Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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There’s a big ding in our new TV stand

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Crap! As those of you who have been reading my posts this week know, we’re getting our new TV this weekend. Well … my husband decided to put the stand that we bought for the TV together this evening so we’ll be ready when we get the TV.

The stand is heavy! When we brought it home last weekend we had to get a guy from the store to help put it in the car, and then once we got home my husband got one of our neighbors ( a really big guy!) to help carry it into the house.

So now my husband and I were unpacking the heavy massive thing, in the kitchen on the ceramic tiles and one of the front legs has a huge ding in it!

I guess if it were at the back of the stand it wouldn’t be so bad, but the dent is right at the front on this stainless steel leg. It would look awful if we didn’t replace it!

Luckily the guys at Best Buy said that we could just bring the defective piece in and they’ll replace it with another one. I’m thankful we don’t have to try to repack the box that took us half an hour to open and bring all the parts back!

Chris just drove to the store with the bad TV stand leg. Hopefully he’ll be back soon so we can get this thing together and off my kitchen floor!

Don’t you just hate when something you’ve purchased is damaged?





Finally rearranged the living room

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Remember that mini-renovation project that turned into a bigger job that I told you about last week? Well, my husband and I finally finished it!

You see, in preparation for our new TV my husband and I decided that we wanted to rearrange the living room. Sounds simple enough, right? The only problem was the electrical outlets where the TV was going to go in the “new arrangement” weren’t hooked up! We’d disconnected them a few years ago when we were doing other reno projects in the room and never hooked them back up.

So my husband had to rehook up two electrical outlets and we put baseboard molding along that wall. We still have to put baseboard molding around the rest of the room (and finishing putting the Tin ceiling in too!).

We did finish the electrical hook up and the baseboards, but we didn’t rearrange the room because that’s when I started getting sick with this terrible head cold. Yes I still have it! Luckily it’s not quite as bad as last week, but now I’ve got fevers with it, so I’m hoping it’s not about to turn into pneumonia or something. Sigh.

Yesterday we got word that our TV will be ready for pick up on Friday, so since it was my husbands day off and I was feeling ok we decided to get to work and rearrange the room.

I’m now sitting on the opposite side of the room typing this post on my notebook computer and it feels weird! We used to have the loveseat and couch close together sort of in an L-shape but now, I’m on one side of the room on the big couch and my husband is on the other side on the loveseat.

Let me tell you, rearranging all that furniture wasn’t an easy task!

We have really big living room furniture! We have a large leather couch, love seat and an easy chair. Plus we also have a 50″ HDTV and a big dog crate in the room. The living room and dining room are connected (we knocked down walls when we first got the house) so it’s like one big room, but of course we do have a dining room table so it’s two rooms in one big room. The actual living room is about 15 feet wide by 20 feet long. Not a lot to work with when you have big furniture. LOL

We moved the big couch, easy chair and love seat around several times before we finally found just the right spots for each of them, We thought the TV was going to go on the opposite wall from where it had been, but we discovered that it looks much better in the corner by the window on an angle. Yes, it blocks the window just a little bit, but this configuration works best.

It does make the room feel a lot bigger, but it’s going to take some getting used to!

Do you ever rearrange the furniture in your living room or bedroom? If you do, do you find it feels a little strange for a few days?

No this isn’t a Laundry Blog

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Wow, I just realized that three of the last four posts that I’ve made this week are about laundry. LOL … no this is not about to become a laundry blog .. I’m just excited about my new front load High Efficiency washer and dryer and the experiments that I’m doing with them to get our clothes even cleaner and softer.

Hey it could be worse .. I could be talking about hemorrhoids relief or something like that all week. LOL

I promise, there will probably only be a couple more laundry related posts and then I’ll calm down. I think.

I’m actually thinking about doing a post or two about using vinegar, baking soda and borax in the laundry and around the house as cleaners. Just about everyone does laundry right … maybe you’ll learn a few money saving tips?

Static Eliminator dryer sheets – natural , no chemicals

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My husbands off work today and it’s shopping day. Usually we get our groceries and anything else that we need on Mondays, his usual day off, but this week he’s off on Tuesday.

Chris is great about doing things around the house and doing the shopping. In fact, when he does the grocery shopping he’s pretty good about sticking to the list we make in advance so as a result he spends less than when I go with him! When I go I find a few other things to add to our groceries, usually things on sale that we could use during the week or in the near future so the bill gets a bit higher. LOL

Right now he’s at a friends jamming on the guitar but when he gets home we’re going to go to this HUGE health food store called The Big Carrot. It’s a store that sells organic groceries and other products like natural herbs, vitamins and natural weight loss supplements and so on. They also sell a lot of green products.

