There Goes the Electric Bill — Southmore Project

If moving in felt like we were on vacation in an alpine cabin, it now feels like we are staying in a five star resort. Okay, we're not near resort-level yet, but our house does have many comforts that it did not have when we moved in.

Unfortunately AC units are prime targets from enterprising thieves, so we have built a strong cage to contain it.

Our first week living at Southmore I consistently took two cool showers a day because we did not have air conditioning and I was not designed to withstand Houston early-fall/late-summer weather. Fortunately for me the fact that we did not yet have our gas hooked up was no problem, because the cold showers were plenty warm for our hot house. Despite not even wanting a hot shower during that first week, I was still excited to have a hot-water option for whenever our house would be cool enough that a warm shower could be enjoyable.

Disney keeps it's recipe for "go away green" a secret, but we were able to find a decent substitute with "Spice Garden" by Behr

As many of you read on my Facebook, turning on hot water turned in to an unbelievably difficult adventure filled with attempted midnight visits by Centerpoint and victim-blaming when I called to complain. Fortunately I had an enterprising friend reading all about my problems who pointed me in the right direction and, after a phone call to somebody that could actually accomplish something, our gas was hooked up in the middle of the week.

Our house was still incredibly warm due to the whole not-having-air-conditioning thing, so I took one novelty warm shower before going back to the cold showers I had grown to love. We called Building Air Services and asked them when they could install our unit, and were happy to hear that they would be able to come by just a few days later. They had some kinks to work out in the first few days, but I can now confidently say that we have a working air conditioning unit.

One of these days I'm sure I'll want our workers to lay down a barrier between their dirty shoes and our floor, but right now our floor is a perennially dirty, multi-level, splinter inducer.

Our electric bill has pretty consistently been under $10 since we bought the house almost eleven months ago, but that is about to change. One of these days I will experiment with house temperatures and energy usage to try to optimize comfort and cost, but for now I am happy to crank the unit low and no longer have to take multiple showers each day to maintain a pleasant odor.

Wet weather meant that the workers used scraps out of our trash heaps to keep their shoes as clean as possible and the unit relatively dry during install.