I stopped taking pictures a while ago because I thought I'd completely lost the cable that hooked the camera to the computer, allowing me to release the photos from the bowels of my camera into the wild. Why just create a worse blockage by making more photos?
Well, in an effort to de-frustrate myself I put up a shelf in the office and put some stuff on it, and underneath that stuff the camera case (containing said cable) emerged!
I haven't blogged much lately, partly because I've been very busy, but partly because of my frustration of not wanting to have to type the thousand words that the pictures would show, wanting to just show them instead!
SO!
Here is our house right before the craziness started:
Yes, there is a house behind those trees!
Right after we moved in we hired three different groups of people to
1) take down some of those trees - most of which were diseased and sick
2) repair the exterior rain flashing stuff and repair the handrails on the porches
3) paint the exterior
There was one wild Friday when all three groups were here at once. The day they took down the trees there were easily eight trucks parked on the street in front of our house in addition to the huge dump truck in the driveway, and a flurry of activity. First the tree to the left of the front door came down:
And then the trees to the right:
The temperature in the rooms behind the trees immediately shot up the minute the trees came down. Good thing I hadn't taken down those nasty vertical blinds yet, but their days are numbered. You can see on that right hand roof line how they started to paint the trim before the trees came down. The guy in the green shirt is the carpenter, who found he couldn't just replace a couple of risers on the front steps because the whole thing was all corroded and falling apart... He had to replace everything from that front porch down, the whole step system.
The painting really helped perk the house up, and I really like the contrasting brown on the porches. This is what it looks like today:
Vast improvement, eh?! Why yes, thank you, it is!
Next year we'll plant a few new trees, kind of at the lower edge of the grass line, which will give us some pretty landscaping, a little more privacy from the street. I'm just happy there are no longer trees that look like they're trying to break into the house.
Interior construction has been going on too...
Most impressive is the new cubby wall, right as you walk in from the garage. There were a couple things wrong with this house when we bought it, one of which was I really wanted a mud room. There is a wide hallway there, and now it is sort of a mud-hall. I now have a BEEEYOOOTEEEFUL wall of cubbies for family members and guests to hang coats, drop backpacks, and store shoes. I am so tickled with how it turned out - except for one thing. It's totally beautiful wood, I had to put some shelf liner on the lower cubbies so people's wet shoes wouldn't damage the wood. DON'T HURT THE PRETTY WOOD!!
The completely unfinished basement has been framed in. My storage area is currently storing stuff! I did not have to drag Christmas, box by box, backward, out of the eves this year! Do you have any idea how liberating that was?
More to follow... Someday...
I have very little to complain about... but I can usually find something. Mostly the same old things recycled. I'm good at recycling.
I posted a while ago that Thing 1 was having trouble adjusting... It's still got me upset. I volunteered at the school's book fair, one of the very nice mothers who was also volunteering asked how the kids were adjusting and to my horror and embarrassment I started to cry. Great. In addition to whatever personal issues she's having, her mother is a blubbering idiot. Great.
We've found a few more friends for both girls, but consistently find more likely seeming ones for Thing 2. She found a friend on the school playground who isn't even in her class, but they have so much in common, and she seems like a really lovely little girl.Thing 1 still struggles. She finds friends but she's much slower about it and they're not as good a fit. Everything is painful. Her school work has shown improvement, nearly up to the levels I would expect, but she is very reluctant to go and lets her dread of the upcoming school week color her her weekend.
She also hates church so desperately, she asked if I could "home-church" her, and started calling it "the C word."
Sigh.
Still struggling.
The new house needed a facelift. When I would show pictures of the house around I noticed I kept adding "We didn't buy it for its curb appeal." It would seem I'm embarrassed by how the house looks.
Fortunately that can be fixed. So we started fixing. A good coat of paint will work wonders, and will protect the exterior siding, which is in really bad shape anyway. Also there were some trees that were dead or dying, and some that were so close to the house it looked like a dog in heat surrounded by its would be admirers.
