The Downside of Birthdays and Other Tales

I love my child and I have been THRILLED to celebrate his first birthday but I will say that right this moment its making me just a little bit twitchy. Mostly b/c his birthday has meant that many many new toys have entered our home. On the surface this sounds like a good thing and don't get me wrong I'm grateful for all the people who have bought wonderful gifts for my child.

The downside is that theres now about 5 million more little hard plastic things ALL OVER my floor. He's only 1 year old. He has not yet caught on to the idea of cleaning up after himself. If anything his goals seem to include making sure that every square inch of floor is evenly covered in toys. There should be no toys in containers, bins, on shelves, tables or in other places that might limit that toys ability to spread across the land. He even throws toys over the baby gates to give them a chance to roam far and abroad and bring him back tales of the rest of the house.

Add that to the fact that we bought a new fridge last week, which did not get delivered until Thursday but meant that I spent part of this week preparing for its delivery, to whit sawing off the bottom ledge of the cupboard over the fridge so that I would have room to fit my lovely new 2010 era fridge in my 1965 era kitchen. So that made a nice mess. And I do need to buy a palm sander and refinish the cabinets sooner rather than later now but whatever...

So the fridge gets here and we encounter problem #2. My genius self got so wrapped up in comparing fridge heights (the measurement I had the most problems with) I failed to carefully check the WIDTH on this fridge. Oooh yes. The opening from the WALL to the COUNTER was 35.5 inches. I neglected to consider the width from the BASEBOARD to the counter (only 35 inches) AND wait for it.... the fridge is 35 and 7/8ths inches wide. Oh yeah so even after I popped that section of baseboard off (they'll never know!!) I then had to bust out my lovely new jigsaw and hack off .75 inches of counter so that my fridge could just BARELY slide into its nice cozy new home. Yay it fits.

Problem #3. We didn't have a water line for our fancy pants new fridge with freezer. No worries! Wonder woman is here! I bought the water line kit, read the directions. Got ticked when they made no sense. Turned to my good friends Google and YouTube and found instructional videos on line which made MUCH more sense.

We then made the hubby clean out 2 cabinets and a drawer full of crap so that I could get in there to install said water line. Everything was fine and dandy. Got it all installed, tapped the existing line, turned it on, checked for leaks, tightened things up until it stopped leaking, cleaned up the mess.... and realized I tapped into the HOT water line and not the COLD water line. *head desk... repeatedly* I sat under there and figured out which was which and then I turned around and laid down under there with all those pipes and completely got turned around being upside down and back wards and tapped the wrong frigging pipe.

So then I frantically re-read the whole instruction manual and it appears the only problem a hot water line can cause is that the water from the dispenser will not necessarily be COLD when it comes out. I breathe a sigh of relief and go to "Prep the water system".

Problem #4: I have extremely low water pressure coming out of the fridge. Its like stand there for 5 minutes plus to half fill a glass of water. I have now gone through the entire Troubleshooting steps for this problem. There are no kinks in the line. The valves are all open. The water filter is installed properly. This means that I need to have a licensed plumber come out and check the water pressure on the line. My money is that having a water heater and a dishwasher screw up the pressure on the hot water line which is why there is jack for water pressure coming from my water dispenser.

I could, in theory, close the saddle valve on the hot water line, buy a new saddle valve and tap the cold water line and just move the line over to there. BUT my concern is that the saddle valve on the hot water side is not designed to be used as a shut off valve and so I'm worried it might leak. Also "closing" the line w/ the piercing saddle valve means putting that little spear in the middle of an already small tube. Is that gonna diss my water flow to my sink?

So my kitchen looks like a tornado hit thanks to stuff being EVERY WHERE courtesy of the kitchen remodeling we've been doing. My living room has also been hit by the bastard storm in the form of toys EVERYWHERE.

Oh and I've got people coming over tomorrow at 5 pm for Caleb's 4th and FINAL birthday party so it all has to get cleaned up by then. And my husband went to bed early tonight b/c he has a head ache and isn't feeling good. Oh and my shoulder hurts. Probably from trying to shove myself into tiny spaces to run the friggin water line o doom.