Follow the red brick road

This is another simple pleasures post. We've added a few more landscaping features to make the front of our rental house look a little nicer. Apprarently, a previous tenant had a rock garden in front, so it's been difficult to plant any shrubs. We bought five red bricks and some pebble stones for less than $10 and set them up.

The bricks don't form a road but a small path in front of our house. In the fall, it will lead to our scarecrow decorations. I think Dorothy would be proud! :)

I'm the proud owner of a ceiling fan

Yes, it's the small pleasures in life that make us happy, and a ceiling fan is one of those this week. As we've moved farther north, we've realized ceiling fans aren't as common as they are in Florida. I remember my parents installing ceiling fans in our bedrooms, family room and play room during the 1980s, and all the apartments we lived in during college in Florida had ceiling fans in each room. When we moved to Tennessee, there was a ceiling fan in the master bedroom and one in the living room, but in Kentucky, there is only one ceiling fan in our living room.

When we moved last fall, the weather was already turning cooler, but now that it's warming up again, we miss having a ceiling fan in the master bedroom, so we bought one, and electricians installed it Monday afternoon. It's a great addition, and we're hoping to save money on our electric bill by using it this summer.

I know my parents and many people throughout the South grew up without ceiling fans and air conditioners, but I am very thankful for these inventions. Ironically, we have some friends who just moved to upstate New York, and their house doesn't have an air conditioner, just a heater. As I've said before, I think Kentucky is as far "north" as we want to live.

Finally Fixed?!?!

UPDATE: The water heater is NOT fixed. We had to reset it again this morning after David took a shower. I think we're both too annoyed and frustrated right now to call the rental agency AGAIN for fear of what we might say!

We live in a rental house in Knoxville, and while it was built in 2005, we've had numerous problems with it. The most recent was the water heater that stopped making hot water in mid-December. We called the rental agency, and they sent someone who arrived one evening at 7 p.m. and told us there's a red reset button that hopefully just needed to be reset, and that would solve the problem. It did need to be reset, and the hot water quickly returned, but after two showers and a dishwasher run, no hot water again. So we reset the button a couple more times and realized something else was wrong. To make a long story short, it's taken four repair trips to hopefully and finally fix the water heater. The top and bottom heating elements and the thermostat had to be replaced. I'm still not sure why all of this was necessary since the water heater is only a few years old.

In addition to that problem, we've had two stove burners short circuit, an ice maker that leaked water in our top freezer and bottom fridge, a leaky toilet, clogged drains (when we first moved it, David cleaned out the bathroom sink drain and found enough hair to cover a furry animal!), and closet shelves that have fallen twice. With the shelves, it took them more than a month to come out and fix them for the second time last summer. The carpet is thin, and all you have to do is look at one of the walls, and it makes a mark.

Some of you might also remember how our porch almost slid down the hill a couple of months after we moved here.



It was a Saturday and had rained all day, and about 4 p.m. when it stopped, I stepped out onto the porch, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the air conditioning unit leaning and realized the porch was also learning. They fixed it but not very well. Finally last summer, they came back and redid our porch and our neighbors' porches. The workers, however, thought our back hill was a landfill since they left all their water and Gatorade bottles and trash. Some of it we could pick up, but most of it was too far down the hill to get.

While we've had our share of problems, I'm glad we're renting this place. If we owned it, we would have spent a lot of money in home repairs. They probably built this house in day or two at the most. They were still finishing our subdivision when we moved, and I remember seeing houses going up in a matter of days, but the workmanship is not of high quality. David and I both have rented a series of apartments that were built in the 1970s or even earlier, and while you can see the numerous paint jobs, we never had as many issues with our rentals as we've had with this house in Knoxville.

The saving grace is the view of the small mountain ridge that I look at whenever I'm frustrated about something else breaking.



I'm keeping my fingers crossed that our hot water heater troubles are over for now and placing bets on what will need to be fixed next!