As you know, we moved into our first home three weeks ago. We are enjoying it a lot so far :) It’s been great to come home to our own place with a lot more space! (I’m cool because I rhymed.) There’s DEFINITELY some upgrades from an old apartment to a new home, that we’ve enjoyed. Like how my stove cooks chicken, and how my oven seems to bake things better! (My rolls taste better somehow.)

Of all the great things we are enjoying about it, my favorite is how much more space we have!!! This has allowed us to organize everything much better, and we love to be organized! To be honest, at our apartment, sometimes I just felt like it was a waste sometimes to go to big efforts to keep things tidy, because the apartment might still seem dirty even though I had just cleaned all the surfaces. But now I actually enjoy tidying up, and putting things where they belong :) haha. yeah, it’s sad.

Little mishaps

Though a house can bring a lot of happiness, its responsibilities can bring some frustration… home maintenance was a bigger responsibility than I had anticipated and we got a taste of that the first weekend here :) Our dishwasher wouldn’t run correctly because we didn’t realize the water hadn’t been turned on yet for it. We also had a miscommunication with how our breaker system worked so we didn’t have an oven for making the only meal I had available for our Sunday dinner, haha. As you can see, we laugh about these things, don’t worry.

Trial and Error

It’s all just new to us! For example, I’m really new to our wood laminate floors. They are beautiful, and of course, I want to keep them that way. So that requires cleaning the floor with the right products… which requires research… and some trial and error… :/ I’ve pinterested, google-searched, and I thought I had a great solution for a cleaner, but it didn’t work as well as I had planned. If anyone has some tips, bring em’ my way, please!

I’m also new to granite countertops and an electric stove top. Those also have specific ways of cleaning, and it doesn’t involve a simple Lysol antibacterial wipe! Stainless steel appliances can also be stressful. I’ve cleaned them before, and it went very smoothly, so I was surprised when both of my researched ideas didn’t work very well with my own fridge. The fridge is clean, but you can still see some marks.

Though I’ve put in much time researching the best ways to clean certain surfaces, and spent much time on the actual cleaning, the results are pretty mediocre. I think it’s one of those things that just takes trial and error, and takes time to get used to. I mean, the time it takes me to clean has doubled now. But I also realize that time is spent because I care about keeping it clean, and I don’t want to ruin any surfaces by using the easiest cleaning strategies. There’s just a lot of maintenance that comes with owning a house, so we knew what we signed up for, but it sure has caused a small frustrating beginning for us.

For Trevor, his frustrations have come from the lawn maintenance. We are grateful that our neighbor works in professional landscaping, who was able to give us tips and tricks for using our sprinkler system effectively. We are also grateful that there is very little square footage of grass that needs to be mowed, because we also have mulch. For that reason, we got a reel mower. The problem is that by the time we got around to buying the lawn mower and having time to cut it, our grass was too long for our mower to handle. We just need a fresh start on it :)

New, new new. It just takes some getting used to (I rhymed again.)

There’s a lot of responsibilities that come with owning a home, and our eyes have been truly opened to those sometimes frustrating, responsibilities. I’m learning that we should be grateful to even have a house to clean in the first place. That’s what makes it better, right? What we are doing is going to have to be enough because we realize that first of all, we have not even lived here for a month yet; and second, we are doing the best we can! There’s a lot we are taking in right now with just our everyday lives of work and school, and are juggling all of the NEW, NEW, NEW that is happening in between. (all the new is good!) Instead of getting frustrated that I haven’t been as successful in my cleaning efforts as I planned, I know that I’ll get the hang of it soon. That day is just not today, and that’s OK. :)

Though we are not the perfect homeowners, we are absolutely loving our home!

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