If you think this is a weight-loss  blog post, click again!

Recently, I’ve  noticed a huge bulge appearing in the floor of our downstairs bathroom:

Ok, so it’s difficult to see in the picture – it’s a few inches above that rectangular green carpet, but believe me when I say it’s getting bigger, seemingly by the day – it’s now big enough to trip over!  My husband thinks we’ll be able to see what’s happening by going into our basement and looking at it from below the bathroom floor.  The only problem is that our bathroom is over the crawl space, not the basement.  In the 2½ years that we’ve lived in this house, we’ve never set foot (nor knee) in the crawl space – it’s always scary to think what one may find in a crawl space that hasn’t been disturbed in years, at least for me.  I guess I’ve seen too many horror movies…  or maybe it’s the fact that I grew up only miles away from the most macabrely (not a real word, but fits perfectly here if you ask me – maybe I will coin the term) famous crawl space – that of John Wayne Gacy, where 29 bodies were unearthed in the late ’70’s.

So anyway, someone needs to go into that crawl space to find out what this bulge it expands and takes over the entire house!

And we recently were told that our electric wiring in the house is out of date; here we’ve been spending money to fix up certain things on the house, and other things just keep breaking.  Sometimes I’m not so sure about the joys of home ownership, sigh!

We became home-owners about a year and half ago, and as fellow home-owners know, it’s a lot different than renting.  For one thing, we now have a yard to maintain and being 2 very busy people who know absolutely nothing about landscaping, we’ve found this aspect of home ownership quite challenging.  As many of you know, my husband is a very hard worker, and when he is off work, we are usually out and about with the kids – no Saturdays working on the yard for us!  So I usually venture outside while I’m playing with the kids in the summer and make a haphazard attempt at pulling weeds and trying to make the yard presentable.  The good news is we have yet to receive a complaint notice on a stick from the city, like I sometimes see in other less fortunate yards.  The bad news is that if we were to ever get one of those notices, I fear now would be the time since I have been immobile with my pregnancy so far this summer.

So my awesome husband tried to make arrangements with a local fellow to have the weeds done for me on my birthday, but the guy showed up and was gone by the time we returned from lunch, etc. less than 3 hours later.  He did get some of the weeds, but not all that many, and lo and behold, the other day we received a bill from him – for $140!!!  Even if he had been here 3 hours, that would be over $46 / hour and he didn’t even do nearly everything he was supposed to do!  Needless to say, I’m going to dispute the bill, but first I’m going to have a baby and get out of the hospital, so he’s going to have to wait.  In the meantime, we’ve enlisted a friend who is a landscaper to help, and he’s going to visit and work hourly on Thursdays…  not the immediate weed relief I was hoping for, but I’m sure he will do a much better job for a much more reasonable rate.  He already visited after weed guy #1 and confirmed that there are still LOTS of weeds in our yard.  I just don’t know what weed guy #1 was thinking…  it’s tough times in the economy and he seemed nice enough, but he must be crazy if he thinks we’re going to pay him that much for what little weed relief he gave us…  My town is going to be offering college classes soon so maybe I should just take a horticulture class and do the landscaping myself from now on…