Why did we buy this house?

My apologies in advance for this very wordy post!



Every room had a ceiling fan, but only one seemed to work. Upon further inspection, they were not hooked to the light switches, you had to pull a chain. Problem was all the chains had been pulled out. You wanted a light on? You had to screw in the light bulb, (requiring the use of a ladder every time). This of course meant that you had to unscrew the bulb (with a pot holder) to turn the light off.  The light/fan in the living room worked the day we moved in. And never worked again. EVER. It is on a remote receiver, and I finally had someone come look at it and they said the wires were totally dead. No power going to it. How it worked the first day is still a mystery.  We bought cheap lamps as a temporary solution, then new fans, then paid a handy man to come install them all. I still don't have light in the living room, my master bedroom or one of the kids rooms. Two of my kids lights have to have a chain like 4 feet long, so they can turn their lights on. It looks ridiculous!

The inspection report noted that one of the windows had a small crack in it. I wish I’d taken a picture of what a “small” crack meant to the inspector. It was huge, the whole window. It had obviously been hit by a ball or something hard. It needed to be completely replaced. We also noticed that the window next to the other one was cracked as well, so that was a necessary fix so as not to have our cool A/C air blowing out into the nice 110 degree weather.

Shortly after moving in we had a small rain storm. With this rain storm water began pouring down the front of the fireplace, like… in between the drywall and the brick, not down the chimney. We’re still not quite sure how to fix that one and I sure hope there is no mold festering up in there somewhere. The next day, we realized that the ceiling in the dining room was wet, as was the wall around a vent high up on the wall. Hubby went up in the attic to investigate and found that the duct hooked to the vent where it was leaking was just an open duct, shooting all our nice cool, expensive air right up into the attic. Up to this point we hadn’t called the inspector with everything going wrong, but this one ticked us off. He went up in the attic, how did he not notice an open duct?  He came back to inspect, said that the condensation line in the a/c was plugged and was filling up and then spilling over onto the roof of the ceiling. He paid for an a/c guy to come fix the problem and Hubby fixed the open duct. We ended up having some other things done to spruce up the a/c and hopefully make it last a while longer, and ended up spending almost $500.

We thought we fixed the leak, Hubby even went up on the roof with tar to patch nail holes and fill around where the A/c is sitting on the roof. But then another storm him. The remains of a major hurricane nailed Phoenix, dropping 4-5 inches in less than 12 hours. People were left stranded, homes flooded, the freeways were full of water and abandoned cars. It was pretty crazy. Of course, we woke to find our ceiling in the dining room a wet mess again, when Hubby went up into the attic this time, he found the wood underneath the shingles a wet soggy mess. We had no choice but to call our insurance company again. We had lived here for 37 days and already filed two insurance claims. Just hope they renew us next year!   It was about 10am that day that we realized it was really hot in the house, that’s when we realized that our a/c was not working. Somehow all the rain had blown out a fan motor. Even though it was only about 80 degrees outside, it quickly jumped to 90 degrees inside, so we abandoned ship and had a slumber party at Grandma’s house. Fortunately, the warranty did cover this repair, so it was only $65 to fix, but we were out of the house for about 24 hours.  As I write this a second hurricane is about to dump what’s left of it on us, and I can only wonder what will happen this time.

The only consolation during this whole time was the totally awesome swimming pool in the back yard. But shortly after move in, the filter just seemed to stop working and with in 2 days the thing was a swampy looking green. Adding that to the list of things that had already gone wrong, and we were beyond frustrated. The local pool supply store knows us by name now, and we finally figured out what the heck we were doing. This pool might end up costing more that we anticipated that it would. That makes me nervous!  Hubby votes to fill it in and have a beautiful garden, some days I think that might be the better route. For now though we love it, we swim almost every day and my kids look like little Indians, they are so tan!