Our First Month

Tomorrow we will have been living in this house for one month and we’ve learned a lot about this house.  First off, it has ants everywhere, in every room, and they’re the nasty kind.  Not the innoculous little sugar ants, though those are running rampant, too.  They’re not what I would call fire ants, having grown up in the country and seen REAL fire ants (about a centimeter or more in length, big circle of dirt mounds, trails of destruction) but they are what most city folk dub fire ants, due to the burning stinging fire-like sting.  The shrubs out front have two kinds of scale which adds to the infestation of sugar ants, since scale and sugar ants go hand-in-hand.  I haven’t seen any roaches, but we do hav the occasional spider and june-bug (fitting since it IS June, afterall)…

Besides pests, I have learned that linoleum does not smell very good when it gets wet and stays wet.  It smells like sour rags.  I’ve also learned that I need to buy new curtain rods as apartments tend to build big luxurious windows into their walls, so all my curtain rods are waaaay too long for the dinky little windows in this house.  I’ve also learned that grass is hard to grow when you start off with only a small patch of it.  We never watered EVER at the duplex and it always had green grass, I guess because the grass was healthy to start off with.

Our first water bill, for the period of time before we moved in and didn’t use any water (April 14th to May 11th, okay, we lived here ONE day) was $80 so I’m dreading what it will be when we’re actually using water.  I hear other Leander residents tell me that our water bill will easily be over $200/month, every month.  It’s just not right.  Our water bill in Round Rock was $40/month and included the same stuff as the bill here (trash, sewer, water).  We’ll see.  I’m not excited about the huge cost of water in this town.

We also looked into a garage door opener and learned that those are a huge hassle to install for the first time (which is probably why NONE of the houses on this street seem to have them).  It would be nice but we can live without it for awhile.

I have the master bedroom clean, presentable, almost done!  Next for me is the livingroom but that will always be a work in progress as it is also the main un-packing zone.  Probably the next space we need to focus on is the kitchen.  It has the biggest ant problem and also needs the most work.  We’re missing one very large drawer (there are only 3 drawers! it’s, like, half the drawer space in the whole kitchen!) and need to finally decide where the plates, cups, cooking, measuring, storage stuff all goes.  We also need to come up with a solution to the huge blue recycling bin, hang some curtains, clear off some counter top space, and deal with the top of the fridge stash.

Pictures of the master bedroom soon.  Lowell is in my lap giving me kisses, so I need to go focus on him first.