Whittling Down the To-Do List

We're getting closer to living in a clean, safe home. I think. As of yesterday afternoon (when the repairman paid us his second visit) we have:

• Hot water, which is truly glorious
• Functioning plugs in our tubs
• A tub faucet that can fill up the tub or be switched into shower-mode
• A working garbage disposal
• New, tight weather stripping around both the front door and the door leading to the garage
• Our own washer and dryer in the laundry room

We'll be seeing the maintenance man at least once more this week because he's bringing newly fashioned screens for some of our windows and picking up the old washer and dryer. It turns out they don't belong to the owner, a former tenant left them here at some point, so instead of paying to have them repaired the management company is chucking them.

Lucky thing, too. After the fellow carted the old appliances out (and brought ours up, which I think deserves major kudos) I went down and looked at the plug for the old dryer. The outlet fit our new dryer nicely, and I was curious because the fellow that removed it had said the plug on the old one was different. Apparently someone had decided to force a diagonally positioned three-pronged plug into a parallel positioned four-pronged plug. When I told Bryan about it he said it was a lucky thing the building hadn't burned down.

And some good news regarding our unwanted house guests: upon seeing how many traps we'd set up without catching anything (ten, I believe) and the volume of mouse droppings under our sink (yes, it is gross, thank you) the maintenance man called his supervisor and recommended they get an exterminator out here. Huzzah! He said the problem looked like it was more than one or two mice. My only concern is that whatever they put out for the mice be safe for small children and pregnant women to be around. We'll be hearing from the demousers sometime this week.

It's starting to feel like there might be a light at the end of this tunnel.