Good and bad

For the most part I am loving this new little house and lifestyle, but there are a few things on the "bad" list.

So here's the good stuff:
The house is a cute, well built little house. Seems very energy efficient too.

It's nice having an attached garage (even if it's smaller than we are used to)

The small town (no stop lights) is easy to get around and quick to get errands done. Today I stopped to get my mail (and a package from the desk that was too big to fit into PO Box), stopped at the city office to get dog license tags (a whole $10 for both dogs for lifetime licenses), then a quick stop at the grocery store for a few things. I was gone a whole half hour LOL

If we want to go to the city it's only about a 40-45 minute drive and it's a pretty drive.

The one restaurant in town has really good food, so we've been eating there about once a week. Even got a "punch card" now that we are "regulars" :)

Our older dog loves being outside now. He thinks the big grassy area across the street is his yard too (though of course we only let him go there when we are with him and we clean up after him).

It's very peaceful overall. And the Fall colors every where are just beautiful.

Here's the "bad" (just minor annoyances):
Our master bedroom is a bit too small for a king sized bed. We are able to fit our bed (sleigh bed) 2 night stands (just barely fit width of room) and a small dresser in one corner. Luckily the walk in closet is HUGE (almost like a small room) so we just put our big dresser in the walk in closet. We even have a gun safe in there now and there is still tons of room.

The master bath doesn't have a medicine cabinet. All our "crap" on the counter is driving me nuts. Will be buying one to hang on the wall over the toilet very soon.

The guest bathroom doesn't have a linen closet/storage area. Haven't figured out yet what I am doing for this problem. I could put a small/tall cabinet between the sink/vanity and the toilet, but if it has doors/drawers it will hit the toilet paper holder when trying to open. Still working on what will be best solution.

The neighbors directly next door have a lot of junk piling up. More than when we looked at house before buying. The guy who owns the vacant lots on each end of our street (and across street) has apparently complained to the property owner (they rent) that it needs to get cleaned up or he's getting an attorney because he feels it's affecting his ability to get the lots sold. At some point (after we've been here a bit) we'll probably join in with him to complain to the property owner about it. There is no reason they need to have an old couch up leaning up against the wall of their back porch area...(that's just an example of one of the junky stuff they have).

These neighbors have two little kids. One about 3 and one in kindergarten. The 3 year old girl doesn't listen at all. The 5 yr old boy is better, but you can tell just starving for attention. He thinks DH is his new best friend, which isn't what DH needs at all. LOL. Yesterday we were outside in our front yard with the dogs and neighbor guy came over to fence to chat. The little girl kept climbing up on the chain link fence and he kept pulling her down. Do you know what he did, rather than make her mind? Picked her up and put her over the fence into our yard to play while we were talking! Within minutes she was throwing rocks and walking into our garage where we had left the door ajar. Good grief. That's the thing - you try to be friendly with people, but then they just push the boundaries.


The tub/shower is really narrow! DH just fits to sit in the tub on each side. LOL.

The dishwasher seems to be a bit on the small size - the silverware holder is really small.

People aren't as friendly as I would expect in such a small town. No biggie. Not intending to get into the politics and gossip of small town anyway, and when we get to build our new house, we'll be 10 miles outside of town, with only one neighbor, so that will be perfect ;)

Master bathroom fan doesn't seem to work at all to keep mirror from fogging up. Even if I leave the bathroom door open, it's still all fogged up!

And my biggest complaint is the stove fan! Our previous house vented the oven smoke through the fan and out through a vent in the ceiling. This one has a microwave over the oven (which at first I thought was nice) but all's it does is vent right back into the house! So stupid! Any time I try to broil steaks or hamburgers I'm just getting smoke right into the kitchen. Sooo frustrating. Our friend, who was visiting/helping DH again this weekend, said his is same way. I don't get it - makes no sense to me why it would be set up like that.


Things we've had to fix so far:
The house garage door didn't open all the way.
The hot water heater was set on the highest hot water setting - yikes. Turned that puppy down to something more reasonable.
Outside faucet knob missing - found it in garage
One of the roll up doors on the shop wasn't set up to roll with proper hardware (seller had told DH he'd install it, but of course never did)
Cleaned up the most of the mess they left (they came and got most of it last weekend) but there are still a couple things they never came back for (an old exercise machine) so now we're going to have to pay to dump the stuff. Grrrr.
Added door stoppers in some rooms
The shower curtain had these open kind of rings that every time you'd pull the curtain back some of the rings would fall all. Was driving DH nuts, so I bought some enclosed rings that have little ball bearings on them. Works great now.


Projects being worked on/soon to start:
Running electricity out to the shop, so DH can have some lights and plug ins. DH's friend helped and it's now out there and waiting for inspector to ok it. Then we'll have some insulation sprayed in. Then DH can finally get his big trailer unloaded and we can get that thing sold and out of here.

Additional chain link fencing. Currently fencing is just around front yard and to side of house. Just going to fence the whole lot and also add the top rail, that's not on the existing fence now. It will give the dogs much more room to wander around the yard......and help keep the neighbor kids out of our unfenced area. Still waiting for a call back to get an estimate. People are slow to call back around here, that's for sure. DH has called 3 people on one project and not a one called back, like they said they would.