What I didn't know about living in the country

Soooo...this suburbanite-turned-country-girl had a lot to learn when we moved out to the country. I *thought* I knew what we were in for! I was wrong.

Here's a list of items that I was wide-eyed about. Aren't we in the 21st Century?

1. No garbage pick up. We used to use Waste Management and paid a monthly fee to bring our large bin to the end of our driveway. Normal. Like normal people do it! Found out that this same company does not service where we live in a "rural-residential" area. Solution? We take all our garbage to the dump. We have a tag on our truck, and we gather up all our crap, put it in our own bin (that we bought) and load bags and bags on garbage onto the trailer and drive down to the dump (it's not far, only a couple miles away). Lucky for us, we don't pay by weight. I believe we pay a yearly fee.

2. Cable - the cable provider we had used previously does not service our area. Part of me was excited about this, because the ONE cable provider had SUCH a monopoly and kept raising prices, horrible service (both technical/digital/TV related and also TERRIBLE customer service). So we went with DirecTV for cable (we don't actually need it and went to cancel this month). We also had to use a separate Internet provider as well. We went through 3 years of massive headaches, but I have to say, I *think* we're set now. Since we have Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime video, YouTube, Netflix, etc. we opted to cancel our cable and save ourselves $150/month (and put it into our Cabin Fund - more on that later). Well, after we canceled, a day later we get a call. DirecTV does not want us to cancel our service, so they are offering us a $48/month for exactly what we have now, NO CONTRACT, and a $300 gift card. Score! Let's keep it, bank the $100/month still, get the $300 gift card and then cancel next year. We're still saving money per month. So I'm good with this for now.

3. WATER. Yes, water. I guess I never understood how lucky people are to be connected to the town's water and sewer. When we moved into our house, we knew they were on a well. All I knew previous to this, was that well water stunk and you couldn't drink it. When we went to tour the house, the water did not smell funky at all (we learned later that you can dump bleach into your well to remove the smell for a while...great). We learned that yes, you can actually RUN OUT OF WATER. If it does not rain, and our well runs dry. Well, that means we have no water. We couldn't run the dishwasher, take a shower and do laundry at the same time, or even close to the same time, or we'd run out of water. I WAS NOT OK WITH THIS. We paid a shit-ton for our house and I wanted to have water whenever I wanted to have it- DUH. Ava was 8 weeks old when we got our water tested (we were buying reverse osmosis, purified spring water from Wegmans for drinking, but were using the well water for cooking and showers/baths). Once the guy from Anderson Water and Power came over and tested our water....well. I think it's safe to say that I could NOT BATHE MY BABIES in that water after I saw the results of the test. Nope. Not gonna happen. So, we paid $7,000 (3 months after buying our house - so we were BROKE) to install a water treatment system into our home. I'm not gonna lie, it's beautiful. Now we can drink our tap water, but we also have a reverse-osmosis purified tank especially for drinking water. So our fridge and spicket provide delicious water now. And I don't freak out when bathing my kids. The water treatment system did not solve our "running out of water" problem. It just TREATS the water, but does not store it. So, we put in a 400 gallon tank in our basement. Since we got that sucker installed, we've never run out of water. Hallelujah. However, if we lose power, our pump won't work and ergo, won't pump water up to our house. Sigh. That happened once, after a week-long beach vacation, we came home after an 8 hour drive to realize we had no water.

4. Mowing the lawn. This is not my chore. When Steve's Grandpa Teenie passed away, not only did he leave ALL his carpentry tools to Steve, but he also left his 40" zero turn Cub Cadet mower. It mowed our 1 acre in Fairport in 45 minutes. We figured it'd be ok for our new house. Nope. It took Steve almost 5 hours to mow our lawn. And he had to fill up the gas tank once during this. He'd come in to "take a break" because it would be blazing hot, or just sitting and bouncing for 5 hours was too much. We talked about it and it made sense to get a larger mower. 5 acres of lawn is a lot more than 1 acre. But, it was going to be a big investment. We were spending a LOT of money to be comfortable in this house! To me, time = money. 5 hours on the mower on a Sunday means he's not spending that time with us. He's not playing with the girls. We ended up getting a Gravely commercial zero-turn mower (I believe the deck is 60") Steve has been able to mow the entire lawn in about 1.5 hours without needing to refill the gas tank.

I will continue to take notes on this topic. I was surprised when reality hit me in the face and I realized that it truly is a "thing" to "get ready for summer" and "get ready for winter." I don't think I could handle this property by myself. That's not easy for me to say since I'm very independent and had lived on my own previously. But, I have zero interest to climb into our sewer tank to retrieve whatever pump stopped working and have shit water drip down my face. (Yes, that actually happened, I had to hold the light for Steve, while simultaneously gagging and throwing up in my mouth while he figured that out. Gross.)