The Joys of Homeownership

Oh the joys of homeownership . . . when you don’t have a landlord you can call when something goes wrong.  For example, in the middle of typing my blog about pumpkin bread, Aaron came in and informed me that our sprinkler system (which had been hissing/leaking since the afternoon) was now geysering (yes, I just made up a verb) in our front yard.  No landlord to call – we had to fix it ourselves.  Oh, and it was already about 6pm and the sun was going down rapidly.

A bit of background on our sprinkler system:  It looks like at one point in time, the house had a very nice sprinkler system.  There’s a control box in the backyard where you should be able to set the sprinklers to go off at pre-set times, and/or pre-set periods of time.  However, since the house was a foreclosure when we bought it, we have no idea at what point the system decided to stop working.  All I know is that it definitely does not work right now.  When we bought the house a little over 2 years ago, we had the inspector try out the sprinkler system, and it worked – when you manually turned the heads for each individual sprinkler area . . . one at a time.  So that’s what we were using to water the “lawn” (I use the term loosely because it was really more a dirt/weed patch at the time).

A little over a year ago, Aaron was out of town, and I was watering and the sprinklers decided they didn’t want to turn off at all.  It was stuck on, and no matter how much I tried they just would not turn off!  Oh, and did I mention it was about 9pm on a weeknight?  Fortunately, one of our really good friends happened to be coming over to pick something up and somehow through a series of turning off the water to the house and fiddling with various knobs and valves, we managed to get the sprinklers to turn off and stay off.  I haven’t touched the sprinklers since then – even when we fertilized and seeded the front yard, I used a hose attachment sprinkler for watering because I was too terrified that I wouldn’t be able to get the sprinklers to turn back off.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed that the sprinkler system was hissing.  When Aaron got home, I asked him to check it out.  I guess in the process of checking it out, he must have been fiddling with something and one of the parts flew off as the water decided to spurt out into a geyser.  Aaron turned off the water to the house, was able to get the geyser to stop, but then the sprinklers (which haven’t been turned on in over a year) turned on and would not turn off.  Ultimately, we decided it was time for an emergency trip to Home Depot.  Aaron took a picture of the broken head on his phone so that we would know what part to pick up (thank goodness for iphones!).  About 30 minutes and $20 later, I was holding a flashlight so that Aaron could see what he was doing as the sun was long gone by this point.  After getting pretty wet because we couldn’t quite get the water to turn off, we finally were able to get the sprinklers off!

Even though it was an adventure, it ended up turning into a kind of nice husband/wife bonding experience.  J