Leave a Light On: Outside Edition

If you've been following along for a while, you may remember that we have a security light on the back of our house. It has never worked and we never shelled out the cash to fix it.

And then, suddenly, a tree fell on it. So we asked for a new one - it was broken after all, even more so than before. Fortunately as the 2013 electrician predicted, the light itself must have been the problem because the replacement worked! Let there be light!

The light turns on automatically when it gets dark out and stays on all night, getting brighter when something sets off the motion detector. It doesn't seem to have an "off" switch, as far as we can tell. Which can be fun when you look out the window and realize an opossum is crossing through your yard:

However, the light coming from two halogen bulbs had to add up (we don't have a smart meter anymore to tell us exactly how much it was costing). After a few months with the two 75W halogens, we finally got around to putting in LED lights. The problem was that our LEDs were actually brighter than the the halogen they were replacing.

A quick adjustment and we were all set:

The halogen lights had stayed on low all the time and then brightened when the motion sensor went off. The motion sensor doesn't seem to work with the LED bulbs, but the constant low lighting in the backyard gives us a better sense of security than the pitch black nothingness, so we'll take it. It's also nice to have a little light back there in the late evening just to hang out outside, though we might have to make some adjustments when the lightning bugs start to come out.

By the way, the title of this post refers to a post a few years ago when we bought an LED bulb, a cheap lamp, and a timer and set it up so that there was a light on in the house to greet me when I came in after work for the few months of the year that it was dark.

Family of Four

There are indeed four humans living in our house now but this post isn't about us (this is a house blog, after all). It is about how we managed to acquire yet another vacuum, bringing our total number up to four. Of course, the fact that we also have four humans (including two particularly messy young ones) probably has some connection to our growing family of vacuum cleaners. Though we have struggled to find ways to keep the floors clean ever since we moved here.

Our vacuum family consists of a Roomba that makes its rounds twice a week, a Miele canister vacuum that we rarely take out now that we have a cleaner come weekly, an old Dyson animal that lives in the basement from back when we lived in an apartment with wall-to-wall carpets, and a hand-me-down Black and Decker dust buster that had outlived its usefulness despite being our most used vacuum.

Thanks to a toddler who likes to walk around with bowls full of cereal, crackers, goldfish, and other small things that go crunch underfoot, the dust buster has become our go-to floor cleaner. Step on an oatmeal sure? Go grab the dust buster. Ride-on toy scooter roll over some cheerios? Time to dust bust. But that thing did not have the suction power, nor was it doing our backs any favors bending down to the floor cleaning up the crumbs.

And so, a couple of weeks ago, we acquired a refurbished Dyson V7 Motorhead vacuum, also known as a stick vacuum.  It lives in the hallway right near where we had parked the (now departed) dust buster. It's not that noticeable from the living room (second picture below) and is very centrally located to all our usual messes. I am also partial to what Dyson calls purple and I call magenta color.

It comes with a few attachments and the stick feature means no more bending down to vacuum. The fact that it has an actual motorized brush bar means it can pick things up from carpeting pretty easily, and it has two power settings depending on how much needs picking up (plus a "trigger" button that somehow is much more intuitive than having to switch something on).

It is so thin that I had high hopes it would fit under things like this sofa, a home to dust and crumbs (and toys and plates??) that get kicked or brushed under  while the kids are playing. Alas, it does not.

Nonetheless, in the two weeks we've had it, we are finding that we love having it around. Here is the haul just from this morning - crumbs, cat hair, dust, and play-doh.

It's not what we would use for when we have to vacuum the whole floor (that's what the Miele is for, or the Roomba if we can wait an hour for it to do its thing). But it's great for the almost constant little messes caused from a house full of people.