It took over a week to paint, a couple days to redo the exterior wood because of course when the carpenter started trying to put new steps on, he found the boards he needed to attach them to were falling apart, so he had to build whole new front steps. The trees came down in one day, the same very busy day that the painters and carpenters were here as well. Our house looked like a movie lot with nearly a dozen trucks parked out front, a huge dump truck in the driveway, and people moving all around.
The tree guys delayed a day because Thing 1 had asked so nicely to be able to see the tree outside her window coming down. We filmed it.
The pictures are trapped on my other computer. Long story. But the renovations have begun.
I keep meaning to download the photos on the camera, so I can have a record of the "before" and "after" house. There are some great pictures of before we hired a team of testosterone laden men to come cut down and haul away a dump truck load of trees, and the house that was hiding behind those trees. Then there is the before and after the new paint pictures.
The camera I'm using isn't mine (mine needs to go to the camera doctor) and my husband had a nice one sitting around that he wasn't using so he gave it to me. But I just found that none of the seven or eight camera cables I can find work on this camera.
Will the pictures I took be trapped forever in the confines of the camera? Will I be required to buy a whole new cable for this camera, because EVERY OTHER NORMAL USB CABLE DOESN"T WORK? Perhaps. But not tonight.
There are simply not enough hours in the day.
Hubby and I have been discussing what are the "top 10 things to do" around the house. He thinks if it's not in the top 10, why am I doing it? I think if it's going to take me 10 minutes or so, and it's bugging me, I'm going to do it no matter how far down the list it is.
He is right, the boxes that persist in the front room, bedrooms, and hallways are totally annoying. It looks like we moved in last weekend. Cleaning them out or moving them to the basement is in the top 10, I agree. All the pictures that we somehow managed to find wall space for in the old, small house, are now leaning against each other in piles around the floor. We have a lot more windows in this house, less wall space, and therefore hanging pictures has become a challenge. So there they sit.
But the rug that I put under the living room furniture but immediately decided I didn't like there but left for a while, that's probably in the low 40s, but it bugged me so I took 10 minutes or less to move the furniture off it, roll it up and move it downstairs.
Blogging? Certainly not in the top 10. But here I am.
I am racked with fear and guilt that I have ruined my daughter's life.
This was going to be a great school year. She was at a school she loved, with friends who loved her. Her favorite teacher of all times was just down the hall, available for quick hugs and advice. She won the back-of-the-school-tee-shirt-art contest, her art would be worn occasionally by other members of the student body on their school shirts.
This was a situation that had taken many years to grow. It started that our next door neighbor and for many years Thing 1's best friend was one of the inherently "cool kids" in school. He's a cute and nice and athletic little boy, who for some reason or another was just born cool. He has always been very kind to Thing 1 and 2, and though their friendship has had a few ups and downs, for the most part they've been very good friends since they could both walk. He was over at our house or the girls were over at his house most of the time. Just associating with him has given Thing 1 a certain vicarious coolness.
She has developed a bunch of other friends over the years, and was for the most part very comfortable and happy in her relationships. I had found an after school art program where she was able to further vent her artistic side, when she found the regular programs in the school insufficient for her needs. However her 4th grade teacher was going to be the teacher in the school who is most actively involved in the school arts program. Everything was perfect, except our house was too small.
Then we picked her up by the short hairs and moved her 30 minutes East. Not far in the grand scheme of things, but way too far for me to drive her to her old school.
While Thing 1 gained her own room (with its own PATIO) and a huge back yard, she lost everything else.
Since we moved she has been experiencing various stages of continuing misery, from substantial discomfort to abject sorrow. Sometimes it's minor but it seems to be lurking beneath the surface at all times. Things that didn't bother her before have now become daunting and scary. Shyness that I had previously never seen has suddenly erupted all over the place. In all directions. When I suggested SHE has to approach people and ask to play with THEM, she was horrified. I think all her life other people have sought out her company. She's never had to initiate social contacts. When I told her that it's flattering for other kids to be told their game looks interesting and that you'd like to join, she insisted if someone told her that she'd be embarrassed.
