Life Lately – Home Edition / 8.30.23

Jose and I have also been managing a slew of house maintenance and services over the last month or so, and while nothing is super major, it’s felt like a stack of dominos — one thing leads to another to another.

• First, our downstairs a/c unit stopped cooling — yes, during our streak of 100+ degree days. Thankfully we were able to get by with the upstairs unit until the HVAC company came out, and even more thankfully, the culprit was a failed capacitor that was easy and quick and cheap to change out.
• The sprinkler guys came to fix a couple broken sprinkler heads, which then escalated into having them come back the following week to re-route and add to a sprinkler line in the backyard.
• The plumber came to fix a clogged sink in the girls’ bathroom, which was exacerbated by the fact that one of our a/c units drains through that sink. This escalated into replacing the a/c drain line from “how they did it in 1988” to “how they do it in 2023.”
• The girls decided to move back into separate rooms after sharing for the last 3 years and we moved several items of furniture and had to disassemble/reassemble a bed that couldn’t be maneuvered through the upstairs doors/hallway in one piece. (On the plus side, we decluttered a good amount of no-longer-needed clothes and books and toys while we were at it.)
• Still to do — call the painters, since we agreed each kid could pick a new wall color for their room.

And finally, after working full-time remote from home for a year, it has become clear that Jose really needs an area that can be solely dedicated to work. He currently has two desks in the study — which doubles as the family TV room — that he uses for both work and play and it’s just not ideal for him. I have proposed many different options, including him taking over my current study/studio (the dining room), but he really wants a room with a door. So the obvious spot for a work-only desk is our guest room, which is currently occupied by a queen size bed and my longarm.

(Note that the photo above is wide angle, so it looks bigger than it actually is. I’m standing in the doorway, and to the left is the door to the bathroom. The longarm frame is 8 feet. There’s ~3′ between the bed and the bathroom, and ~2′ between the bed and the windows. The room is roughly 13′ x 11′.)

I had come to the conclusion that getting rid of my longarm to make space for Jose was the most appropriate thing for our lives right now…until I happened to chat with another parent who mentioned that he works in his garage, which he cools with a mini-split a/c unit. And our garage has a mini-split, albeit one that we have never used. And maybe we could actually make the “garage quilter/maker space” that I’ve daydreamed about happen for a lot less than I thought it would cost. So:

• I tried turning on the garage unit. Unsurprisingly after 7 years of not being used, it did not work and started flashing some sort of error code, so…
• HVAC company #1 came out to service the unit, but determined that it’s failed and can’t be fixed, so we need a new one. Fine, we said, but the priced they quoted was outrageous, so…
• Jose called HVAC company #2, who came out and gave us a much more reasonable quote, but also determined that we need to replace the old circuit breaker to align with the spec for the new a/c unit, so…
• Jose called an electrician, who is coming today to replace the circuit breaker. Based on previous experience, this will likely escalate into a couple other fixes/upgrades to the electrical box to make sure everything is up to current code before the new mini-split arrives.
• (Also just yesterday, the garage door stopped opening due to a broken torsion spring. The timing is impeccable! So I found a garage door repair guy who is coming sometime today to fix that.)
• Assuming everything goes smoothly for the electrician, HVAC company #2 will be back tomorrow to remove the old, dead mini-split and install the new one.
• Also tomorrow, the Houston Furniture Bank is coming to pick up the queen bed frame, mattress, and box spring from the guest room, so tonight we have to disassemble that bed.

*In theory*, by Friday we should have 1) a guest room that no longer has a large bed and 2) a climate-controlled garage.

Buuuuut given that the garage currently looks like the photo above, the to-do list goes on:

• Move one of Jose’s desks upstairs to the guest room as his new day-job workspace.
• Clean out the garage. The vast majority of stuff in there is junk that can either be trashed or donated. Once it’s mostly clear, we’ll need to sweep out the leaves and dirt and hose down (or power wash?) the floor.
• Disassemble the longarm frame, move it from the guest room to the garage, and reassemble everything. Maybe I can get by with only a partial disassembly? Fingers crossed.
• Buy a daybed or murphy bed for the guest room, so we can still use the space for overnight guests for the 2-3 weeks per year we need it, while taking up less space for the other 50 weeks.

Whew. It feels good to be making all this progress, but it’s also kind of exhausting and I find myself wishing it could just *poof* all magically happen without me having to do anything.

And of course all of this is happening on top of day jobs and school and kid activities! I’m just really thankful that we have the financial resources to afford the various fixes and upgrades, plus the job flexibility to handle various service calls at the house during the day.