Category Archives: House Stuff

another reason to dislike farm animals

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I know I’ve mentioned before that our realtor and her husband have been helping us out with a lot of our home improvements. Mostly the yardwork – Renee and I made a couple of trips to our local hardware store together and bought all sorts of plants, and she made a very pretty little flower bed in front of our house. (For those of you who’ve seen my house: you know the place where the weeds used to be? There are actual, real plants there now! They’re going to have pretty little flowers on them and everything! I know!) Anyway, it’s been a tremendous help and they’ve just been awesome.

Last week, Renee and I emailed each other a couple of times, and she said they were going to come over on Saturday to work on the yard. Then Friday night, Scott (Renee’s husband) called and said that Renee was in the hospital. She works with horses a lot, and while she was at the stables on Friday afternoon, her friend’s horse kicked her. So she has a few broken ribs, a punctured lung, and her spleen was bleeding. Um, holy crap?!

Scott wanted to let me know that he’d still be over to work on the yard on Saturday, but it’d just be him, not Renee. Which, dude! Priorities! I told him that if he needed to hang out with his wife in the hospital, of course that was fine, but Renee is pretty hardcore and I’m guessing she told him to get his butt over here and get some yardwork done. (Scott is a bit… hmm, how to say it nicely? He sometimes tends to be a little unmotivated.)

Yesterday, I left Cate with Dave at home and I went to visit Renee in the hospital. She seemed to be doing pretty well, and they’re probably going to let her go home in a couple of days. She was really lucky, because the horse could’ve gotten her in the spine or the kidneys, and things would’ve been much worse. Still, it just kind of reinforced why we only have cats. There’s only so much damage a 12-pound animal can do, you know?

And not that it’s a huge issue when your friend is hurt, but obviously this is going to put another crimp in our moving plans. Renee is going to be immobile for a while, so I don’t think she’s going to be able to do any more yardwork for us. Looks like we’re going to have to call in an actual landscaper, which is fine. I kind of figured we’d have to do that at some point anyway. (The blackberry bushes around the perimeter of our house are going to need some professionals to cut them back; those thorns will slice you to ribbons if you’re not careful.) I just hope Renee will be up for her basic realtor stuff soon, because I really want her to get the commission for our house, rather than a stranger.

spring

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We’re finally starting to get some weather that almost resembles spring here, which is long overdue. We were thinking about driving up to the Tulip Festival this weekend, which runs for the entire month of April, but apparently winter has dragged on so long that none of the tulips are blooming yet. Oh well, some other weekend.

I was also thinking that since the weather is warming up, maybe I could start working on organizing the garage. But we don’t have daycare today (Patsy had to go out of town for the weekend – parents’ weekend at her son’s college), and the idea of trying to work on the garage with Cate around seems sort of impossible. The garage is one massive baby hazard, and I’m going to be up to my elbows in dust and cobwebs (thank the lord for those heavy duty gardening gloves, so I don’t have to actually feel the spider webs), so… yeah, no way. I’ll tackle the garage next week when Cate is safe at someone else’s house.

Anyway, I know it seems like I just post one video after another these days, and I guess the novelty of having a baby! who! walks! on two feet! for real! will wear off eventually, but for now, I hope I don’t annoy you guys too much with these.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIkpYeD8Xes

Since it was finally semi-warm out, we let Cate try walking on the deck for the first time. She was extra-cautious and walked sort of like a little old man, but she had fun. And you can hear her scream “dabbyyy!” (one of her many names for the cats) after one of them saw her coming and bolted for the fenceline, a half-acre away.

house preparations and stress

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Ok, I know that most people out there have moved at least once in their life. And some of you, if you have kids, might’ve even moved with children. For those people, I ask: HOW?!?!

Admittedly, this is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with selling a house. Everywhere I’ve lived before now, I let my landlord know when I was leaving, and then I moved out by that date. End of story. No keeping the place in tip-top shape for potential residents to check it out, no worry about how long it was going to take, nothing. Also, every other time I’ve moved (and I’ve moved a lot), it’s been a one-bedroom apartment, plus me and Teenie. This time, it’s a four-bedroom house, four cats, two adults and one baby. Holy hell, what am I getting myself into?

It’s not even the moving part that’s hanging me up, it’s the getting-ready-for-the-move. Or more specifically, getting ready to put the house on the market. I’m going room by room, trying to tidy up and declutter, and I feel like I’ve made zero progress. Sure, the closet in our master bedroom is now organized and pretty, and Cate’s room will take less than five minutes to be in perfect showing condition. But the rest of the house? Wow. I thought that going room by room would keep me from feeling overwhelmed, and really? Um, no, not so much.

Earlier tonight, I was talking with Dave about how stressed I am, and how I wanted to take Cate to the Tulip Festival like we did last year, because I thought it’d be cool to do sort of a side-by-side comparison of how much she’s grown. (Plus, the chance to get pictures of her walking in the tulips? Priceless!) But now, if I think about taking the day off for a silly festival, it feels like a waste of a Saturday when we should be working on house stuff.

