day on various channels, and during my 2004 Summer of Despair before I met him, I got in the habit of watching every single showing. So after that it was a joke that Friends was always on. But here, it isn’t! So he bought me the DVDs so I can watch them while nursing the baby, and I cried because really, he is the most thoughtful person. I got him a book on forbidden Lego models and half a Crumpler bag for work (the other half was his family Kris Kringle gift) and he was happy too.

Mum stayed with us from Christmas Eve through to Sunday when we drove her back to my home town, and it was mostly okay. Our relationship is… frustrating, is the best word I can come up with to describe it. Frustrating, for many different reasons and for faults on both our sides. Remind me to tell you about it sometime. It’s hard to explain without giving you the full story but the full story would probably take up the whole internet so it will have to wait. Anyway, we had a few issues on Christmas day, but afterwards we were mostly okay and Saturday was actually successful. And then she went home :-)

Yesterday (Monday) was Boxing Day holiday here and we went to see Avatar in 3D, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, and then we went to Myer and bought a Dyson handheld vacuum cleaner. I have been lusting after one of these for ages, we really need one because of the budgie and the new baby and I just don’t want to have to haul the big vacuum out every day. It has a power head! Myer only had it 15% off, but we also had a bunch of reward gift cards that have been hanging around for months, so we ended up getting it for $200 instead of $349. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant as well.

And then Dave’s sister and her boyfriend came over and we had a BBQ and played a couple of games of Ticket to Ride until midnight, and now I’m exhausted and I don’t want to see a single other person for a week at least.

I hope your weekend was as successful!

Well, there were 15 boxes of books (they are little boxes, honest), and Dave’s old study took medium 10 boxes to pack up, and I’m pretty sure mine was about the same, so that’s what, 35 present and accounted for. And there were probably eight or so of assorted kitchen stuff, so that’s 43, so that only leaves, um, thirteen that I can’t guess to the contents. But I’m sure it’s all really important stuff!

Actually, I’m hoping to cull a lot of it. I have a lot of STUFF that I don’t really need, but is really hard to let go of. I tried to declutter my study when I was packing but apart from dropping a couple of old programming textbooks into the recycling (I’m pretty sure NO ONE wants to know about coding in Pascal anymore), I didn’t really manage anything. But! Now we have to share one study instead of having one each, so I’m expecting that unpacking will go more like, “okay where does this thing go? Bugger it, it’s too hard, let’s just put it in this bin bag instead.” And don’t even mention possibly ebaying the things I don’t want, I’m sure there’s a whole subset of crap already in this category in those boxes.

Anyway, so I managed to unpack about five or six boxes of kitchen stuff, and I found places for it all, and it looks lovely! I love a well-stocked kitchen. There’s still a couple of boxes to go but they’re all about half done already as we needed things so they shouldn’t take too long. Next weekend we’ll tackle the debacle which is the pantry and then it will be DONE and BEAUTIFUL and I’ll spend my time opening cupboard doors and marvelling at the sparkly innards, until I mess it all up again in about a month.

Dave was busy too, he started putting together our study and dragged everything out of the front little bedroom, which we’ll be using as the nursery. Which is brilliant, except he dumped every single box into the spare room, and now I can’t get in to reach anything, like towels, or bedlinen, that I’d dumped on the spare bed until I got around to sorting out the linen cupboard. But that’s all part of the plan, apparantly, and at least now we can see the nursery, which is good because we really should get a move on with painting it and working out what the heck we need to buy for this baby, because I’ve been told giving birth is not something I can procrastinate on.
But, the kitchen! Have I mentioned how lovely it all looks, all organised and nice? And I can now walk into the games room as well, and see actual floor! Ah, it feels really nice. All I want to do now is get on and sort out the other boxes, bugger this going to work and sleeping and stuff.