I've always been incredibly intimidated by having to do any sort of home maintenance. Mostly it's the stuff that involves using tools, touching wires, and other crazy things of that sort. Owning my own home for the past two years has proven that there's no time for intimidation you just have to get off your ass and do it. Every time we think of something to fix or change about the house I jot it down in a to do list especially for house stuff. It's become apparent to me recently that the list was only growing and not getting any smaller. With Sari gone for a bit on Saturday I decided to "get off my ass" and do something about our ever growing list.
There were a few little things that I wanted to warm up with which included a new toilet seat, shower curtain and drip guards for the shower, all an absolute breeze. The big one was replacing our aging thermostat. It didn't keep track of the temperature very well and we would often be terribly cold or experience sweltering heat in our house. It was so old in fact that the small glass container of mercury was easily exposed by lifting the cover. It was kind of neat to watch it roll around in there but a bit scary at the same time knowing how detrimental to our health it could be if let loose.
I made several trips to Lowe's which is luckily only a few blocks away and eventually settled on a nice, touch-screen model. If I was going to go to such incredible lengths to replace something like a thermostat, the new one better have some seriously cool bells and whistles and last a long time, which I'm confident this one will. The next issue was figuring out how to wire the new one up. Unfortunately the wires connected to the old thermostat weren't marked very well which had me a bit panicky for a few minutes. Luckily the manufacturer had been cool enough to scan in the old installation guide which looked like a photo-copy of a photo-copy but was enough to help me figure out which wire was for which. That in combination of the quarter inch thick manual that came with the new thermostat made it surprisingly easy to get the wires connected correctly and, as an added bonus, the base and frame was large enough to cover up the crappy job that the previous home owners did when installing the old one.
There's nothing more satisfying then putting effort into fixing a problem in your home and having the solution work the first time. In this case it was adding batteries, mounting the thermostat, turning up the heat and having the furnace click on. Cool stuff! We can now program the thermostat based on the day of the week which will be really helpful. Not only that but being able to accurately keep track of the temperature will mean the furnace not being run when it shouldn't be and thus paying a bit less on our electricity bill.Next up is patching all the walls in our home from the electrical work that we had done several months ago. It's fun owning your own home!