My New Electric Mower

So with our new house comes a huge yard. Well, maybe not huge, but big. Bigger than any yard I've had I think. Certainly since leaving Alaska.

Teresa thought it would be great to get a non gas powered mower. Better for the environment, less maintenance, slightly higher initial cost, but you save in other areas. Cool. Well, since we're trying to save money, we usually hit up Craigslist first to find stuff on the cheap, and she found something for a very good price. 25$! And it wasn't gas powered either. Neither was it electric.

Yes, we got a "Reel" mower. Get it? Reel?

Anyway, I mowed our big, no, huge yard our first weekend in the new house. I took 3 hours. That's a long time. But on top of that, the yard looked awful. Anything that was longer than 4 inches didn't get cut because it just laid down as the mower ran over it. This wasn't working out.

So a couple of days ago we found a fairly good deal on a barely used electric lawn mower. It had a 100 foot outdoor extension cord that came with it too, so I called the guy and went out to take a look at it.

The lawn mower was in Sylva, which is 30 minutes West of Asheville. I work in Marion, which is 40 minutes East of Asheville. So I drove for over an hour to get to this place. By the time I had arrived, I was determined to purchase it simply becuase I'd already come that far out. The seller was really nice, showed me how to use it, and I talked him down on the price a little bit. Enough to make me not feel too bad about the cost of getting there. So I loaded up the mower and headed home. There she is. A 12 amp, electric lawn mower. Comes with a bag and mulch plug and everything. Last night I took it out and did just the front yard, the most visible areas of the yard, and it worked really great. It took a bit of getting used to mowing with an extension cord following me, but after a while, it felt pretty natural and I never was in danger of running over it. It cut the gross really short, which I like, and didn't leave a lot of large grass clippings laying around. I guess it cut them up really fine.

It still takes me a long time to get the yard mowed though. I guess it's just that big. I'll tackle the back yard this weekend. I just hope 100 feet is enough to get to the back corners! Still need to get one more piece of yard equipement though. Our front yard has some areas I can't reach with the mower, so I'm looking for a weed eater to get into corners and the edgings of a fence. Criagslist, here we come.

Now, does anyone want to purchase a reel mower? Works great for small yards, and short grass.

Settling In

The house is wonderful, or at least I think so. It has it's quirks. The basement is kind of shabby, and the overall plumbing needs some kinks fixed, but it all works. The yard is a lot bigger than I was expecting. And by that, I mean the mowing size of it. It looked nice when we bought it, but I didn't realize how much yard was there until I walked every square foot of it with a scissor blade lawn mower. Yeah, no power, no motor, just a rotating blade and me pushing it. It was cheap, and we thought it would work, but it just doesn't cut the grass very well. Perusing craigslist for better one this week.

We still don't have a couch, so that's high on our priority list as the living room seems very empty without it, and we still haven't figured out where to put everything until we can figure out how big the couch will be. Our bedroom, the dining room, the kitchen and the bathroom are all in place. We have a washer and dryer down stairs that work well. All that's left are the two other bedrooms (which contain lots of boxes at the moment) and the aforementioned living room.

This weekend will be spent couch shopping, as well as some other household things. Hopefully I can find a cheap lawnmower to mow the yard with so I don't have to use the manual one. I've also got to start looking into fencing the yard at the front so we can let Hannah out without being on a leash, and still be reasonably certain that she's contained. I don't really think she would run away, but she would chase after any kind of animal or something that caught her fancy. I don't think we will ever train that out of her. Might be part of her beagle/hound instinct.

Speaking of Hannah, I believe we've successfully trained her to sleep on her mat on the floor in the bedroom now instead of on the bed. That's a pretty big step. She'll still get on the bed during the day if we don't watch her, but she's now sleeping all night long on her mat. Woohoo! When we get a couch, it will also be a no dog zone. Hopefully she picks that up as quickly as she learned not to sleep on the bed at night.