Craziness

Yesterday, we had an electrician come out to look at our dishwasher/dryer problem, finally. Doing the dishes by hand isn’t too awful, but we had a lot of laundry piling up since we didn’t have a dryer. He quickly figured out what I wasn’t able to: that a fuse that fed our auxiliary power panel had blown. The auxiliary runs the dishwasher, dryer, and something else that even he couldn’t figure out. I had no idea there was a fuse up there to even replace, but now I know, and knowing is half the battle (Go Joe!).
Naturally, later that SAME DAY, our oven stopped working. Actually, the burners work, and the broiler works, but the bake function does not. After finding out that a service call would cost $80, I narrowed down the problem to, I think, the Glo starter thingie. It’s supposed to replace the old pilot light, and it is not glowing like it’s supposed to. So I found a guy on eBay selling them for $17 (instead of $50), and we’ll see if that fixes the problem. I’m definitely getting to know our house and its appliances much better in this new year. Too bad that wasn’t one of my resolutions.
One last bit of house-related craziness: mortgage rates have dropped so much that I’m almost considering refinancing again. In our last round, we got a rate of 6%, and right now, it looks like we could get 5.125% (saves about $150/month, we break even in 16 months), or even a 20 year mortgage at 4.875% (costs only about $125 more per month, gets paid off ten years earlier, just in time for the kids to be finishing college). Thankfully, we belong to that select group of people that actually still has good credit, so we should have no problem qualifying if we want to. I may wait a few more days though, just to see if things don’t go down even a little bit more.