Tuesday. I was up at seven thirty this morning to make sure that I was ready for Frontier in case they arrived on the early side. With the house being without Internet, we do not want to be taking any unnecessary chances of something going wrong. So I got up and was at my desk (which can see the front door) before eight so that I was ready for anything.
I got some work done and Liesl came out to join me shortly after eight. We hung out for over an hour. Around nine Liesl wanted to help me unload the Quest of all of the stuff that we had brought back from storage in New York. We had been too tired last night to deal with it and carrying everything in in the middle of the night is pretty annoying. It is hard to do and that is how you end up dropping things on the ground and not realizing it.
We got the van open and were just starting to take our second load into the house when the Frontier Internet van pulled up behind us. Perfect timing.
Frontier was great. The guys said, as I had suspected, that absolutely everything on our account had been screwed up. First of all, Rachel and Shawn were not supposed to have taken the service or the router away with them. They were supposed to leave that and just switch the service over to us which would have made this all completely painless and simple. As it turns out, this caused them to be without Internet all of this time as doing that made it impossible to hook them up at their new house. So even though we have been in New York for two weeks, we had our Internet hooked up more quickly than they did (they will end up getting Internet access tomorrow.)
Because they did not properly shut off the service, Frontier had all kinds of bad info about our property and had things registered as us being a “multiple business location” needing some seriously large equipment to get our Internet access working. The installers were like “we knew that this was all wrong, but they didn’t record your phone number properly so we’ve had no way to reach you to ask what was needed or to let you know when we were coming.” All stuff that I would have guessed from the ridiculously confused phone conversation that I had with Frontier two weeks ago.
But we talked it through and got everything straightened out. It was all quite easy and the Frontier guys were really helpful. We did not have to replace the outside fiber connection box (contrary to what the guy on the phone had said) and they were able to remove the huge, pointless Verizon box that has long been in our back server closet with a small, new Frontier one. The old one has been beeping because of a dead battery for several years now and is incredibly annoying. The new one does not have a battery as there is no need for one (and never was) so we have more space, draw less power and don’t have to worry about a UPS beeping every few minutes year after year.
The Frontier guys didn’t just hook up the service for us, they made sure to hook up our Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite, hook it up to our Netgear Prosafe switch and ensure that the house was online before leaving! They were great. With the new service and the EdgeRouter in place, we are getting more than 150 Mb/s in both directions at the house.
After they left I spent a while getting rooms wired up, getting our Ubiquiti wireless access point working, getting wireless devices hooked up to the new wireless and so forth. But we are super happy. We have been very nervous that there going to be problems getting the service hooked up today and have worried that we would be left for weeks without Internet access (like what happened to Rachel and Shawn.) So mentally my day had been set aside for disaster. But instead, it was a best case scenario and everything was working great long before lunch time!
After the Internet was all working, we got the minivan all unloaded and moved into the house. It is not that big of a load, but it will make quite a difference in the house, especially since we have almost nothing in some places, like in the kitchen. We brought a lot of kitchen stuff back with us like my “Midnight Sun” stoneware that dates back to my first ever kitchen purchases from around 1996. I think that I got them on mom’s discount when she worked at the home store in Rochester.
Dominica spent much of the day looking around the house figuring out all of the things that were missing that had been here when we left two weeks ago. She found more and more stuff all day long. From boxes to kitchen stuff to food items. She was making a list all day long.
But we are home. We are moved in. We have been cleaning, unpacking, getting the house back to usable all day and it is our house again. We are making it all comfortable for us. The kids are excited about all of the space and are anxious for us to get the floors cleaned enough that we can move their bed into the back bedroom where they will be switching tomorrow. We could have, in theory, moved it tonight as the Roomba ran over and over all day today getting the floor cleaned but it was so late by the time that we deemed the room clean “enough” to start moving things in that we were not in the mood for doing it tonight. They can make it one more night in the old room, that we still sometimes call “Liesl’s Room” – the room that Liesl chose when we first bought the house in 2010. The same room that had the lone stuffed animal in it that she found that day.
Overall, a very good day. We are feeling very good about being moved back into our home.