"You'd be embarrassed if someone wanted to join YOUR game?" Yes. Sob.
I don't know how to handle this.
I keep reviewing our decision to move here... We knew from the first minute we were househunting that the girls wanted to stay in the same neighborhood, but we also knew that what we wanted didn't exist in that neighborhood, and if it did we couldn't afford it. There were other reasons we had for moving up here, many of them most important to Hubby but valid for the rest of us. I find myself doing quick real estate searches to find if anything was/is available in our old zip code. But would we move back? Not hardly...
Though there are things that keep surfacing about this area that we like, and about the house that we like, I am caught up in fretting over Thing 1. When my baby's sad, it makes me sad too.
She did have a lovely birthday, which I need to write about. But the pictures of that are trapped in the camera because I can't find the cord that connects it to the computer (it's in a box somewhere), and today this is on my mind. I need her to find a friend... a good friend... and fast.
I am not an ironer. My husband could pass for retired military, with the stiff creased lines down the front of his immaculately pressed pants and the arms of his starched shirts. I sport a more casual, wrinkled, perhaps I might have slept in my clothes sort of style.
In our old house laundry would often be left in the dryer for a few days, or be stacked clean and waiting to be folded into huge piles. There was nowhere to fold it except when I'd resolve to break down and cover the couch and all other elevated area in front of the TV with the clean laundry. The floor is out, because unless I vacuum very carefully before I iron, all clothes would be covered with Kelso hair. At any given time, even after I vacuum, there is a certain amount of Kelso hair around my house. This, by the way, is Kelso on the path that runs behind our new house. The path is fabulous for walking the dog, though I'm surprised at how many burrs his coat picks up even if he doesn't leave the path. But I digress.
I have made extra effort in our new house to get the laundry out of the new dryer before the permanent wrinkle folds embed themselves in the clothes. Oh, stop for a picture! The new washer and dryer are so be-you-tee-ful!!
Soooo pretty!
The guy at Home Depot was teasing me when I asked which models came in the more expensive red. He told me just the one, but who really cares about that? "What are you going to do, take people on a tour of your Laundry Room?" He did an abrupt tour demonstration between the appliances, backing up and motioning me to follow saying "We're walking.... we're walking..."
Actually we do take everyone on a tour of the new appliances because the appliances live in a bump out closet off the main hall from the back door. They would be hiding behind some bifold door except that one of the first things I did when we moved in was remove the bifold door to that closet. The spring on the bottom of the door was broken and it has been dragging across the wood floor and scratched it all up. Also when the laundry closet bifold door is open, you couldn't open the door to the garage. Easiest solution: remove the bifold door. So yes, every time someone is taking the tour out to Hubby's Fabulous New Office above the garage, they're going to see the Beautiful New Cherry Red Washer and Dryer right off the hallway in their own little nook. And yes, I really am enjoying the washer and dryer, I think, in part, due to their fabulous color. And the fact that they are right there, flat and convenient for folding clothes. No TV to watch, but no Kelso hair floating around either.
When my brother and his wife were up for the first time last week my folks also came up for the afternoon. My mother is of course the devil's advocate in all things, ready to argue every side of every situation. She saw the house before we bought it, and it worried Hubby sick at the time that she was going to try and talk me out of it because no, it is not perfect. But she gave her stamp of approval and now we've relocated. What was amusing was that on this particular day she was the one giving the tour. I think she has been vicariously enjoying having a new house through ours. It's always fun to get new stuff, and of course a new house sort of tops the list for most people. I sort of ended up hanging back and watching while she showed my brother and his wife around, and gushed about the good features of the house, how it fit our needs so well, and explained our visions for the improvements. It was pretty neat to watch her get excited about it.
I think we're going to like it here just fine.
