New Addition to the Family

After D inadvertently caused a scandal with his blog title earlier this month, I thought I'd continue the theme and tell you all about our new addition: a beautiful new vacuum. (No offense, blog readers, but you will not be the first to know should any *real* new additions join the family.)

We've tried for years to figure out the best way to clean our floors, which range from wood to tile to area rugs to wall-to-wall carpet and are spread out on three floors. We finally gave up on our Dyson upright, which just couldn't handle the hardwood or tile very well and relegated it to the basement's wall-to-wall carpeting (no more having to drag it up and down two flights of stairs) and bought this pretty fellow:

A Miele C1 Titan, retail price of a hefty $600. Fortunately someone we knew recently got theirs using airline miles and when I noticed that I had about 75,000 about to expire at the end of the year, I knew I should go that route too (get it, route?). With no trips planned, this felt basically like free money.

While I have nothing but hatred for airlines and for flying, using my United Miles for this was surprisingly easy. I was short a few miles, so they charged me $60. I kept expecting to see more fees or expensive shipping tacked on while going through the purchase, but nope - just a flat $60 to make up the 10,000 or so remaining miles. This is way cheaper than trying to buy or gift miles to purchase an actual flight.

How does it work? So far so good:

We haven't had to replace the bag yet (yes, this one has a bag - how old-fashioned) or vacuum anything particularly challenging. But it seems to work well transitioning between rug and wood, so we don't have to sweep as often, so that's a win. We still use a sweeper on our fancy hand-knotted rug to get the cat fur off, but we can set this one on low suction to get rid of crumbs without feeling like it's going to destroy the rug.

I guess we'll just have to see if it stands the test of time. But at $60, I'm not quite so concerned about whether this was the right decision.