Tag Archives: The NEW house

Kitchen!

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So much going on. More than just the new house. But I don’t have the time or energy to go into details. Issues selling this house. Work is good. Kids are good, but need lots of dental work. Open house at school last night. Life is busy! Grad courses have started again. Eve will be playing the flute this year. Projects going on. But, for the moment, we have a new kitchen! Or at lease the start of one. :)

A boy and his dog on a stormy afternoon.

The kitchen!

I’m so excited for an island! Lots of bins for recycling too!

Kids.

Arlo does not love our visits to the new house. We let him off lease to explore yesterday and he seemed to enjoy the view. :) I think he’ll like it more when it’s less echoy and more filled with stuff he recognizes. :)

More later. Someday. <3

House update

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Today was an exciting visit to the new house! Notice anything different?! :)

Walls!

We ran into a friend and his son, who is Eve’s friend, on the way over and they came along for the tour. I was surprised to see the green sheet rock, but he told me its a moisture resistant version. That makes sense.

Upstairs family room area

Same room, looking the other way, towards the stairs

 

Guess what’s in the garage?!

A solar panel power thingy! (very technical, I know!)

And a garage door! Whoo hoo!

We scheduled the closing date today. Mid-October. I can’t wait!!!

We also scheduled a tentative closing date for our current house. The inspection went well the other day and we are moving forward with the sale. It has been a little more turbulent of a process than the new house has, but I know we’ll get there and everything will work out well in the end. And, believe it or not, the end is near!

First day of school

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5th and 7th! Can you believe it!!

They both woke up happy and ready for school. We managed photos without anyone getting cranky, without any animals escaping, and without anyone being late for school! We’re finally getting good at this! LOL!

I had a good day at school. The superintendent even stopped by when I was teaching a 1st grade class and those kiddos were perfect! I was handing out stuffies for them to cuddle as reading buddies, were were naming the stuffies and discussing how much they like stories, and then he walked in. It was perfect! :) Earlier in the day I ran a fun scavenger hunt with the 5th graders. They loved it!

Macy scanning the QR code on my back. The word was “fire” and the kids laughed that there was fire on the librarian! :)

After school and popcorn for snack (it’s our thing) Eve went to play at Macy’s house for awhile, then they came back here and we all took a walk over to the new house. Guess what?! We have solar panels!!! And siding on the whole exterior. So exciting!! The developer told us (via email) that the landscaping crew was coming at the end of this week and the area will look very different soon. We are hoping they get that path carved out soon.

Then we got home and Eve crashed on the floor! She was literally asleep on the living room floor at 6:15pm! I tried to get dinner in her, but no luck, I tried to get her to shower and brush her teeth, but no luck (yuck!), and by 7:30 she was sound asleep in bed… with me by her side! I woke up an hour later, remembering I still had another kid to put to bed too. :) He didn’t mind the extra Minecraft time!

Here’s hoping we can pull it all off again tomorrow!

Last day of summer vacation

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Today is the last day of summer vacation before the kiddos (and me) start back to school tomorrow. I wanted to do something fun and celebration-ish, but sadly that is not our life these days. I did let the kids watch Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix this morning as a fun start to the day. Eve decided a few weeks ago that she wanted to start watching them and we’ve been jamming through them ever since!

Yep, tv, laundry, and my laptop hard at work on the last day of vacation.

We had the woman who is *hopefully* buying our house over today for an inspection. She brought her son and parents to check out the place as well. All was good, I think. Waiting to hear back from them now.

Then I dragged the kids to school for just one hour, I promised them! ‘Cause there’s nothing a kid wants to do more on the last day of vacation then go to school! They were good helpers and we got out of there fast. I’m feeling totally stressed out about how much there is to do this year! I really just wanted to make sure the library was clean, organized, and presentable before the kiddos all come back tomorrow. I really wanted to do a lot more than that, but I keep reminding myself that I rearranged a good part of it and did a full inventory this summer — so it’s not like I’ve been slacking!

The fish had babies again. Lots of them!! Just in time for back to school. Good fishies. :)

Afterwards we went to the sports store and dropped a lot of cash on new cleats, shin guards, mouth guard (and case!), eye wear, and field hockey stick for Miss Eve to start field hockey again. She played two years ago and liked it, but took last year off. Back at it today!

Don’t mess with this chick!

All geared up and ready to go. I think she said, “No, don’t take a picture of me, ” but it’s hard to tell with the mouth guard in! LOL!

