Home Improvement

Praise the Lord, we survived another home improvement project!

When we bought the house nearly six years ago, the previous owners said we could keep the air conditioner in the dining room window. We thought that was great. It was an old unit, but free is good.

Well, sometimes free can be expensive. The unit turned out to be a large, ancient, noisy, energy-sucking machine that worked real hard for long periods of time to drop the temps just a few degrees. We only used it a few weeks of the year, but sweating felt better and better with every electric bill we received when we did use it. Thanks to a special donation, we purchased a smaller, much more efficient model which will cost pennies on the dollars we used to spend. But purchasing the unit is always the easy part.

We figured it'd take an hour, maybe an hour and a half to remove the old unit and install the new one. How hard can it be? Once we were four hours into the project we realized the reason the previous owners left the window unit in the house was because it was there first and they designed the house around it. What a nightmare...

Anyway, the new unit is in, our marriage is still strong, and we escaped major injury through the grace of God when the massive old unit fell out of the window while I was working under it trying to get it loose...far too much excitement for everyone involved. But we did learn a few things about air conditioner installation and removal.

And the icing on the cake? The previous unit was so old, it used an odd outlet that won't take the standard plug the new unit came with. I just called a friend who knows a lot more about electricity than I do about air conditioners. We'll know later this week whether we just need to change the outlet or do some re-wiring...