CA or Bust

On Tuesday we went to the home of our friends, the beautiful, Grable family. They were packing up and working hard, preparing to leave for their move to California. We snapped this shot of them before we left and said our goodbyes.

Jul 24 12

Expedited Move

   Wow, what a day we had yesterday!  Our cousin, Deanna,  and her mother, Doris,  who will be taking care of her needed a place to go when Deanna gets out of the hospital.  This resulted in a move that needed to be expedited this weekend.

The day began by rising early and driving 105 miles in our van (with our trailer) down to to Aunt Doris’ home.  We loaded up the trailer with out door furniture and then loaded up another trailer with more picnic tables and benches.  We were joking that Ellie Mae and Granny needed to be sitting on the bench.  Someone took the joke even farther and taped this sign to the back of the pile.

Everyone worked hard and worked together to pack things up and load them onto the truck

 

26’ U-Haul

 

Loading the truck for maximum storage is like a puzzle……………………..…..Packing up boxes                           

 

Time for lunch and for a quick birthday celebration!

 

 

 

The house is empty! Time to move out!

 

We formed a caravan of 5 cars as we drove north with the cars, truck and trailers loaded down. (Notice the Beverly Hills or Bust sign is still on the picnic bench.) 

Two hours later, we made it to the new house where other family members had been painting and repairing the house.  A few fresh hands also came over and helped us unload the truck.  We also had some pizza together that evening before it got dark.

 

 

 

 

 

Noah hanging out with our cousins

 

By the time we got home we were exhausted and slept well.  It looks like Lydia was tired too!

Dec 22

We’ve been making progress since I have last posted though, we’ve had to take a little break of a few days to finally do some Christmas shopping, which, thankfully, we were able to do almost entirely online. It’s been awhile since I have posted, but I’ll just publish a few photos in non-chronological order.

Mom has been working on the trim at least a little bit each day and on Monday we got the bookcases moved into the living room.  The miter saw is still in the living room, but it’ll only be a few hours more of work before we’re finished with the trim and can start decorating in preparation for our party on Saturday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glenn had to totally redo the electrical in the kitchen and hallway, but not we have light and we also replaced the fixture in the kitchen with one that was brushed-nickel to match the other hardware in the house.  Wow, the photos I took of the light turned out pretty cool!

The venetian plaster in the back bathroom has been sealed and is now finished.  Venetian plaster takes a lot of extra work and time because it requires a lot of different coats and you have to wait for each coat to dry. However, thanks to the extra effort venetian plaster looks fantastic and we may end up using it in a couple of other rooms.

 

 

One of our biggest priorities now is to get the hallway bathroom semi-functional for our guests. We’ll paint the walls in the bathroom with the same paint we used in the laundry room, you can see a sample of the color in the above picture.

 

 

 

 

 

Today we got the water/ice system for the refrigerator hooked up!

 

The original water line had rotted and we also had to replace the water filter. The fridge had been delivered exactly 363 days ago, so at least we can say that we got the water system hooked up in less than a year!

 

 

 

Our growing collection of Christmas cards

 

Well, now I’ve (reluctantly) have to get ready for a ballet performance of the Nutcracker that we’ll be attending tonight…should be interesting…

Emptying the Living Room & A New Sub-floor

This Saturday we got accomplished quite a lot it one day!

Benjamin and Noah stripped out the back bathroom before we left for Florida and Noah scraped off some of the paint.

 

As you can see the living room was a wreck and I thought it’d take us a few days to get everything moved out.

 

However, after a few hours we had all of the bookcases out and had moved them into Benjamin’s room.

The boxes were easily moved out and all of that was left were a few odds and ends.

 

 

After getting the living room and kitchen in order we worked on putting the new subfloor into the bathroom.

We brought in a few tiles from one of the pallets outside on the driveway so we could get an idea of what the flooring will look like:

 

The tile is going to be arranged in a brick pattern like the picture above.