Tag Archives: The NEW house

Backyard upgrade

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Ever since we built the house we’ve been talking about making in a fenced in backyard for the doggo. This summer Eve worked out the plan, mostly, and talked me in to taking action! Last weekend we bought creeping thyme ground cover and ordered some easy-install wire fencing. The plan was to buy fencing local and do the work last weekend, but we couldn’t find any so we had to order online and wait. So far only one box has arrived, so we put that up and planted ten thyme plants, along with some morning glories that Eve started indoors last month.

The goal is to have a 6′ x 30′-ish fenced in area with low-grow ground covering that’s native and doesn’t need to be mowed. I hope it works out!!

Once the other fencing arrives we’ll put that up. I think we are going to do the ground covering in stages and not tear up the whole back yard right away. In theory the creeping thyme will overpower the grass and spread. We’ll see how that goes!

Neighborhood “socially distanced” block party

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A few neighbors thought it would be fun to have a BYOE block party, so we did!  :) Everyone brought their own chairs and food, we hung out and chatted, being careful to maintain safe distances, and then we had a live performance! One neighbor is a jazz singer and another is a composer/musician, so they put on a show.  I think they have been Zoom practicing together. :)  Our preschool neighbor provided the entertainment by dancing around the whole time.  It was a lovely evening!

Eve brought the cat outside, on an yarn leash. The cat was not amused.

Neighbors putting on a jazz show. They said they were doing a driveway rehearsal. :)

Neighbors

More neighbors

On an unrelated note, the pine tree in our yard is bursting with baby pine cones!  They are adorable. :)

Look at them all! :)

With “portrait mode” anyone with a cellphone can be a professional photographer!

 

One year!

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Hard to believe, but it’s been one whole year since we bought our house!  Yay!  We celebrated by having a dinner party with our neighbors.  It was fun to get to know them a little better.  I still love our house and every day I’m thankful for this amazing place.  Here’s to many, many more years in this great house!

The weather all day was really weird, but at one point we got a big sun shower that make a triple rainbow!

Pictures never do rainbows justice. The bottom rainbow was a double, then there was another on top. All arching beautifully over the dumpster!

Laundry room updates

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Alan has been working hard to make this house a home.  His project this week was the laundry room.  I drew a little sketch a few weeks ago to share my ideas, and he went to work with it.  He stacked the washer and dryer, bought a 3-bin laundry cart, and built a frame to make use of the extra cabinet bin drawer we had.  I love it!  It’s hard to take a nice photo of a laundry room!  It’s awesome, but maybe not Pinterest-worthy, yet!

Laundry room updates.  Stacked washer/dryer, garbage and recycling in pull-out cabinet bin drawer, laundry baskets on top, dirty laundry bin for sorting, fold down iron board on top (which will never be used!), and room to hang clothes on top.  Everything I wanted in a laundry room.  <3

The bins will have to be in the middle of the room for awhile so they can catch laundry from the ceiling chute.  That will be a project for another week.

He has earned himself a weekend vacation to Florida.  :)

Halloween and other updates

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Happy Halloween! We have been pretty neglectful of this holiday (admittedly not my favorite) this year. Lex had some grand plans for cardboard costumes, all Minecraft related, which would have been awesome but none of us had the time or motivation to make it happen. Eve wanted to be Mad-Eye Moody (from Harry Potter), but we ran out of time for that as well. We ended up at the costume store Sunday where she decided on some Gryffindor robes and orange hair spray to be Ginny Weasley. Lex was not motivated to come with us to the costume store, and he was easily swayed when Alan suggested staying home and playing Minecraft together instead of trick-or-treating. Eve offered to share her candy. All was decided. Ordinarily such a milestone would make me sad, but since I don’t like Halloween anyway, I’m just fine with this decision.

I have no idea how many trick-or-treaters to expect this year. At the old house we got 150-200 most years, but I think it will be far less at this house. I bought a few small bags of candy, and by “small” I mean regular size, not the gigantic Halloween bags they sell this time of year. Eve decided to package them into goody bags, sooo…. I hope we don’t get more than 20 kids coming to the door. LOL!

My little witch making Halloween goody bags.

What else? We are settling in to the new house. Hanging blinds, rearranging things, unpacking boxes, setting up drums, building bunk beds, making messes, and generally living here. We closed on the old house on Thursday and it went off with only a minor water bill hitch. I was able to remedy that quickly and all is well. It’s nice to be able to pay off some of the debt we acquired while building this place!

Three beds?!? The world’s best fort? A room to drive mom crazy? We’ll see. :)

I am running a book fair at school this week. It’s exciting and exhausting and the kids LOVE it! The book fair made over $1200 the first day! I don’t know if that’s a lot or not, but it seemed pretty impressive to me! We’ll see how the rest of the week goes. It was fun to see kids so excited to buy books.

This whole summer/fall has been a mountain of things piling up (the house, the new house, the book fair, two grad courses, the 5K I was training for, Lego League, field hockey… other stuff….) and now things are starting to close/end/ramp down. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. We moved into the new house and sold the old house. I quit the 5K training and was never so happy as on the day the race was to take place and I didn’t have to be there! Field hockey ended last week. Book fair will end after this week. My grad course end in mid-November and Lego League ends in mid-December. I’m not longer pushing the boulder up the mountain, it’s now just a gentle ride back down!

Ok, off to school now. I’ve got a book fair to run! And also library classes, a K literacy group, and a reading group! Oh, and did I mention, it’s Halloween!! LOL!

All moved in… kind of.

