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Archive for July, 2009

Our house is falling apart - Part 2

July 26th, 2009 at 05:22 pm

Several months ago (January, I think) I posted an entry entitled, "Our house is falling apart."

Six months later, we've fixed several things on that list, though not all of them. In the meantime, a few new ones have cropped up.

We had to have our oven repaired not long ago. I went to bake pizzas one night and the oven warmed up but didn't get to anywhere close to 450 degrees, so we ended up with warm but not fully cooked pizza. When the repairman came out, he was able to fix it but advised us that it is 20 years old and it probably won't last much longer.

We've had a recurring problem with carpenter ants and have had the house treated a few times over the years. This being ant season, they came back last week. The exterminator came out and retreated but discovered some moisture damage in the wall where the paneling is bowing and cracking. So now we need to have a contractor come out, rip out that paneling, see what kind of damage exists behind it and fix whatever needs to be fixed.

Now, our stovetop, which is just as old as the oven, is on the fritz. I was helping DD cook some potstickers last night and even though the burner was only set on medium, it got red hot and burned the food.

So it looks like we need to go shopping for a new oven AND stovetop. Oh, and replacing the oven means having the contractor rebuild the wall (it is a built-in model) because our oven is 26" and the standard now is 27" so it won't fit where the current one is. Also, the current unit is a combined oven and microwave (that died a couple of years ago) so we want to rebuild the wall to fit a new oven and build a cubby to put our free-standing microwave and get it off our countertop (that will be nice). Besides, we've always hated our stovetop. It has 4 burners, 2 small and 2 large, but they are too close together so you can't actually have 4 decent size pots going at the same time. I'm sure the end result will be a more functional kitchen, but we just weren't planning on spending any big bucks on renovations at this point in time.

Oh well, such is life.