I managed to pay off our Lowe's account about a month ago and swore to not use it, but I am also a liar to myself and I have very little discipline. Yesterday, we decided to go out for a couple things for the house. We ate and went to Best Buy, but I shall talk about that separately. Eventually, we made our way to the Lowe's on Brodie Lane. My main reason for going is that I want to see about installing a water softener to help remove all the calcium depositing in our copper pipes.
We rang the little bell that calls a service guy and a young kid came over. I wasn't expecting much, but he did say that the one I was looking at was overkill and the smaller $300 was going to do the job just fine. Right there, he cold have saved me about $300 as the largest one that I was considering was $600. Before I go spending money, though, he said to take a test kit to see where our water was at. He gave me about 4 little test kits which just look like pH strips. This meant we were not going to spend money on this today, so I went over to Wife as she was looking through the different bottles of cleaners, such as Clorox. We had talked about needing new yard tools, including possibly a new awn mower, so we headed over there.
Lawn mowers have come a long way. They had 4 different types: manual push type, traditional with engine, battery powered, and even 1 that ran on electricity (from a cord). Prices had quite a large range. I have actually bought most styles, so I consider myself an "expert" here. When we first moved to our fist house, I bought a manual push type, it kind of works, but it is more for a tiny yard because it does require a strong body to get it spinning and keep spinning. Our current yard is too big for one of these. Gas mowers work great, but you need to have gas and they are loud and smelly. The electrical variety works great, but you have to have a long extension cord and stay aware of where it is or risk running over it. I love the idea of the battery powered mower and several years ago I had bought one from Sears. It was fine for maybe two seasons, but then the battery would not hold enough battery power to get through the yard, even when I was willing to split the front and back into two separate days. I did consider that nowadays, one can order an extra battery, but that would be an extra $40-$200, depending on the Amp the battery is set for. I was mostly leaning towards the battery type mower until Wife saw a returned mower sitting in front of the bay where the mowers were at. This got interesting, specially when considering the prize went from a new $260, to a used $134.50. This mower was gas and had front wheel drive, so at less than half the price of the battery powered one, and I wouldn't need to tinker with extra batteries, it was a huge savings, money-wise.
We added a new hedge trimmer because our hedges are at chest height and I kind of like that, but most people keep their hedges down around four feet tall.
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