The First Month / Appliance Revolt! / Weird Work Reassignment?
Nicole and I have been in our new house for about a month and a half but truly alone with it only for about a month now. It's been a challenging month of finding our bearings and adjusting to what it means to own something this big and needy. This is a forty year old house after all and it does need special attention.
Every weekend so far has been filled with home improvement tasks. The first couple weeks were about me putting the wood trim back on the walls everywhere after putting in the hardwood floor. I was dreading it because when we laid the flooring down in December, it wasn't perfect and there were places near some walls where the trim couldn't cover up a gap. I discovered a few sneaky solutions including simply adding extra flooring back into those gaps, so it actually went by pretty quickly. There was so much trim... But it's done now! And with every project we complete, it really is beginning to feel like a home. Heck, we just paid our first mortgage payment, so it feels even more real now.
Just yesterday, I finished a simple project that I think anyone who builds a home entertainment center daydreams about: Mounting their big-screen TV to the wall and neatly hiding all the cabling in the walls to create a theater room effect. This might not sound as important as some other projects to do in the first month of owning a home, but I felt that it would be a shining example or centerpiece for successful home improvement projects to come. It took me a bit to add some electrical outlets and feed the power around, but it turned out great and now the TV simply floats in mid-air like magic. It's succeeding at these tiny little projects that will make this place feel like a home eventually. We haven't put anything on the walls yet outside of curtains here and there, but we'll get there. We have years.
The first challenge we've run into is that all our appliances have seemingly suddenly decided to revolt. It started with the dishwasher making this loud horrible grinding sound during cycles. Then the water heater was found to be only providing maybe twenty minutes of hot water. Then the fridge started freezing food. Then we discovered the stove's cooking elements were all bent up and inefficient. Then the clothes dryer stopped putting out hot air altogether. It's been weird. We never had this many appliance problems when we lived in an apartment let alone all at once. And it sucks because here we don't have a front office we can call to get help; it's all on us. So thankfully I'm a fairly handy guy and I've managed to fix most of this crap. The dishwasher was a pain because for some reason, every time I went to put it back together, it leaked somewhere. It's not even that old a device. Incredibly frustrating. But that's home ownership! The fun begins!
I've been back to work as normal in January after taking all of December off to renovate the new house. But when I say back to work, I mean merely telecommuting as the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis continues and my workplace is still locked down after about 10 months now. This year looks to be rather difficult for me professionally as there's going to be a lot of change and pressure. My department of computer programmers is going to have lots to do and no time to do it. One of the first things that's already happened to meet these challenges has been to put everyone on teams. Up until now, our department was so small (nine people or something) that each of us was what they call, "siloed", or working alone within their area of expertise. This led to a lack of cohesion and cooperation. I mean, sure, we were working together, but everyone was working alone; there were no groups within the department. So now we're going to try teams. There'll be three programming teams for each layer of software and each team will be working together on a project. Participation will be paramount. I can only hope this new way of doing things works because looking at the rest of the year is scary.
Every weekend so far has been filled with home improvement tasks. The first couple weeks were about me putting the wood trim back on the walls everywhere after putting in the hardwood floor. I was dreading it because when we laid the flooring down in December, it wasn't perfect and there were places near some walls where the trim couldn't cover up a gap. I discovered a few sneaky solutions including simply adding extra flooring back into those gaps, so it actually went by pretty quickly. There was so much trim... But it's done now! And with every project we complete, it really is beginning to feel like a home. Heck, we just paid our first mortgage payment, so it feels even more real now.
Just yesterday, I finished a simple project that I think anyone who builds a home entertainment center daydreams about: Mounting their big-screen TV to the wall and neatly hiding all the cabling in the walls to create a theater room effect. This might not sound as important as some other projects to do in the first month of owning a home, but I felt that it would be a shining example or centerpiece for successful home improvement projects to come. It took me a bit to add some electrical outlets and feed the power around, but it turned out great and now the TV simply floats in mid-air like magic. It's succeeding at these tiny little projects that will make this place feel like a home eventually. We haven't put anything on the walls yet outside of curtains here and there, but we'll get there. We have years.
The first challenge we've run into is that all our appliances have seemingly suddenly decided to revolt. It started with the dishwasher making this loud horrible grinding sound during cycles. Then the water heater was found to be only providing maybe twenty minutes of hot water. Then the fridge started freezing food. Then we discovered the stove's cooking elements were all bent up and inefficient. Then the clothes dryer stopped putting out hot air altogether. It's been weird. We never had this many appliance problems when we lived in an apartment let alone all at once. And it sucks because here we don't have a front office we can call to get help; it's all on us. So thankfully I'm a fairly handy guy and I've managed to fix most of this crap. The dishwasher was a pain because for some reason, every time I went to put it back together, it leaked somewhere. It's not even that old a device. Incredibly frustrating. But that's home ownership! The fun begins!
I've been back to work as normal in January after taking all of December off to renovate the new house. But when I say back to work, I mean merely telecommuting as the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis continues and my workplace is still locked down after about 10 months now. This year looks to be rather difficult for me professionally as there's going to be a lot of change and pressure. My department of computer programmers is going to have lots to do and no time to do it. One of the first things that's already happened to meet these challenges has been to put everyone on teams. Up until now, our department was so small (nine people or something) that each of us was what they call, "siloed", or working alone within their area of expertise. This led to a lack of cohesion and cooperation. I mean, sure, we were working together, but everyone was working alone; there were no groups within the department. So now we're going to try teams. There'll be three programming teams for each layer of software and each team will be working together on a project. Participation will be paramount. I can only hope this new way of doing things works because looking at the rest of the year is scary.