Month: October 2007

Finally, some major progress!!

I got back to the house at almost exactly 5 pm (love that commute!!!) and cleaned the garage until it got too dark to see well. It was a little bit of an archaeological dig – the “finds” ranged from carpet and tile that didn’t match anything in the house, to spent florescent bulbs behind the furnace, to 70+ half-empty cans of paint, to plenty of chemicals and some not-diminutive furniture. The most confusing items to pull down were two projection screens that I found 10 feet up on top of a cabinet. The most potentially horrifying were three bags of cotton batting – all I could think as I got ready to pull them down was that if I was a mouse, that’s EXACTLY where I would want to live. Luckily, they were rodent free.

I stacked all of the “remnants” in the middle of the garage, and then swept out everything that I could reach (and see – by that point, especially with the clouds, it was pretty dark – this picture is from the next morning).

And here’s the pile from the back of the garage:

At that point, I decided to start in on cleaning the kitchen cabinets. They’re going to be a little bit of a trial, I think, and we’re hoping to renovate within the next year or so. It’s just old, sticky, heavy wood, and most of the rollers don’t work, and most of the hinges are a little bit off. The shelves aren’t adjustable, so I’m worried about what will even fit, and between the antique(:-)) microwave/oven and the trash compactor that we had removed (leaving just an empty hole), the cabinets likely just won’t become fine once we get used to them.

That said, I love our corian counters, and that big sink, and the wall tile, and I suspect I’ll like the stove a lot. And the bow-out window is awesome. So it certainly isn’t all doom.

Before I could clean the cabinets, I needed to remove all of the baby-proofing – took longer than I was expecting! I only made it through two cabinets and two drawers by the time we decided to break for dinner.

Meanwhile, Kevin came home, we turned on the stereo, and he started to go to town on the “wood paneling” in the family room.

It turns out that the wood was more of a sticker/wallpaper than it looked. The wall has a weird bump-out shape, and so we were hoping to correct that, plus removing the “wood” also took along a fair amount of drywall. Kevin had a blast with his brand new crowbar and the sawzall from his family. He definitely made fast work of the demolition.

It turns out that the wall is bumped out because they poured the foundation unevenly. Oops. We found about a good number of bottle caps and three ping pong balls sealed into the former wall – perhaps the construction was some sort of fraternity reunion bonding exercise?

We’ve decided to keep the bump out – I actually don’t mind at all, since it will be a good place for potted plants, and the part that grated for me was the faux wood. Kevin’s going to add some insulation, since they did a spotty job and missed entire sections. Then, he’ll put in new drywall and we can start painting. I can’t wait to replace the blue! 🙂 It’s sort of a big, undefined room, so we’re thinking of putting in an off-white chair rail to continue the line from the bump-out, and doing a medium café-au-lait below the line to ground things a bit and a lighter shade above. It will need to coordinate with both that fireplace brick and the “cedar” (green-grey) couches. I’m hoping that those colors and a light neutral rug will really work well? We’ll see. Choosing paint is so hard.

(An aside – like the fire screen? I’m such a big fan. This, along with the buffet cabinet and the sofa/chair/ottoman were what we purchase furniture-wise from our wedding gift money. I can’t wait until the rest of the room matches – so pretty!)

We ended up getting the word at around five that the sellers were out and the house was ours!! Pretty cool!

I drove home to get a carload of cleaning supplies, the vacuum, the stereo, some folding chairs, and some tools. I got back to the house to meet Kevin a bit after 6, and we just wandered room to room for almost an hour. A bit overwhelming! I’d forgotten how echoing and dark an empty house can be.

We went to buy light bulbs, and then promptly ran out of steam and retreated to the apartment for dinner. I’m planning to get out of work early tomorrow and take a vacation day on Wednesday, so there will be plenty of time in the next few days to start cleaning.

The house was in pretty good shape – surfaces were surprisingly clean, and it didn’t look like there was much moving-out damage other than about a million hooks and anchors in the walls. The garage still had a LOT of stuff in it – no good – and the carpets are more stained than I remembered (but in line with what Kevin thought) – but on the whole, really not bad.

We signed the documents yesterday, and received word at about 2 in the afternoon that the house was now ours.

Despite the closing and the fact we have a key, the sellers requested a three-day period before we took possession. This is making our parents nervous, and now that I’m here I can completely see why, but it’s written in the purchase and sale agreement and so there’s nothing to do now but wait.

(In addition to not being able to sign off on the house between closing and possession, the pity of the thing is that we lose one of our weekends for moving, and so cleaning and the initial car trips will have to take place in the evenings after work. Bummer, especially now that it’s dark so early.)

But, all that aside, we’ve closed! And now a month and a half of waiting is reduced to one last weekend… 🙂

Knock on wood, we close on Friday (so close!), and I’ve been making lists like a madwoman for the last week. We get the keys on the 12th, and our lease doesn’t end until the 31st, so we have three weekends plus the intervening weekdays to make the move.

We’ve rented a van for the final Saturday in October to move over all of the big furniture (and we have some awesome friends who actually volunteered to help – bless them. I’m so excited not to have to wrangle the couches and mattresses.). We’ll do the fishtank the next day, by ourselves. (The details on that deserve their own post).

In the meantime, we’ll clean, paint (the family room, and one bedroom), and start moving over all of the bits and sundry. The new house is actually right on both of our drives to work, so it won’t be too hard to bring a few box-fulls over each day until everything’s in place. (Even better, it means we can just keep reusing the boxes and packing supplies! AND, there’s real incentive to fully unpack each day, so that when we finally start sleeping in our new home at the end of the month, everything will be unpacked into its spot instead of sitting in a wall of boxes.)
I’ve been sort of grieving for our apartment for the last few weeks, in my typical poorly-transitioning way. (We’ve lived here for more than three years – the longest-lived home since high school. Kevin proposed here. I’ll miss the daily view of the Olympic Mountains and the lake. It held the first several phases of the fishtank. Larry came over for movies and sports, or just to hang out. The way that you can see what the weather will be in three hours by looking at the sky to the east. The first seven months that we lived here, when I was willfully unemployed and spent most of my days reading and knitting. Our running routes. Our fireworks spot. I keep thinking of things that I’m sad to leave.)

That’s not to say that I’m not excited about the new house. I’m totally won over – we both have been since we first saw it. We can’t wait for the projects, we can’t wait for family and friends to visit. And, last week, it occurred to me that the move could be such a last hurrah for our apartment. All of the reasons we’ve grown past it (kayaks and bikes in the living room, skis and camping gear and power tools and luggage crowding the closets, wonderful wedding gifts that have nowhere to live, wood from furnishing projects that we didn’t have the space to finish) can move to the new house. (Yay for garages!) And so as we settle our new place, our old place will just get better. It’s a relief to finally have a positive way of viewing the move.

In the meantime, I’ve been going through cupboards and cabinets and closets to find the things that we no longer need. I don’t want to move anything that we don’t have to!! For example, the almost-empty shampoos and expired sunscreens from Boston and before would have taken up a full box.