More Random Home Improvements

I’ve been wanting one of these big deck umbrellas for quite sometime and we finally got one. Of course we haven’t gotten much use out of it yet. Remember that long run of consecutively sunless days? Well that was immediately after us buying that umbrella! But we broke the sunless streak this weekend and we actually got to lounge under it for a while. It was blissful.

The next home improvement project that I want to document is a little hard to show so here is my best shot . . .

A few weeks ago our friend Nancy (previous owner of our house) came over for a visit. It was a particularly hot day and when I asked her what I could serve her she said, “Oh no trouble, all I want is a ice water.” Great, all she wants is something that I can’t give her! So I thought it appropriate to give her hell for the fact that we have this crazy expensive Sub Zero fridge that refuses to make an ice cube. And I know what you’re thinking . . . get some ice cube trays, but that doesn’t work so good when you have freezer that is a drawer that needs to be pushed closed. The water would be everywhere by the time the door shut. So the timing was perfect. Nancy called her husband and he was able to give us some advice. Apparently this high-end fridge acted up on him too, but a little trick with the hairdryer seemed to fix the problem. Finally, we have ice again. This was a very exciting event. So exciting, in fact, that we celebrated with some frozen blueberry smoothies (totally should have taken a picture of those, but we sucked them down too fast to even think about finding the camera). They were delicious and I’m now addicted to the idea of having ice cubes in the house.

And on the subject of over-priced high end items that don’t work for beans . . . Every ceiling fan in the house is a Casablanca with some impossibly difficult control. It literally takes us 10 minutes to figure out how to change a speed or reverse a direction and Heaven forbid we have an electrical storm. All the fans in the house freak out, spin out of control, lights come on and then the control fries and needs repair. Our patience with these fans have truly been tested. When we discovered that our bedroom fan was stuck in one speed–High (which is completely unacceptable) we decided to give up on it. Not to mention the darn thing was butt ugly and I hated it.

So we ditched the expensive Casablanca and it’s fancy control and got a modern and stylish Home Depot model. It has a simple ON/OFF switch (what a concept), a light that only comes on when we ask it to and all three speeds work. Aaaaaahhhhhh, so much stress will be relieved and we’ve been sleeping like babies ever since installing it. Sweet dreams.