Life is Beautiful

* When you first look at the house for rent, you notice a bad smell, but chalk it up to being an empty old house. The smell will go away, right?

* When you come back a few days later to shampoo the carpets, you then notice they are covered in stains from animal feces. You get rid of most of the stains, and it smells clean after they are shampooed.

* That stinky carpet smell comes back after only a few days. You are now relegated to treating the carpet no less then every 5 days to keep the smell at bay.

* The house is really old, and is actually two old small houses that have been put together to make one decent sized house. Although there really isn't anything terribly wrong with this, it does make for a strange floor plan and a not very efficient use of square footage. A lot of your belongings don't fit and you have a hard time making the space work for you.

* You get extremely poor cell phone reception. This most likely due to your location, but none the less, there is only 1 corner of the house where you get mostly decent reception and can hold a conversation without cutting out.

* Upon closer examination of the kitchen/living room floor, you realize that although they have been updated with a nice pergo flooring, the original floor boards, (were talking original, original from like 1920) are sagging underneath the new floor. That means, well a sagging floor, but it also means that their are now gaps between the boards of the pergo floor, which kind of defeats the point of a new floor.

* Although the paint in the house is relatively new and updated, it is also very dark, which doesn't bode well in a house with poor lighting. It kind of makes it feel like you live in a cave. All that dark brown drains the life out of you.

* The bathroom has been updated with a new tile floor, sink and jetted tub. Which would be great except that the tub is so big that there isn't much room left for storing towels, toilet paper, blow dryers, etc. You get creative to make due with storage issues. The tub would be really cool, except that it hasn't been properly taken care of, so despite all effort to clean and sanitize, the jets have a perpetual sluff of grime coming out of them. Needless to say, you won't use the jets. But, it wouldn't matter if they were clean, because the hot water tank doesn't hold enough hot water to be able to fill the tub high enough to run the jets anyway. Not unless you want to soak in a cold bath, that is.

* The laundry room: ah where to begin. It used to be the kitchen in the original house. It hasn't been updated at all, which could actually be really cool. It still has the original walls and flooring and has a cool built in pantry shelf unit. Except that one of the floor boards in the front of the dryer is broken. And remember how it is the original flooring? That means that a 1 X 12 floor board is the only thing between you and being underneath the house. Watch where you step, or your foot will go through the floor. It is also covered (we're talking piles here) of mouse poop around the walls. You don't even know where to begin because it is so bad and as a result will mostly just pretend this part of the house doesn't exist except for doing laundry. It is also STRICTLY of limits to the kids.

* So as previously mentioned, the house is actually two houses put together to make one house. The first house is on a cinder block foundation. The "add on" house is on a cement foundation. If you walk around back, you will see that the foundation is sinking and a 2 x 4 has been shoved under one of the cinder blocks to hold it up to the house.

* The ceiling in the laundry room is falling and is being held up in one place with a box of rat poison. Nice.

* The rat poison holding up the ceiling should have been a pretty good clue that you are going to have mouse issues (that and the big hole in the floor of the laundry room). You get that under control, with, you guessed it, poison.

* There is a constant musty smell in the kitchen and the bathroom. You and the kids spend a fair amount of time being sick. Little mister is running a fever again today, thus the vicious cycle begins again. Pretty sure the walls and/or floor where ever there is running water is harboring mold of some kind.

* One day while doing laundry, you notice a flood of water coming out from underneath the kitchen sink. Apparently, the laundry water drains out of the house through the same pipe as the kitchen sink. You get under the sink (which still has mouse poop, mice are not gone at this point) to see if there is something you can tighten to stop the leak. You find that the entire pipe has come apart, and water is spewing in. Mop up the water and call the land lord. The land lord, who doesn't even live on the same side of the state as you, calls his dad, who is kind and promptly comes over to fix the leak. The nice man tells you that the plumbing was improperly put together with a piece of pipe that is too short. He has done a temporary fix to stop the leak, but promises to come back later with a longer piece of pipe to do a better fix. He never comes back.

* You call your land lord to discuss what should be done about all of the water now under the pergo flooring. He tells you to do nothing, it is the original floor so there are cracks between the floor boards. The water will drain out on its own. The already not great pergo flooring now has water damage.

* You notice shortly after moving in that there is some extreme fluctuation of electricity on one of the circuits. You work from home, and depend on a consistent flow electricity to this particular circuit because your work computer is on it. One day in the middle of an important work meeting, you lose all power to the office, wiping away all the notes you were responsible for taking during the meeting and taking out your work phone as well. You grab your cell phone and head to the one corner in the house that gets good reception to finish your meeting. After the meeting is over, you go check the breaker. Turn it off and then turn it back on again to hear an arching sound. Turn breaker off. Call land lord. To make a long story a little shorter, a visit from land lords dad, a temporary fix, another work interruption due to power outage and 4 days with out power to office, the land lord finally comes to town to fix electrical problem. After all is said and done, you are just grateful the house didn't catch fire.

* The back yard is littered with hazards to children, such as old piping, oil barrels and an old fireplace. There is also a canal that borders your back yard. Most of it is fenced off with a decent fence, except this one little spot...not that you're kids are old enough to be left alone outside anyway, but still.

* And to put the cherry on top, you have a total white trash, red neck refrigerator. It makes awful moaning sounds from time to time. The rails on the door shelves are broken in several places and are being held together by tape. You have to be careful to place all of your large containers in front and small containers in back, otherwise items come spilling out of the fridge every time you open it.

Only two weeks left and we will be out of here. We found the perfect cute little country house to rent instead. I just hope the fridge doesn't die before we move.

Oh, and this house is also for sale. Any takers?

I'm so excited about the snow. Nothing screams Christmas like waking up to snow and having an orange for breakfast. We were all so excited about the snow that we decided to put on our snow gear and head outside for some fun. It was Cody's first time playing in the snow. He loved it, at first. We were building a snow man. By the time we got to the end, he was crying and ready to come in. We barely got the snowman done, so I didn't have time to get a picture of us with our snowman. I had to go back and take the picture of our snowman later. We will have to get some eyes, nose and arms put on him another day.