Photo-finish in 2012

Did a lot of last minute stuff these past few days leading up to the year-end.

- renewed our car registration

- renewed hubby's driver's license

- renewed my driver's license

- stayed up overnight (nagpuyat) to finish Swe-cha's photo album for his 1st birthday (oo, 2 years delayed na and if my voucher weren't expiring on 12/30, this will probably still remain pending, haha!). The good news is that if this comes out nice, it'll inspire me to get started on his photobooks for his 1st, 2nd and 3rd  years.

- submitted our elections for our medical & dependent FSA (photo-finish rin ito, last minute submission for the 12/31 deadline)

- hubby finally put up the plastic sheet that we use to seal our balcony door against winter drafts, our master bedroom is so much warmer now! Let's see if he can put up the one for our living room balcony door & possibly get another one for our 2nd bedroom's windows.

- threw trash away (lots of them - around 7 big grocery bags. he kept going down to the trash chute to get rid of pahabol soiled diapers because Swe-cha kept pooping. He was probably purging himself for the new yera too :)

2012 has been a wonderful year and came with lots of blessings for our family (hindi ko na iisa-isahin, overwhelming kasi).

We wish you all a blessed 2013 :)

Dishwasher - another DIY

So our dishwasher broke down last month and if I had not already said so, we love ours and use it regularly. The dishwasher is such a lifesaver and in our case, it's a no-brainer for us because our hot water cost is already included in our monthly condo fee - not really sure how much the old dishwasher costs us to operate in terms of electricity since it was a dinosaur (20 years old), this new one costs $35 / year to operate assuming you run it 4x a week.

Anyway, losing use of this appliance was such a hardship. We couldn't even use it as a 'drip pan' to drip-dry our dishes because it died in the middle of its wash cycle and it still had a puddle of water at the bottom of the tub which we couldn't completely dry out. Also, since it died mid-cycle, I wasn't up to cleaning the drawers / trays. So on top of having to wash our dishes manually, we also had to air-dry them on our kitchen countertops. It was so difficult to find free space after a while.

The bad news is that we had just replaced our washing machine last month and our wallets aren't quite ready for this on top of the holiday spending for December. The good news is that, apparently, compared to other appliances, dishwashers are pretty affordable and since ours is a standard-sized dishwasher, you could easily get one for as low as $250 or as high as the high $1000 range.

We decided to DIY the installation as it seemed fairly straightforward. We saved ourselves between $90 (handyman fee) and at least $139 (home depot installation fee) or $169 (Sears installation fee) by doing the installation ourselves. It would cost more than $139 or $169 to have it installed professionally because we also needed an electrician to do power hookups.

For this project, I did the wiring and hubby did the plumbing.

Here is the new washer, we will install the footboard (the cover at the bottom of the washer) and remove the plastic sheet on the door & the energy guide sticker after we run it a few times and make sure that there are no leaks.

We've already run a load last night and it ran wonderfully - quiet and efficient.