The reason we’re going there is to buy something called the Static Eliminator. I just found out about it last night. It’s basically a dryer sheet that can be reused about 250 times. We only do about 12 loads of laundry a month so that means a Static Eliminator dryer sheet would last us close to two years!

It has no chemicals on it, it’s hypoallergenic, eliminates static in the laundry and softens clothes. It basically does what a Bounce dryer sheet or any other popular fabric softener dryer sheet is supposed to do, but without all the chemicals. Plus it doesn’t leave any residue on your clothes or inside the dryer so it’s better for the machine and your clothes. It’s also better for the environment without all those chemicals and when you consider that you aren’t throwing out dryer sheets each week.

Now that we have our new washer and dryer and we can use less laundry detergent (and have it rinsed out better!) I’m experimenting with using more natural products to clean our clothes and soften the laundry – like vinegar, baking soda, Borax and hopefully that natural dryer sheet.

Hopefully we can find the Static Eliminator dryer sheets at the Big Carrot. If we do, I’ll let you know how it works for softening clothes and eliminating static compared to name brand dryer sheets.

So far so good with our new front load washer and dryer

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Our new high efficiency washer and dryer set finally arrived yesterday. Yeah! I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m thrilled to be doing laundry. Now that’s something you don’t hear everyday, is it?

The delivery men arrived early Saturday morning, something like 8:30 am. They were very quick in removing our old very heavy washer and dryer and then bringing our new set downstairs to the basement.

I thought I would have been able to try out the new washer and dryer by yesterday afternoon but it took forever getting everything set up! The old dryer was connected directly to our fuse box and we were going to hook up the new dryer that way, but in the end we decided to put in a new 240v plug so Chris had to run around to a few stores to try to get the correct junction box and cover etc so that killed a couple of hours right there.

We also bought two pedestals to put the new dryer and washer on because front load washer and dryers would require a lot of bending otherwise since the doors are so low to the ground. With my back being really bad lately we thought it would be good to have the machines higher. Boy do they ever look huge now that they’re up on the pedestals!

Between putting in a new electrical hook up for the dryer, attaching the pedestals and leveling the machines, cleaning and reassembling the old exhaust venting and then trying to get someone to help us lift the machines in to place (my husband didn’t want me to do too much because of my back) we figure it took us about 15 hours to set up the machines!

So I didn’t actually do my first wash with the new HE front loader until about 4:30 pm this afternoon! As I expected, my husband and I watched the machine wet and tumble the laundry for a little while before going back upstairs to wait for it to finish the wash.

We were amazed at how quite the washer is! It’s like 500 times quieter than our old 43 year old washer! The noisiest part is when the pump drains the water from the machine and it’s not the pump that makes much noise it’s just the water and air going through the drainage hose. It kind of sounds like one of those Australian instruments that they play at the start of Survivor. LOL However it’s still quieter than all aspects of our other washing machine!

Our dryer is a lot quieter than our old one as well! Yes it’s a little louder than the washer, but it only makes half or less noise than our old dryer. When we had the old dryer it always seemed that we were drying clothes at night and it was so load that we had to turn the TV up quite a bit if we were watching it .. and that’s from a dryer in the basement! The new one’s quiet enough to not interfere sound wise with what we’re doing upstairs.

Oh and it’s fast! We put our first load in to dry and the sensor estimated that it would be about 43 minutes, but after a few minutes of tumbling it readjusted the time to 25 minutes. Remember I said we’d put a load in our old washer for say 45 or 50 minutes and it still wouldn’t be dry when it was done so we’d have to put it in again for another 20 to 40 minutes. So I guess the new dryer (thanks to the super spinning the washer does) cut drying time by maybe as much as 60% compared to our old dryer.

I’m sure we’re going to save a lot of money with the new washer and dryer – especially when compared to our old 43 year old machines! Now if only we could cut some of our other bills and expenses, like finding cheaper car insurance we’d be set!

If I weren’t so tired and headachey I’d have taken some pictures of our new washer and dryer and the clothes spinning around. Maybe next time!

For those of you with high efficiency front load washing machines and driers were you amazed at how quiet they were too? Are you happy with your front loaders?

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