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The Move: Expenses mount

We got our new Heat Recovery Ventilator installed for about half the price that Sears quoted us. Seems like it works great! That was, oh, $1300+. We only got $1000 off the sale price of the house based on what the home inspector found, so on that alone we're beyond what we got out of the vendors.

And recently we had an appliance repairman come in to fix a part on our dishwasher. The dishwasher was smelly, stinky, foul and the handle was broken. Well, the repairman noted a bunch of other things wrong with it, too. He called the previous homeowners "animals" as he exclaimed angrily about how they abused this otherwise fantastic dishwasher. This dishwasher we've seen for, what, $700 at Home Despot.

So we paid him, what, $80, to tell us that we'd be better off just getting a new dishwasher.

Oh, and replace the plumbing under the sink, because whoever hooked it up put the shutoff valve *after* the dishwasher connection. In other words, to uninstall the dishwasher, we'd have to turn off the water to the entire house. Idiots.

Now it's back to washing dishes by hands.

All the other major systems are performing just fine. The air exchanger exchanges air, the shower showers, the doors door and the windows window. The house is a little cold, but that's because it's been stupidly cold outside lately and we're concerned about keeping our electricity bills low.

Speaking of which -- we got a great deal on compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) at Home Despot, and have been installing them hither and thither. But whoever hooked up the upstairs lights had a dimmer fetish. The kitchen, dining room, bathroom and bedroom all have dimmers. And traditional CFLs are not for dimmers. They're for on-off, inside, right-side-up, period. There are dimmable and outdoor CFLs available, but they're prohibitively expensive. For now, we're CFLing lamps and putting lower-wattage bulbs in the dimmer-fed fixtures and outside.

Y'know what's (potentially) grinding my gears about all this? We've shelled out thousands of dollars in the past month on pre-move-in renos, repairs, painting and cleaning ... and this week, the Harper government announced a fancypants tax credit dealy for people who spend thousands of dollars on renos, repairs, painting and whatnot. I'm gonna be so cheesed if it's not retroactive to the start of this year, 'cuz you bet I want to get some of that money back! I bet we're already excluded from the New Home Buyer tax credit (if word I've heard about it existing is true), 'cuz we closed on December 31. Mooooo.

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