The first few weeks in our coastal Maine house were basically a crash course in “figuring it out as we go.” Jack and I have rented our entire adult lives, so we were used to texting one person when something went wrong. Jumping into first-time homeownership and realizing there’s no magic contact to fix everything? Steep learning curve. In this vlog, I’m sharing the very real stuff that popped up back-to-back—starting with mice in the basement/garage (yes, I found droppings on our stroller stuff and I was like, absolutely not), and what we did to get ahead of it. Then we get into ice dams, which I truly had never even heard of until Jack saw a video and we looked at our own roof like… oh. We talk about why they’re dangerous (water has nowhere to go except under your shingles), what a pro quoted us, and what we did ourselves: roof raking and using the right kind of “less corrosive” salt to create channels through the ice. And because homeownership loves to humble you, we also dealt with a heating zone going out after a boiler service (cue panic), plus a leaking KitchenAid freezer that turned into—no joke—an ice dam inside our fridge. It’s chaotic, but it’s also empowering learning these systems and knowing what to watch for next time.