It’s not just the de-cluttering that’s holding us up. We have a contractor working on our kitchen, and a friend working on our deck, and progress on both of those projects seems to be at a standstill right now. We have new cabinet doors for the kitchen that are on order and won’t be here for at least another week, and the deck work is something that has to wait until the damn weather cooperates.

I guess I just want everything on my to-do list to be finished, so that whenever everyone else’s work is finished, we’ll be good to go and ready to list the house. It’s just that it feels like there are about a million items on my to-do list, and I still have 999,995 to go.

more house-selling stuff

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We have a contractor working in our kitchen as I type this. Yes, he works on Sunday – this is his side gig, not his main day job. But the tile backsplash in our kitchen (which I’ve always hated) is gone, and it’s now been re-sheetrock’ed, or re-drywall’ed, or whatever that stuff is that, um, you know… makes walls exist.

Point is, it’s lovely. And as soon as he’s finished with the walls, we can get our new kitchen counters installed. (The counters have a built-in backsplash, hence the need to take down the old tile stuff before the new ones could go in.) I suppose there wasn’t really anything wrong with the tile that we had before – my brother-in-law did it, and it looked quite nice – I just didn’t like the color scheme. It had maroon and hunter green tiles, and it reminded me of my dorm freshman year of college when my roommate and I intentionally decorated our room with those exact colors. Very early 90’s.

So after all of this is done, we just have a couple of projects left, and our house is going to be ready to go on the market. I can’t believe it. I have a feeling that it’s going to be April, though, because one of the projects is to get new kitchen cabinet doors, and apparently those take 3-4 weeks to arrive. (Btw, the reason we need new cabinet doors is because I painted our old ones and they look like crap. I’m not good at painting walls, I don’t know why on earth I ever thought I could paint an uneven surface. Lesson learned, I’ll never try that again.)

I’m doing pretty well at sticking to my goal of packing two boxes a day, so I won’t get too overwhelmed when it comes time to actually move. It serves a dual purpose, since it’s also helping to de-clutter the house so it’ll look nicer when we’re trying sell it. Yesterday, Kris came over to raid my CD collection so she could load a whole bunch of my stuff onto her iPod. I’m going to see her next week at our book club, so she can give them back to me, and I can box them up and be done with them.

It’s weird, I’m not that nervous about getting the house ready to sell, or the actual moving process. I mean, sure, that’s on the radar, but my primary source of stress is how long it’s going to take us to find someone to buy this place. We could be out of here in May, or it could be sometime in 2009, and we have no way of predicting when it will happen. My obsessive need to plan isn’t coping too well with that one. So I’m just telling everyone I know to pray (or hope, wish, meditate, send happy thoughts, whatever) that we get a buyer sooner rather than later. If any of y’all want to help me out with that, it’d be much appreciated.

Raleigh Recap

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We just got back from what feels like a whirlwind trip to North Carolina, and we’re all completely exhausted. We had such a great time, I don’t even know where to start. It’s so pretty there, and Dave really liked it too, so it looks like we’re all on board with the idea of moving there. Yay! So now all we need to do is finish the work on our house and (this is the tricky part) actually sell the damn place, and we’ll be on our way.

It was so much fun to get to visit with Cat and Tony, and it was an absolute riot watching Cate interact with e-baby. She surprisingly didn’t freak out at e-baby’s signs of affection; maybe because she’s a girl, maybe because Cate instinctively knew she was family, who knows. But it was totally easy, and Cate had a great time playing with her little cousin. It’s going to be so much fun watching them grow up together, I cannot wait.

Other weekend stuff:
* Househunting was great because we found some neighborhoods that we really liked, and Tony’s realtor friend was fantastic. Of course, most likely nothing that we saw this weekend will still be on the market when it’s time for us to move, but at least we have a pretty good idea of where we’re going to want to focus when we start searching for real.

* We got to have dinner with two of my friends from college, which was awesome. I don’t see or talk to them nearly enough, so I always forget how much I just adore them and how much fun they are until I see them again. But it was great, and I look forward to living closer to them so we can hang out more often.

* Oh, the southern food. Fried okra, hush puppies, yum. And did you know that there are Chick-Fil-A’s in North Carolina? And there aren’t any on the west coast? We didn’t have the chance to stop at one, so poor Dave has yet to experience the joy and wonder that is Chick-Fil-A. He was all, “Is it like KFC?” Oh, sweetie, it’s just so much better, you have no idea.

* The flights sucked, as it always does when you spend more than six hours on an airplane. But thankfully, none of the flights were nearly as bad as I was anticipating. Which is not surprising, since my anxiety level was pretty much focused on the absolute worst case scenario. Cate did amazingly well, and several passengers commented on what a good baby she was. In case you were wondering, this is my highly imaginative technique: pack tons of snacks, a variety of small toys, a portable DVD player for cartoons, and when all else fails, a half-dose of children’s Benadryl won’t hurt. There you have it.

raleigh trip

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We’re leaving for our trip to Raleigh tomorrow, and I’m experiencing a combination of excitement and dread right now.

