Lucky Me & The Little Things

Back in the day Greg was quite the tiler- a craft he learned from his late stepdad, and helped him with on many jobs. In all the years I have known Greg I have not yet seen him lay a tile, but I’ve heard about how he’d love to again many a times. Finally with our new house he can flex his tiling muscle, starting with the guest bathroom, and get nice and warmed up for all the other projects I will have in mind for him when I see what he can do!

The bathroom floor is getting prepped. The gross old toilet is tossed into the back yard and the vinyl is gone. Imagine the possibilities!!

This year Greg has started working with Nolan on learning how to hit a ball with a bat. It’s been pretty amazing how well Nolan has picked it up, especially considering Greg pitches the ball to Nolan- no tee ball here! Nolan it getting a huge kick out of it (and so is Greg ofcourse) and he often throws in dramatic falls, runs and tumbles for that extra touch of drama.

I can not WAIT to see how they will look when they are finished!

Last week, while on my mission to read as many books as I can this year and reading Laurie Notaro’s ‘The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club’ I came across the chapter where she described an incident with a candied apple. After reading that I had a sudden intense need for a candied apple, and randomly mentioned that to Greg. He looked at me like I was nuts and quickly turned his attention back to tickling Nolan’s feet.

Yesterday I met up with Greg at the new house and we decided we had to make our 350th run to the home improvement store. As I got in the passenger seat of his truck I noticed something was already occupying it- a big fat, juicy candied apple, for me!!!

I think he likes me!

Thanks to all the time the move has been taking up my little seedlings have been mightily ignored this season. Thank goodness I remembered to water them at least occasionally, so that despite the neglect they’ve been able to take care of themselves pretty well. So far as I can tell none of them have gotten pregnant, so their after school programs must have been working for them.

Yesterday I had a chance to take the biggest and bloomiest of them all and transplant them into larger containers so I could get them ready to move over to the new house soon. Among them were all the veggies I started which were zucchini, squash, cubecumber and tomatoes. They will bear their first fruits at our new home- so symbolic, no?

Rooms/areas finished painting- 7
Rooms cleaned- 2.5
Exciting project of the day: The floors are getting refinished!

Today and Monday through Thursday next week our hardwood floors are getting their extreme makeover. Over the weekend I will finish painting the remaining bathroom, master bedroom and kitchen. Yesterday I finally really scrubbed half of the kitchen and both bathrooms, I am so much more comfortable in them now!
When cleaning the kitchen I pulled out the shelf beneath the stove (the one appliance that came with the house) and was faced with oodles of dust bunnies, spider webs/nests, dead spiders and dead bugs, among more un-identifiable crap. I thought I would have been able to live with this stove as it wasn’t new, but also not too old, but after getting a glimpse of this and only being able to imagine what was living (or dead) in all the stove crevices that I can’t see gave me the heebie-jeebies big time. Now I may want a new stove!! This kind of sucks because we are already buying a fridge, washer/drier and a dishwasher (all eco friendly and energy efficient mind you), and I had been kinda glad that we didn’t have to also buy a stove. But seeing so much gross in an instrument with which I cook our meals makes me want to take the materialistic high road, which I never thought I would do.
Then again, this may be a great excuse to get a gas line added and finally be able to have a gas stove, which has been my dream ever since moving out of my mom’s house. Heck we are spending money as if it’s water at this point, might as well keep going, right!

In other news- I see a lot of packing in our future, I suppose I had better get started.

This is a quick update while I am home this morning, the first morning since last Thursday where I haven’t frantically been getting ready to head over to the new house to paint or clean or shop at the home improvement store or the like. So last Thursday we closed on both selling our old house, and buying or new house. It was as smooth as can be expected, it turned out we actually knew the buyers, and we were cordially polite with the sellers considering the hoops they’ve made us jump through in the process. We even headed out to the new house after the closings to start hitting some items on our LONG to-do-before-the-move list, but we were so mentally exhausted now that this big step was finally behind us that we cheered a pitiful ‘hurray’ and soon left again to eat a good burger in our favorite downtown burger joint.

Since then we’ve been working at full speed to head over there every day to paint, pull up carpet, change locks, clean, paint some more, and sweat a whole lot. Initially we had planned to make the big move on Saturday the 26th, but that gave us very little time to get the things we wanted to get finished before the move done in time, especially when poor Greg got a serious case of the cold early on. Since we already are renting our old house back for two weeks after the closing, we asked the buyers if we could rent it back one additional week more, which was fine, so now we are moving June 2nd instead, and so I am taking it a bit slower this morning while I am doing all the laundry we had piled up over the weeks, and shipping some jewelry orders that were placed in the mean time. We are crazy exhausted and sore right now and really look forward to next month when we are moved in and done with that part. Despite that the hard work has been incredibly rewarding as the changes what we are making are making us happier and happier and make the place feel more like ours every day. I will take some time to post pictures here later, in the mean time I will be uploading them to flickr to this set so you can see the progress as I capture it. At this time we only have the 2 bathrooms and the master bedroom and the kitchen left to paint but only have pictures of Greg’s office and the living room.

More later!

After quite a few days of jumping through hoops, dealing with daily doses of frustration, days where we thought we were going to have to walk away from this deal all together, we finally got the confirmation yesterday that we are set to close on this beauty on the 17th! The buyer of our current house also closes on the 17th, but we are able to rent it back from him until at least the 31st so we have two weeks to go nutty in the new place before we have to move everything in, which is a HUGE blessing! The things we are *hoping* to get done before moving in are:

put a shed in the back yard

pull up the carpet in the rooms that have carpet over hardwood

refinish the hardwood floors if necessary

paint, paint, paint, paint the interior walls

those are the things off the top of my head, but I am sure we’ll come up with more are we get closer.

Yay!!!!

Yesterday was a great day, as while Milko was in court for the 4432321th time, all the charges against him were dropped and he is once again a free man!!!!

Today is the day that I FINALLY got my hair cut. Man oh- man I feel like I have lost 10 pounds!
Last year, as I lost a friend to cancer I decided that I wanted to grow my hair long enough to be able to donate it to locks of love. Since then my hair has gotten ridiculously long, and for a few months I have felt like I’ve had a mop on my head. Part of the reason for growing it this long was for the donation, and part was because of sheer lazyness. Truth be told I probably had enough hair to donate last year when I made my decision, and it took me until now to actually get it cut. I vow never to be that lazy again!
This was me the morning:

This is my donation, a whopping 15 inches at it’s longest!!!:

And this is me now- light and lively:

And damm it feels good!!