The Joys of Home Ownership, Part 1
When considering my options regarding a title for this post, I decided to add “Part 1” because, as any home owner knows, there’s always something else when it comes to repairs, etc. This week has been a doozy and it’s only Tuesday; I freaking can’t wait for Saturday (insert appropriate sarcasm here). Sometime last week, Scotty received a call from our pest control people saying they would be performing a “routine pest inspection” at our house on Monday morning. Presumably to prevent a freak-out on my end, they neglected to acknowledge the reason behind said inspection. When the guy arrived, he explained that, due to the recent construction in our area, rats are being unearthed and are looking for new homes. Many of them have been taking up residency in my neighbors’ attics, apparently, so our pest control company is checking all of their clients’ homes for evidence of rodent activity. While I should note that it’s really awesome for them to take the time to do that rather than wait for people to call because they hear/see rats in their walls, attics, etc., I must say EWWWWWW! I refuse to share my attic with flea-ridden, destructive, and, let’s be honest here, ugly squatters. Upon further inspection of our attic, we learned that there is evidence of at least one rat having spent time in our home without our permission. The guy couldn’t tell us if the rat(s) had been there recently so we decided to set a few traps up there to see if we could catch a rat. I am really hoping we don’t for a multitude of reasons. Anyway, my job for the next week is to go up into our attic once a day to check the traps and then call the pest people if I do, in fact, catch something. Fun, huh?
On Scott’s mom’s advice, I decided to check my dryer vent on Saturday to see if it was clogged because my dryer has not been drying clothes very well for a while now. I moved the dryer and, to my surprise, found water on the floor in the laundry room. After ruling out the washing machine as the culprit, I started checking the walls for evidence of a leak. Boy, did I find it. Our guest bathroom and laundry room share a wall, and on either side of that wall are the bathtub and the washer/dryer set, respectively. I unscrewed the metal plate from around our dryer vent into the wall, and you will not believe what I found: MOLD! ICK! For anyone who knows me very well, I am a compulsive house cleaner. I pride myself in my reaction to such a nasty discovery; I simply grabbed a screwdriver and begin gently scraping paint from the wall to see how much mold was there. Fortunately I didn’t find much. At that point, I figured the leak had to be coming from our guest bathtub (thankfully it doesn’t get used often), so I called a plumber. He came out today and, to our great relief, said it was an easy fix and made the necessary repairs in under an hour. Then I spent several hours Cloroxing my laundry room in an attempt to kill any and all molds and germs that might be lurking there. As sorry as I am that Scott’s mom had to replace her dysfunctional washer and dryer last week, I’m really glad she did because that’s how she learned about her own clogged dryer vent affecting the dryness of her clothes. If she hadn’t made that discovery, I might have gone months without finding the leak in our wall!
On top of all of that, our homeowner’s insurance premium has increased by over 20% this year thanks to the horrific drought and the ridiculous number of wildfires in Texas last year (our area in particular). Texas led the nation in weather-related claims for 2009, 2010, and 2011 according to our insurance lady. That’s insane, especially when you consider the fires and mud slides that happen in California seemingly each year and the terrible flooding that happened in the east last year. Regardless, I was unprepared for such a hike in our premium, and it makes me very sad. I hope that things go well for Texas for the next few years so our premium will go back down. Yeeeeeeesh. Is it next week yet?