Dispatches from the home of Angie’s List magazine.
The big countdown has begun. In 10 days, I will be a married man.
My fiancée is a wonderful woman, and I’m looking forward to married life. But with 10 days to go before a wedding the two of us have basically planned ourselves (from 200 miles away), the big day can’t come fast enough. Continue reading ‘Get me to the church on time … and soon’
I’m leaving for vacation in less than 48 hours. I’ll be spending a week on the beach in South Carolina, with nothing but sunscreen and seafood on my mind. So you’d think I’d be giddy right now from the excitement, right? The thing is, I’m too busy to even think about putting my feet in the sand. Continue reading ‘Vacations are a lot of work’
It finally happened. My brother got married. After six months of bachelor parties, annoying questions from friends and relatives, and watching my brother’s poor new mother-in-law slowly pull every follicle of hair out of her overburdened head, my brother tied the knot with his grade-school sweetheart. Yes, people, they’ve been together since grade school. Continue reading ‘Should a wedding make you feel guilty?’
In an effort to save money, my fiancee and I recently downsized and moved into the most affordable apartment we could find. Before the move, we inhabited a circa-1920s home that measured about 1,600 square feet total. We now live in a 1940s-built apartment that’s roughly 750 square feet.
It’s a great deal: our monthly rent was reduced by about 40 percent and, thanks to the pinnacle of 1940s boiler technology, we’ll no longer have hefty gas bills in the winter. In fact, the only utility we pay now is electricity. The trade-offs are less space, no longer having a fenced-in yard for our dogs, paper-thin walls and competing for parking spaces. But, with less than six months to go before our October wedding, the savings are a godsend. Continue reading ‘Doing more with less’
Today’s my six-month wedding anniversary (no, the title of this post does NOT refer to my wife.) It’s hard to believe that half a year ago my wife and I were saying our vows in the Bloomington sunlight outside the Well House. Now I’m sitting in my drafty office, looking out into the cloudy, cold Indianapolis sky. How time flies (and weather changes.)
In the days leading up to our wedding (which was the best day of my life, and I’m not saying that just to kiss up to my wife), we had a long list of to-do’s (one of which was to say “I do”) that got shorter and shorter as the big day arrived. We got hitched without a hitch (besides the fact that I had food poisoning — not a hangover, I swear! — from a bad blue crab pizza the night before. Word to the wise: do NOT order seafood or anything exotic at your wedding rehearsal dinner!)
Anyways, I digress. My point of this is that we started with a simple engagement, then a to-do list that grew quite long and became shorter in the days leading up to the wedding. The list grew again in preparation for our honeymoon, but after that, we didn’t have much to worry about in terms of wedding to-do’s. We had to pick out photos for our wedding album and have my wife’s dress prepped for long-term storage, but that was about it.
It felt good to have accomplished everything on our wedding to-do list and put it in the recycling bin, at least until I remembered that we’d recently moved into our house, and there was a Hundred-headed To-Do Dragon (about the size of a piece of legal-rule paper) lurking around every corner. Dang!
In the six months we’ve been wed, my wife and I have improved a lot of things: our communication, trust, checking-account-sharing abilities. But we haven’t improved our home much. Sure, we’ve done some landscaping. But landscaping wasn’t even one of the To-Do Dragon’s heads (I know I’m stretching this dragon thing a bit, but bear with me!) I’ve yet to clean up our basement, completely sort our garage, fix the vents on our roof, install vents in our extremely hot-in-the-summertime garage, patch a hole in the wall next to our basement window, etc., etc., etc. I think you get the point.
Don’t get me wrong: we have done a lot to our house since we moved in over a year ago. But the things we’ve done weren’t necessarily our choice to do: the water main to our house burst, costing us a pretty penny. Our furnace decided to overheat and die on one of the coldest winter days of early February. And the 25-year-old outdoor all-weather carpet covering the basement floor and bathroom — ugh! — was just begging to be ripped out and thrown away.
After all the things we’ve done to improve our home — and all the things we’ve not done — I’ve learned two things. 1: Home improvement can be costly, both in money and time, and 2: no matter how long or short my list of to-do’s is, it will never disappear completely. (In the interest of full disclosure, my Grandpa told me that last part.)
So it’s good to know that no matter what happens, whether it’s a pipe bursting, a window leaking, or — God forbid — a wall crumbling, I can depend on contractors on Angie’s List to help me battle the Hundred-headed To-Do Dragon, one troublesome head at a time.
(PS… Begin shameless plug transmission… The second episode of List-en up!, the authorized Angie’s List podcast, is out. It’s about etiquette, and how people who hire others for services should be respectful to ensure good customer service… End shameless plug transmission…)