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We spent the weekend moving in to the new house. Remember how nice it looked when we bought it? Easy come, easy go. It is now full and cluttered and unorganized and three whole days lived in! LOL! It’s coming along though. We had AWESOME friends and family VOLUNTEER to help us move on Saturday. Crazy, but amazing. Aunt Katie showed up at 9am with donuts, Alan’s coworker came by with plenty of muscle, and my friend Elizabeth and her son showed up shortly afterwards with infinite patience and coordination skills. Alistair kept Eve busy (not terribly helpful, but at least out of the way), Parrish came over and helped Lex pack up, and by mid-afternoon we were practically done! We spent Saturday night in the new house. :) We bailed on all other obligations this weekend and focused on moving and settling. This week we have been stopping by each day to pick up the mail and newspaper and random small items left behind.

I tried to add a bunch of photos but it’s not working and it’s late and I’m tired, so here’s the link to the shared album again instead. All the photos are there.

Did you catch the “kind of” in the title? We actually have a whole garage and basement still full over at 64PP. We have been joking about “forgetting” that stuff, or leaving it as a present for the new owner, but of course we are nice people and would never do that. This weekend when my parents are up with their truck we will get the rest done. So the goal this week is to get unpacked and organized enough to make room for practically a whole other house worth of stuff! Ugh! Lex has been itching for his drum set and Eve really wants that bunk bed and I’m pretty sure any company we have would prefer a bed in the guest room instead of the hard floor. :) So, one more weekend of moving and then we will be completely moved in! Whee!!

New House!!

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We closed on the new house today!!  Whooo hoo!!

The kids came to the closing and right afterwards we went to the new house and did a happy dance! :)

We were a little bit excited. :)

Then we started moving in our boxes and boxes of stuff.  The fancy new house will be “lived in” in no time!  Tomorrow is the official moving day.  We’ve had several friends offer to help us move (crazy friends!) so hopefully we can get it all done this weekend.  Wheee… What a crazy summer it has been!

My life, in bullet points

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  • We are closing on our new house next Friday (Friday the 13th, to be precise!)

We have a lot of mirrors in the master bath vanity!

  • Everything is coming along swimmingly!

We were here for awhile, making faces in the mirrors.  :)

  • We hope to get all the moving done in one weekend. Alan says one day, but I can’t even imagine that. :)

I”m sure she’ll be super helpful!

  • Lego League is going a bit better.  We have divided up into three teams, so the chaos is more manageable.  I have a bad habit of finding myself in charge of things, so I’m pretty much in charge of the Upper Valley First Lego League team.
  • School is good.  No, school is great!  I don’t always love going (so much to do at home!), but I always love being there.
  • I’m in the middle of two grad courses.  One boring and the other super boring!  I posted a minor vent on a closed Facebook group for librarians about my cataloging course and got over 100 replies, most all of them completely emphasize, but a handful who admit to absolutely loving cataloging. It takes all sorts, I suppose.  Glad someone likes doing that stuff and I’m double glad I won’t have to do much of it after completing the program!  :)
  • The kids have both had growth spurts and now have a whole lot of ankle showing.  ‘Tis the season, I suppose.  Probably should do some cold weather shopping soon, before the cold weather really hits!
  • I started a Battle of the Books program at school.  It’s for 4th and 5th graders and will take us through the end of February.  The kids were luke warm at first and I was getting nervous, but last week they got to pick their books and we officially kicked off the project and they were SO EXCITED!  I loved it!  It made me feel 100% more confident about the idea and I know it’s going to be fun!

The brackets are up!

  • I finished making the growth chart I’ve been thinking about for 10 years.  It came out really great.  I’m happy with it and now we can officially move.

Growth chart ruler

  • I am running my first book fair at school in three weeks.  I feel wholly unprepared for it!  The kids at school are very excited and definitely missed it last year.
  • PTO is organizing a Color-A-Thon again this year.  It’s supposed to be bigger and better than last year.  I’m the VP of the PTO and should be helping with this effort.  I’m not.  I do plan to show up for the event.  I hope that’s sufficient for this year.
  • We got flu shots last weekend.  Did you see the photo?  Lex was worried, of course, but didn’t protest too much.  He held my hands and cried a little, but he got himself there, talked himself through the whole thing, and didn’t end up no the floor even once.  Eve smiled for a photo at the end!  I think my babies are growing up!!

Alan says, “Flu shots for a happy family and healthy community.”

  • Eve is playing field hockey this fall and loving it!  She has practices three times a week and one or two games each week (sometimes a game replaces a practice).
  • Lex is belt testing next week for his purple belt.  He’s had the green one so long that the threads are coming out!  He said it’s time to retire the green belt.  We missed a few tests over the summer, so he hasn’t tested in many months.
  • Monday is in-service for me and no school for the kids.  I decided to sign them up for a rec sponsored trip to Jay Peak, a super cool (or so I’ve heard) indoor water park that’s two hours away!  We have talked about going for years, but never made it.  The kids are thrilled that I’m letting them go.  I’m nervous about the distance, but I had a nice email exchange with the parks department director and the details he provided greatly reassured me.  I still don’t love them being that far away without me (am I weird?) but I know they’ll have a great time and ya know, Alan and I have to work, so it’s a pretty good deal.
  • Alan is super busy at work, with town stuff, and, of course, taking care of all the important yet boring parts of this house process, like researching lights and keeping the finances moving forward.  He has been the detail man on this project and has done a wonderful job keeping it all on track.  I just show up with cookies and a camera when the mood strikes!

Our first dinner party

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We hosted our first dinner party at the new house tonight. It was perfect. :) I picked up pizza, brought seltzer, grapes, and apple cinnamon crescent rolls for dessert. We had our HVAC guy (who loves our house as much as we do) and our new neighbor (who loves her solar, net-zero house as much as we love ours) and the four of us and the dog. We had a few folding chairs. Birthday napkins I grabbed at the last minute. Running water!! Whoohoo!! :) It was a great time. I’m looking forward to many more, maybe with furniture next time. :)