Lessons Learned; The First Two Weeks of Home Ownership

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O.K. I have been a home owner for a whopping eleven days now and I have learned a few things that I thought I’d share.

1. Home Depot/Lowe’s/Wal-Mart are now my favorite stores
2. It’s a royal pain in the rear to find pool chemicals in December, even in Houston
3. Contractor’s HAVE to be watched the entire time
4. I need to find a pool maintenance 101 course
5. Never have your lawn guy come on Saturday to rake your yard if it’s windy out and there are still leaves on the tree
6. I have the only tree on my street that drops leaves
7. Check the floor of all closets before you close them as new closets are neat to cats
8. Pissed off cats are not fun cats
9. You can bribe cats with treats, but you can’t make them not pissed off
10. Replace all toilet seats as soon as possible
11. No matter how much storage room you think you will have, its not going to be enough
12. It’s a good idea to find out what day trash day is BEFORE you move in
13. Having DSL transferred from one place to another takes forever
14. Hardwood floors are awesome, but take a lot of work
15. The Husband and the Wife should set up the kitchen together
16. The New Dish Network DVR receivers need pretty powerful remotes, so powerful that one of my neighbors can change the channel on my system and I can on his. (BTW: He wanted to watch Telemundo and I wanted to watch Everybody Loves Raymond, after 20 minutes we settled on a CSI repeat)
17. Beer and Pizza are the best bribes when asking friends to help you move
18. Ceiling fans are cheaper at Wal-Mart than at Home Depot
19. Pools in Houston in November are cold (Thanks to Vulture Big Brother for testing that out for me)
20. Re-keying locks is a lot cheaper than buying all new locks

Even though we are having a few difficulties, we are loving the place and celebrating a lot of firsts (first drive to work from out home, first dinner, first broken glass, first fire in our fire place etc.). We have started putting up the Christmas decorations inside the tree looks great on the hard wood, the all silver and blue theme with white blue & lights reflects nicely, though the hedges in the front block most of the view from the curb.
With all said and done we are happy and it is a great feeling participating in the American Dream.

Vulture 6