The excitement is because I know that getting to spend time with Cat, Tony & e-baby is going to be so much fun. Also, Dave and I finally get to check out the area and make sure it’s really where we want to live. We’re spending most of Saturday with a realtor, and I’m really looking forward to that.

The dread: I’m not a good flyer to begin with, and flying with a 13 month-old makes it about a hundred times more stressful. Also, this trip means that the reality of moving is starting to sink in, along with all the details that go with it. Finishing the home improvements, listing the house on the market, praying for a buyer, packing, dealing with the million little details that are involved in any move and oh my lord I need to go lie down.

Other factors on my Stress List:
1. Making sure that everything is packed. When we went to Mississippi for Christmas, I packed Dave’s stuff for him, and I think I’ll probably do that again this trip. He tends to pack about 20 minutes before we need to leave for the airport, and I cannot begin to tell you how much that drives me crazy. I like to have everything packed the night before. Since I’m already packing for both me and Cate, what’s one more person?
2. I’m trying to get the house clean, because we’re going to have a friend stopping by to check on the cats while we’re gone, and you know I can’t have people in my house when it’s messy.
3. A dozen other tiny things on my to-do list that, trust me, y’all don’t really care about.

Earlier this week, Cate woke herself up coughing. I heard her on the baby monitor and panicked. She cannot, CANNOT get sick right before we have to fly 3,000 miles across the U.S. But last night I noticed just the faintest bit of white on her gums where her top two teeth are starting to break through, so I think that’s the reason for the coughing. Or at least I hope so.

Everybody cross your fingers that we have a totally dull, uneventful flight tomorrow.

making headway

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Move-related things I have done so far:

  • The hall, foyer, and kitchen ceiling are all painted. However, the painter guy got a tiny bit of beige paint on the (otherwise white) ceiling in my living room. I’m going to have our realtor friend come check it out before I call him and demand that he come back to fix it. I spotted it about a half hour after he left, but Dave insists that he can’t see what I’m talking about. So I don’t know if I’m being obsessive, or if Dave is blind as a bat. I figure Renee can give an impartial tie-breaker vote.

  • I don’t know if I mentioned this, but during that nine-day power outage back in 2006? Yeah. At some point during my own personal hell, Dave put the generator just a weensy bit too close to the house. And part of the siding melted. I guess that’s what we get for having a plastic (well, vinyl) house. It wasn’t really his fault, most of the time when he went outside to mess with the generator, it was dark and he was working by flashlight. And God bless him for taking care of the generator so I didn’t have to. Anyway, the siding people came back and replaced the melty part, so it’s all pretty again.

  • I’ve gotten estimates from two different moving companies as to how much it’ll cost us to move to North Carolina. I have another guy coming out tomorrow to give me a third estimate.

  • We bought a new microwave and range, which were delivered yesterday. They’re both stainless steel, shiny, and oh-so-pretty. I don’t miss our old handle-less white appliances one bit.

  • I’ve gutted my closet of all the clothes that I’m going to give to charity. I’d like to do Dave’s side of the closet too, since I pretty well know all of the things that he never wears anymore, but he won’t let me. Hmph. (Btw, all of my maternity clothes have been boxed up and put in the guest room closet. I may need them again someday, so I’m not getting rid of them just yet.)

  • I met with a house cleaner, who specializes in move-out cleaning, to get an estimate for giving our house a very thorough scrub-down before we put it on the market. (Surprisingly cheaper than I thought it would be.)

  • I scheduled an appointment on Thursday afternoon for Dave and me to go see about getting new kitchen counters. That should be fun.

  • Our realtor friend and her husband are coming over this weekend to help us with some of our yard work. They have a power-washer, so they can scrub down the siding and the deck. And Renee volunteered to do our front flower bed for us. I’m guessing the real estate market must be really slow for her to be so desperate to help us sell our house, but I certainly won’t object to having the help.

    • So, those are the items on my “have-done” list. There are probably at least dozen things that are still on the “to-do” list, and I won’t bore you with them. The only one on the list that kind of bums me out is we’ve decided that we’re going to sell my car since the money will be a pretty significant chunk toward our moving costs, and it’s pretty expensive to move a car cross-country. It’s rare that Dave and I both need our cars at the same time, so we should be fine sharing, until we get settled and can buy a second car.

    It’s just that I’ll be really sad to let it go, since it was the first car that I ever bought new. And I bought it all by myself, I went to the dealership and haggled with the salesman all on my own. But, you know, time to move on. If Dave sticks to this idea he has in his head of us eventually having three kids, I’d have to get rid of it anyway, since it would be way too small. It just feels weird to sell it since my family historically does not sell cars that are still running. We drive them until the engines fall out. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this car, it’s been virtually perfect for the 6 1/2 years that I’ve had it.

    So hey, if you or anyone you know wants to buy a 2002 Subaru Outback Sport, drop me an email.