My Mondays and Wednesdays for the next ten weeks will be field hockey/karate taxi runs. Luckily they have nice staggered times and don’t start and end at the exact same times. When I picked Eve up she said, “I forgot how much I like field hockey!!” When I picked Lex up he said, “My gi is getting too small. We need to buy a new one.” Good thing I’m going back to work!

We got dinner at Panera. That’s a fun celebration, right?! I even got them a cookie (to share). Alan joined us and we had a nice time together. On the way home we stopped at the new house. They have a roof on the porch (oh, and a porch!), the doors are now locked with a key, and we saw they even put up the first two pieces of sheet rock!!

Our porch is tiny, but cute. I like the green wrapper around the post. :)

Drywall! Sheet rock? Is there a difference? Anyway, there’s the laundry chute. It will open on both sides so you can put clothes in from both bathrooms. Sa-weet!

Lex noticed that you can watch the neighbor’s TV from our kitchen window! LOL! They were both watching together (it was the news and they said they could see Trump’s head), but when I tried to take a picture, Lex ran away.

We also met a couple who has just put a down payment on Lot F (the lot next to the magazine home being built). That was cool. They have a daughter who was in Lex’s class at DBS and is now at the middle school, though he was quick to tell us that she’s not on his team. I know for a fact that she is a very sweet girl though. Hopefully that bodes well for the parents as well. :)

Let’s see… what else is going on… Eve lost another molar today. Her second in less than a week. I’m hoping one of them is the molar with the cavity the dentist wanted to fill! Arlo has a hurt paw. Not sure why. He’s been chewing on it for a few days. I have to get him to the vet, eventually, but I’ll say, as much as I love our vet, I feel like I’ve seen more than enough of her lately!! Between the cat with allergies and the dog with whatever he’s had going on… I’m ready to stop spending money on these pets!! I’ll be good though and take him in soon.

Tomorrow is the first day of school. I have nothing to wear and only asked this kids at bedtime if they have anything to wear. Lex found an outfit. Eve swears she’ll come up with something. They both have full dirty laundry baskets. I think my days of “let’s look perfect for the first day of school,” may be behind me. I even remembered this evening that I packed up their “first day of school” photos, the ones we use each year for them to hold for the new year’s photos. I dug them out real quick!! I’ll keep that tradition alive… for a little longer. I was hoping to have a new front door for the photo this year, but alas, one more year with the old front door. :) I considered driving over to the new house for photos, but I already know I won’t be that ambitious tomorrow morning!

First day of school photos — all packed up! Oops!

Now I’m off to do more prep work for tomorrow. I don’t even have lessons plans fleshed out for my classes tomorrow. Eeek!! I will though, I promise!! Lex and I had a long chat about having a positive attitude. We’re both going to keep that in mind as the new school year starts. :)

Emotional Ups and Downs

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We signed a contract on our house today. The one we’re selling. It should be an awesome, exciting thing, but instead we are both frustrated and cranky. We like the buyer, don’t like the agent, don’t love the deal, but agree that it’s good. The buyer came to us first, we showed her the house, she made an offer, then brought in an agent. We have been going back and forth for a few weeks now. They want more, we want more, blah, blah, blah. We were *this close* to the deal, when I got a call yesterday morning from an agent asking if she could show our house to her buyers. I said sure. This morning we get a final updated contract from the buyer and a 7pm deadline for signing. I called the other agent to let her know and she said her buyers are very eager and would still like the house. Ok. Spent the afternoon cleaning the place spotless (ha!), which is good to do sometimes anyway, and they came to see the house. I loved the couple! They reminded me so much of me and Alan when we bought this house. They have a 1yr old and are pregnant with another one. Loved the neighborhood, etc. Sadly there wasn’t much time to think. We had a really nice meeting, then Alan and I had an hour to imagine we would get a counter offer – one that was more money and less frustration. It was a nice imaginary hour. Then the agent texted me and said the couple loved the house, but not the wide-open backyard. Bummer. Not much we can do about that. So we signed the contract with the other buyer. Alan was frustrated with the buyer’s agent’s attitude and the sudden deadline. It’s not the warm, happy feeling we were hoping for. It’s a business transaction, I keep reminding myself, and not personal. It will be ok. I have faith. But boy, I am mentally exhausted now! Before all this we spent the morning at school helping to run the kindergarten open house, then back home (late) to meet a town official who can close out a building permit for our basement.

I keep reminding myself, busy summer, busy summer, busy summer. It will all turn out ok in the end. It will.

