Home Sweet Home

We have lived in our current home three years now.  Where has the time gone?  As somewhat recent college grads that is practically a lifetime after moving almost on a yearly basis.  In fact in the year before moving to our current location I had 5 different addresses.  We are currently renting a duplex (although we have never actually signed a lease-- oh well).  From time to time we talk or dream about buying a home of our own-- someday.  However there are other times that we wonder if home ownership is really all it is cracked up to be.

I am house sitting for a friend who is gone for the summer.  My biggest duty is mowing the lawn.  Growing up I had two brothers so mowing the lawn never was one of my jobs.  I had practically earned my doctorate degree before I helped mow a yard for the first time.  This past week was my second time.  My friend has a riding lawn mower but it is not equipped with zero-turn radius capabilities.  Luckily she doesn't have many obstacles in her yard and now there is even one less since I ran over a surveying stick this week-- oops.  As I was mowing I thought that most people probably spend three or four hours on caring for their yards a week.  For us currently that is three or four hours of "free time" since my garden only takes 15 minutes of attention a week and someone randomly shows up to mow our yards.

Then we can talk about home maintenance.  As renters if we have major issues such as water gushing through the floor we call our landlord and it isn't our problem.  Since we don't own the home we don't own the problems either.  We are trying to "practice" by taking care of the less serious issues ourselves.  The dishwasher has had a certain funk to it lately so I decided to clean out the filter.  The TV show Red Green used to say duct tape was a handyman's secret weapon but I frankly think YouTube should be in the running.  A simple search brought up a 5 minute video of how to unassemble the parts I needed on our exact model and it was fairly easy to do with my handy screw driver.  Of course I had to watch the video several more times to get all the parts put back in exactly right but it worked.  I also used YouTube last year to diagnose a problem with our furnace. 

On our evening walks we often wander about town talking about houses that we like or neighborhoods we want to live in.  Usually people are out and about mowing the lawn, tending to the garden, or doing a fix-it project.  However we don't run into many others out walking in the community-- it is probably because all the homeowners have to walk behind their lawn mowers.  We aren't quite ready to trade in our free time yet.  Omni Vincit Amor.