My new favourite home gadget

When I was a kid, I loved staying with an honorary aunt of mine during the school holidays.  She lived right out in the country, and there was a huge yard for me to play in and imagine all sorts of wonderful things.  She was also the local postmistress, so I could help sort and stamp the mail, and all that sort of old fashioned thing that doesn't even get done by people any more.

She was also the sort of person who had a definite routine in the mornings: specific jobs that just had to get done before we were really ready for the day.  One of those was to run the carpet sweeper over all the carpets in the house.  When I was there, that was my chore - that and making my bed - and I loved it.

Okay, so, I'm not *this* old...

 When we moved into Chez Stutters mark 2, and ran my beloved Roomba in the bedrooms for the first time, we noticed a slight problem.  The carpet is a much tighter weave than in the old place, and it has very defined ridges.  And whereas the Roomba could work easily with the old carpet, and could pick up all the dropped fluff from the flannel sheets with no problems at all, the combination of the tighter weave and the ridges combined to leave the majority of the flannel fluff on the floor.

At which point I began to muse.  "Do they still make carpet sweepers?" I wondered.  "Because that's what we need here."

Blow me down, but they do!  And it's just as good as the one I remember from my childhood - and as fun!

So although I don't sweep the carpet every morning, I really should try to do the bedroom and the big red rug in the living room at least twice a week.

Chez Stutters report: the cliffhangers continue

So - when we last "spoke", the dishwasher had quit, taking out all the powerpoints with it.

Thankfully, unplugging the dishwasher restored the powerpoints, and once we'd survived the weekend with my un-laws, we got in the repairperson.

Who told us the dishwasher was old, the seals were failing, and water had got into the electrics.

Long story short, we went shopping for a new dishwasher on the long weekend, and after an unfortunate run-in with the worst record-keeping system either of us have ever encountered, on Saturday (a week after we purchased it) the new dishwasher was installed, and we did two runs with it before the evening was out.

But in a newly purchased house, of course there are ongoing issues. 

And so now we're dealing with the heater.  Or lack thereof.

Last Thursday we got the repairman in, who decided what it needed to be fixed, and came back the next day.  While he was up in the roof on the second day, the GF - who was at home to let him in - heard words you never want to hear:

'It's smoking, God, it's smoking!' and the sound of coughing...

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(What?  I promised you another cliffhanger in the title!)