Gotta love the handyman!

Besides the daily challenges of running after two funny children with a large basketball attached to my front and juggling work with home life, we also encountered a few other house challenges over the past week. I'm pretty sure Hubby was starting to question his mental status when we purchased this house 7 months ago. Like I've said in the past, God likes to smack us around with a few issues all at the same time instead of one here and one there. :o) See, I can be humorous about it because we are used to it.

On top of Hubby working with his dad in trying to get our new/used coal stove working and me talking with a man in India for the longest time to get my new router working, (Yes, I'm pretty sure that's where he was. No, I didn't ask but should have.), we also realized a new issue on Sunday. My washing machine would not fill with water. There I was with a bin full of "wash me now!" cloth diapers, unable to get the water going. The rest of the house water was fine, and we quickly realized it was definitely a pipe problem, not a machine problem. Ugh.

Hubby spent most of Sunday trying to dig out the part of the basement that contained our lovely washing machine water pipes, and he was unable to reach them. (In between this task, he and our neighbor worked at getting the coal stove going.) On Monday night, thinking that the pipes might be accessible via the deck that is just outside our back door, he began pulling up the wooden boards. And there was the problem.

Sometime over the summer, we kept smelling "eau de dead animal" in and around the back deck. We suspected something was dead under there, near the house, but we couldn't get to it. So we poured bleach down through the deck boards and lived with the smell for a week or so. Wouldn't you know...whatever animal was under there had dug a huge hole against our house, exposing the washing machine water pipes. With the beyond-cold weather this past weekend, and no insulation around them, the pipes froze, leaving me waterless. After a nighttime run to Lowe's for insulation and more of Hubby's handiwork, the pipes had their insulation, I had a functioning washing machine, and peace was restored. Gotta love a man who can juggle all of that and still not lose his cool with me! ;o)

So now we have a working router, a lit coal stove, a warm/cozy house, and clean clothing. Ahh, yes...normalcy. I can almost ignore the men digging up my front yard at 7:30am this morning to install a grinder pump for the pending public sewer project. Almost. ;o)