I joined the C25K running program again and my body seems to have forgotten how to run in the few weeks I was on vacation. Yesterday I was feeling TOTALLY stressed out and my neighbor, who is also doing the program, texted to offer me a ride. I said I was so stressed and busy and wasn’t going to make it. She said ok, but then nicely/gently suggested that maybe fresh air and running would be helpful. Dang peer pressure! I went and, of course, it was good. The fresh air, running, and social interaction!

On Monday we went to the lake with some friends, who invited other friends, and I invited other friends, and it ended up being a very big group. You’d think that would be good, but really it was just a lot of trying to make decisions and brief interactions with lots of people. Not quite the long chat on the beach with a bestie that I was hoping for. After an hour there Eve settled in for a snooze on the blanket. What? That’s not like her. I gave her a nice sunscreen massage and she was burning up. Eek! We stayed for a little longer, then headed home to find a thermometer. She had a temp of 103.7°!! I gave her Tylenol and dragged her to the dentist (mean mommy!) where we discovered that she has a cavity and Lex needs two teeth pulled. Ugh. Then home again. She had a temp all night and all the next day, but it was slowly coming down. She was complaining of achy body and a lump in her throat. Last night I started Googling Lyme disease. Ugh. This morning she woke up and the fever was gone and the pain was gone. All better? I hope!

Here are a few pictures of other stuff going on.

A sick Eve and a very sweet friend cuddling her.

A sneak peek at my back to school bulletin board.

I started a new Instagram for school. @dbslibrary Feel free to follow if you just can’t get enough of me. :)

A view out my new kitchen window.

An excellent book! I’d highly recommend it if you’re into YA. :) Also, it’s number 26 on my list of 30. So close!

Tomorrow we only have two commitments, both of them at home (boiler inspection and piano pickup). We are all (except Alan who has to go to work — sorry Alan — thank you Alan!) looking forward to a calmer day. I might bake cookies and visit our neighbor’s brand new baby.

House update

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Things are moving along fast with the house! We’ve got a garage framed, upstairs rooms framed, HVAC stuff in place, bathtubs in place, and the roof on. I got an email this morning from the builder saying the windows and doors have arrived and the cabinets and flooring are ordered. Eek! Coming along so quickly now!

We are still adding pictures almost daily to the Picasa Album.

We went over the other day with chalk and marked out beds, dressers, couches, and the kitchen table. I think it will all fit!!

Hello boys!

Eve, measuring out her bed.

Lex trying out the bed space.

The family room, looking into the upstairs bathroom.

Standing at the to of the stairs, looking in to Eve’s room, with Lex’s room in the background.

Ohh.. I hope we get to keep this little table. :)

On another day, while I spoke with the builders, Eve took some pictures and a video.

On the homefront (old homefront?) things are moving along as well. We are working on a contract to sell this house. It has been a frustrating process and we’re getting less $ than we had hoped for, but Alan and I keep running the numbers and still believe it’s the best option. Things will work out for the best. I’m sure of it. It’s going to be busy for the next few months!!

Handprints

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We stopped by the new house today and found fresh concrete!

There’s our porch and garage.

So we stuck our hands in it! :)

We look so organized, don’t we?! (Ha!)

I love it!

Left to right and apparently best to worst in the handprint department: Alan, Eve, Lex, Tessa

Truth be told, it wasn’t like that at all. They have been talking about pouring concrete for weeks now and we have been “on deck” to do this project. It kept getting delayed due to rain. Last week they said they were pouring so I stopped by in the morning to find out what time would be good for handprints and the concrete guys said they were just pouring the foundation that would be under the house. No use putting handprints in that! So we went back to waiting. Friday they told us they’d pour Monday (today), but we woke up today and saw “Severe thunderstorm alerts” in the forecast and figured it would be delayed again. I stopped by around 9am as Lex and I were heading to a volunteer event, and found fresh concrete!! I called Alan, who had just got to work after dropping Eve off at camp. He called the builder to make sure we weren’t too late and we all scrambled. We got there in time and I’m so glad we did. The concrete guys were great and even took pictures for us. One guy worked hard to make sure the heart stone was placed well and smoothed out all around.

We stopped by later with cold lemonade and warm cookies as a thank you, but found the concrete guys gone and the framing guys starting to lay out the rooms!! That was exciting! They appreciated the cookies and lemonade too. :)

Eve in the pantry.

It all looks so small. I’m so nervous!  Alan and I decided to go over with a tape measure and double check it against the floorplans, but then those severe thunderstorms did come (not so severe, really) and that plan got delayed.  Maybe tomorrow evening.