Lots of little things

Its been a few days and we've had some small and big changes:

1. Water Heater officially works
It took a week and might have been a little over-engineered but as my dad says "It won't break there again." Bob did an amazing job rebuilding the frame, moving all the ductwork, gas line, water in and water out lines, etc. The metal strut support structure insures that it will survive armageddon. We have hot water although we have noticed that if you have the hot knob on and turn the cold water knob at all you suddenly have cold water. We're working on finding a happy medium.

2. Baby-proof (we hope) door
After being defeated by the baby safety lock for the handle on the door leading to the laundry room we decided just to change the knob. $20 later we had an old fashion knob handle with a baby lock mechanism on it we hope will last a few months.

3. Flickering lights stopped The strange flickering in our CFLs has stopped because we replaced them with slightly higher wattage ones. We exchanged the 14 W (=60 W incandescent) ones for 19 W (=75 W incandescent) ones and that was enough to stop the flickering. Which is good because it was creepy at night when they all flicker, dimly, but all off beat from each other.

4. Baby locks in the kitchen Mike has been working hard on installing the baby locks in the kitchen but there are a lot of drawers and cabinets. We bought these really nifty magnetic baby locks that are opened with a magnetic key. The lock can be disabled if you're opening drawers a bunch or the baby grows up but otherwise they are always on "lock" until the magnetic key is brought near. Everyone says "Don't lose that key!" but we have a few spares and it stays handily on the refridgerator. Plus, I just may have a magnet or two at school. ;) I actually probably have one that would open all the cabinets in the kitchen at once ...


5. Dog area built 
We built a real simple frame of 2"x4"x8' pieces of wood and some L brackets to put up against the fence in the south side yard. Tomorrow I fill it with pea gravel (during the baby's nap hopefully). Mike managed to get 20 bags of pea gravel in the Subaru. He did note some acceleration lag on the way home ... Checking the Home Depot website, each bag is 0.5 cubic foot and weighs 49 lbs. That means Mike had 980 lbs of pea gravel in his car.

6. Boxes, boxes and more boxes
Mom has come over a few times to help with boxes. Its very hard to do anything with the baby and dog around. Anne takes Beau to her house daily. Between the two of us we can keep the baby occupied with something other than going through the boxes we are trying to empty. We got a lot of stuff emptied into our bedroom, found the last of the kitchen stuff and moved more craft/ storage/ old baby stuff into the green room. The garage is getting emptied slowly. Technically, if everything was on one side I think we might be able to fit one car in there.

7. Bye bye scrap metal!
Someone was driving around our neighborhood with a big pickup truck with black wood side panels and white lettering that said "FREE SCRAP METAL" and a phone number. The guy stopped and asked if the fridge that is clearly visible on the side of our house worked. I said yes, we wanted to sell it and he asked if I had any other scrap metal. Oh yeah, come and take it! He took the big wire basket of random door knobs that had been left in the garage, the old dirty vent covers we had replaced, the metal cane she left and the metal brackets I had taken out of the baby's room. He asked if we wanted to keep the three light fixtures on the side of the house and I almost laughed. They had gotten no hits on Craigslist (you're surprised, I know) so bye bye vintage lighting!

We continue to open boxes and try to empty them. We are hitting this weird place of having boxes half filled with stuff we don't know where to put yet. The cable remote is still MIA as is the dishwasher detergent but we found our camping stash for that so at least we can do dishes.