Well, the latest in our household is that last weekend, our mailbox was vandalized. We called the police and they filled out a report on it. We knew that since the mailbox only cost about $50.00, that we could not file insurance on it. So, we set about trying to figure out what our options are. We don't want to have to buy a new mailbox and/or post every 6 months, so we were willing to buy something a little more sturdy. My hubby talked to a few friends online who made some suggestions. We also did some online shopping on the Home Depot website. We even investigated the possibility of moving the mailbox to where it was originally located about 1/2 way between the street and the house. No go on that one by the way, as the post offices nationwide are trying to move everyone's mailboxes to the street for safety and limitation of liability. After talking with the postmaster, they came up with an idea the post office is happy with and will also hopefully eliminate future vandalism issues. It involves: 1) mountaing the mailbox on a new post where the box is screwed into a hard metal plate, 2) setting the post in quik crete, and building a sort of cage made of rebar around the mailbox. It is bound to be the most unusual and ugly mailboxes in our town, but if it will keep people from knocking it over, I am all for it. Will post more on this later.
The second issue we are dealing with is ants. Ants by our microwave, in our kitchen cabinets, by the stove, and on the floor. We have been trying for weeks to stave them off by keeping the counters meticulously clean, washing all dishes as soon as we are done with them, and sweeping and mopping the floor often. That has not been working, as they seem to come back anyway. Well, today we decided we had had enough. I did some searching online for anything we could do that did not involve calling an exterminator or spraying awful chemicals into the air.
We went out and bought the boric acid and I put it where the online instructions said. Then, my husband went out and looked around the house. He said he found hundreds of ants in our yard and so he put some of the boric acid on them. Hopefully, this will do the trick.
There is other stuff in our house we definitely want to change. Here is a picture of the closet doors in our bedroom. Yes, they are actually an icky color somewhere between pink and lavender. Yuck.
Here is a picture of the bathroom looking towards the bathtub and a small cabinet Notice the weird colors? Yes, we have a harvest gold bathtub and tiles, but that lavender/pink paint on the inside of the cabinet above the bathtub on the wall. I think whoever painted must have been color blind!
We also want to install some kind of insulation in the attic. Some I know was commenting how they had recently installed radiant barrier in their attic and that it made a huge difference. They described it as looking kind of like big pieces of aluminum foil. I am not sure if it is considered a replacement or a complement to regular insulation. Have any of you heard of it or used it?
I knew that home ownership would be different than renting, but this has not been much fun. It certainly hasn't been boring, though.
July 15th, 2011 at 05:29 pm 1310750958
July 15th, 2011 at 09:17 pm 1310764648
Jerry
July 17th, 2011 at 12:54 pm 1310907297
As for the mailbox, several years ago we had kids who liked to play mailbox baseball in our area (lean out the car window and drive by with a bat and whack the mailbox off the post. What we did was get two sizes of mailboxes, put one inside the other and fill in the empty space between the two with quick crete. We also set the mounting pole heavily into the ground with quick crete and used a heavy duty mounting plate. After the kids shattered their bats a few times on our mailbox they decided it wasn't worth the replacement cost and we never had problems like that again.
July 17th, 2011 at 03:23 pm 1310916235
Our mailbox project is almost finished. Our nephew came over and dug a hole to put the new mailbox post in, poured in the quik crete, put the post in, and helped put the rest of the mailbox together. My brother in law is coming over later with a cage made of rebar that we are going to put around the mailbox.