Home Improvement...... Sucks!

As most of you know, well those who sorta follow my blog, we are in the midst of finishing up home improvement projects so our house can go on the market. We have way outgrown our current house, 1070 sq ft and this seems like a good time to sell, at least where we are! I know at least 3 people personally that sold their houses here in less than a month, so wish us luck!

We have been working on the house since oh I don't know, April and are just now getting to the point of done. Insane, but with hubby working so much and our Hawaii trip we just were short on some time. We...well ok hubby has done alot of work himself and we did get a little help from our BIL for FREE, he's in construction. It's nice to have family who'll do that stuff for free, though we plan to pay them something once we sell.

Our house is looking so nice compared to what it did when we bought it 8 yrs ago, if we hadn't outgrown it I would stay lol. We have a brand new roof this year, we installed laminate flooring in the living/dining rooms two years ago, new vinyl in the bathrooms and kitchen two years ago as well. We have now painted the outside of the house to a beautiful champagne color (pale yellow) with white trim from a ugly charcoal color. The house now boasts beautiful new light fixtures in every room, new sink faucets, door knobs, and patio doors. I was looking at the cost of all this, we are close to umm 10K in fixing up this house and I felt faint. It needed to be done, esp the roof and flooring in order to sell, so it'll be worth it.


The latest spendy project is the Air Conditioner. So a few months ago our thermostat went out, just quit working, tried new batteries, checking the wires etc. Nothing seemed to work, so I bought a new thermostat. Sounds good right, hubby installed the last one and likely would be able to do so this time too. Umm right it took him hours and hours and still it wasn't right...but we made do. It did cool and that is what we needed since it was near 100 outside but unfortunately it wasn't kicking off when it reached the desired temperature. It would continue to run, which we didn't realize how bad until we came back from our trip to Hawaii. I would have thought our bill went down since we were gone for 2 weeks, sounds right? Um nope, it went up from the normal $180's to $250's EEk almost $100 extra that month.

So then this months bill came and yet again $250 so we called the AC company and had them come out Friday morning. The guy arrives on time, thankfully as we had tons to do and gets to work. Turns out we simply had the wrong thermostat..oh great, so I am a true blonde. The one we had that was for gas not electric....eek again. Well it was $89 for them to come run a diagnostic on the whole system which we needed anyways and all that was wrong was the thermostat. UGH so the guy said he can install a new one for $120 and I ask hubby if that is what he wants to do or just go get one and do it himself. He's like pay for it!! It takes me to long to do it and plus we might not be able to find the right one. Ok so the guy has checked out the whole system and installed a new thermostat in about an hour.... $200 later it's done! Yay for AC guys on time and fast!