> Actually, now that I think about it, I'm still using that hose. I guess a hose can expand enough to withstand freezing. But you can have problems if you leave it attached to the faucet all winter with water in it. The faucet might be damaged.

Too true. When we bought our first home, we didn't know it but the previous owners had been leaving their hose attached to the faucet all winter long for something like 3-5 years straight. Our first year there, we had to get that faucet and part of the attached plumbing replaced. We tried to fill our son's kiddie pool that summer and ended up with a different kind of pool on our bathroom floor.

Seems like there's always something going wrong or needing to be fixed when you own your own home. When you rent, you just call up the landlord and get him to fix it, but if you're your own landlord then you get to handle stuff yourself. Our latest problem has been a large family of mice that moved into our walls for the winter. I let them be as long as they let us be, but when they started leaving droppings all over the attic and then started coming into our bedroom and waking us up at night, I declared war on 'em. It took two weeks but I think they're just about all gone now... the body count is up to fourteen.

Gri"sorry Mousie... but these mice weren't nice"shny