Max had previously warned me that houses are "money pits" but I thought this just referred to buying curtains and spending money on other cute decorative items for the home. Oh, how wrong could I be! Now I know he was talking about the not-so-fun and barely even bloggable home needs. First it was our sprinkler system, which decided to start spewing water like Old Faithful. We saved some money as my handy hubby dug up the valves and rebuilt them himself, but money did go into our imaginary pit.
Next it was the handles to turn on the showers. We had the opposite problem here as we just could not get our master shower handle to turn the water on (not without pulling with all of our might). My mom reported that the large guest bath shower was almost impossible to turn on. After opening all three shower areas we found that the cartridges behind the handles were completely worn (they were after all almost 20 years old). After a trip to Lowe's we brought back new cartridges and handles (I even installed one almost entirely by myself!) and ended up with showers that turn on easily. But alas we had dropped another $100+ into the money pit. And nothing cute to show, sigh.
This brings me to our latest home disaster: the bees! We had noticed about a month ago that a hive had spontaneously formed on an area of the eve of the house that has been repaired right before we moved in. Knowing that bees give us great gifts like pollination and honey, we were reluctant to do anything about them, especially since they kept to themselves way up high on the second story. Over the past weekend, however, Max found some bees that had made their way into the attic: not good. In addition, we had started reading about the damage that bees could do to structures, the fact that the hives could persist for years, and that they attack en masse when they perceive a threat (P.S. the majority of bees in Arizona are the Africanized). We thought that the best course of action (even though we hated it) would be to exterminate the hive. I caught Max searching for Bee Keeping Suits on EBay and worried for a minute but luckily he was talked out of a do-it-yourself job by a coworker who had gone that route and had said he wouldn't recommend it for himself ever again let alone anyone else. So instead, Max got the information for a trusty company who came out today to tackle this mess:
The exterminator who did the job said the hive had housed about 15,000 bees and that he had taken down 15-20 pounds of honeycomb. We don't have an after photo since the worker bees who were out working when the hive came down are now swarming around the area that used to be their home, primed for attack. Don't worry, we can go outside again in about a week. How much in the money pit this time, you ask? Two hundred dollars, and still nothing cute to show!
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