Category: Household

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Activities Cole Family & Friends Holidays Household Mothering Parenting Ryan

Another Thrilling Update

I wish I had a brilliant or at least somewhat exciting update for you, but I don’t. 

We’ve been working on the house, and trying to get everything else done in daily life that must get done, like work, errands, parent, spend time with the boys, etc.  I still haven’t started packing yet, but that is soon to change.  Joe started bringing home boxes the other day, so now that fun chore is on my plate.

I really don’t mind, but there is always way more stuff you realize you have.  I am hoping we can donate or just get rid of the stuff we haven’t used in years, and be done with it.  Like the extra microwave that has been sitting the pantry now, for eight years.  If our microwave ever broke, we had a spare.  Except it hasn’t and we have had a microwave sitting in the pantry for eight years.

I usually blog at night- but I have been so tired physically and mentally, I think I have blogger’s block.  If you don’t see very many posts here in the upcoming weeks, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth.  But with moving, fixing up the house, and the upcoming holiday season, I’m not sure how much time or motivation I will have to blog.  Please continue to check in- I know I’ll get my blogging mojo back eventually.  🙂  You can find me on Twitter, and I seem to be able to post 140 character items, much easier and regularly than actual blog posts these days.

I pinkie swear I will post pictures of the new house and the progress we have made.  Joe finished painting the boys’ rooms today, and he’s going to start on our bedroom tomorrow.  I placed the carpet order last week, and that should be installed right after Thanksgiving.  We are ordering our engineered hardwood flooring tomorrow.  We have decided on a honey hickory color which is a golden brown- not too dark or light.  We should have it around Thanksgiving.  It has to cure at room temperature for a week, so Joe should be able to install the floor, the beginning of December.

The brand we are getting has a locking system, so there is no need to glue or nail the pieces together.  Joe is optimistic he can install it in a few days, rather than a few weeks.  So it appears we are on schedule to move into the house by the end of December.  Not sure where we will end up having Christmas- in the old house, or the new one, but Ryan is already wondering about the tree this year, and how Santa will find us.  🙂  Cole has just been talking up a storm and telling us he wants Santa to bring him a dump truck.

I’m also trying to plan Ryan’s fifth birthday party, which always sneaks up on me, since it is just two weeks after Christmas.  I booked the venue this year in JULY- so that is set.  Now I just have to get save the dates out to people, and hope I’m not over the number of guests we are allowed to have.  Guess I had better double check on that.  Ryan of course, is just thrilled to be turning five.  I’m wondering where the time went, and how did my ‘baby’ become a little boy, who is just weeks away from being five years-old?

My mom is coming out for a visit the week of Christmas and will be able to spend an entire evening, and the next day with us.  I’m excited for that, and to be able to show her our new house.  Ryan and Cole are excited to bake cookies for Santa with Nana. 

So that is all we have been up to.  Stay tuned for another exciting update in the near future.  🙂

Categories
Activities Cole Household Mothering Ryan

Home Improvements

Joe was out of town this week- he came home a day early, so that was nice, but it has been an exhausting week. 

Since we would like to move into our new house, before next spring, I had grand plans this week to remove all of the ugly wallpaper border, and clean the walls, in the three bedrooms in our new house, so they would be ready for Joe to paint this weekend.  

We have decided to hire a professional painter to paint our living room, entry way, and dining room.  The living room has what I think is a 16-foot ceiling, but no, we haven’t measured.  There are some interesting angles in the room as well. 

Furthermore, the previous owners were hunters (no they were not related to Sarah Palin- a little shot of humor- I need it these days, 🙂 ) and on these tall walls, they had a lot of their catches stuffed, (I believe taxidermy is the correct phrase for this), and mounted on the walls.  Evidently, it takes a lot of nails to hold up stuffed wild game.   I can’t count how many thick nails are in the walls, at various heights, and how many nail holes are in the walls. Did I mention, there is animal hair stuck the one of the walls, oh, about ten-feet up?

Joe is a great painter.  He is meticulous, but you have to have time to be that precise.  Even if he had the time, the nails, holes, and heights of the walls would take sometime to paint.   We found our painter, savior, who will remove all the nails, patch the holes, clean the walls (animal hair included for no extra charge), and then apply two coats of paint.  He has a crew, so it should just be a three or four day project. 

We have to get this area done because we are having hardwood floors installed by none other than Joe.  (We really are lucky he knows how to do all of these projects!)  But we don’t want to install the floor until the walls are painted.  In the master bedroom, and the boys’ rooms, we are having carpet installed, and again, we don’t want to paint with brand new carpet down.

So I thought I’d spend all day Tuesday removing wallpaper border. The border was glued, super-glued, three quarters of the way up on all the walls.  I had forgotten how much I HATE wallpaper.  After five hours, I only had three walls done in the master bedroom.  I didn’t have the right tools either, and I had the duct cleaner there as well..

Ryan had an injury from earlier in the morning, (trust me- you don’t want to know-let’s just say it was in the worst place ever for a little boy, and the teeth of his two year old brother were involved), so he was cranky (but who could blame him?)  and trying to work on a ladder removing wallpaper that is ten years old, with a cranky four-year old, and a curious two-year old who keeps trying to climb up the ladder-is not the formula to get much accomplished.  

After five and a half hours, we headed home.  I had to go to work for half-day on Wednesday, and after I picked up Ryan from school, we went back to the house, and I was able to finish the last wall in our bedroom.  I inspected the wallpaper in the other two rooms, and it was stuck on more firmly than the stuff I had just gotten off. 

After work today, and the nice surprise that Joe was home early, we went to Home Depot, to get a wallpaper scorer and some paint.  Fortunately, Joe has tomorrow off so he can get started in the master bedroom, and after the boys’ music class, I’ll start me vs. the wallpaper-Round 2.

It is a lot of work, and a bit stressful, but it will be worth it.  I can picture the rooms in the colors we picked out- the soft yellows against the wood floors and I get really excited.  The work makes me tired, but I still enjoy it.  

As the boys and I were sitting on a blanket on the floor in the living room, which is just sub-flooring right now, having a picnic on Tuesday, I knew someday when the room had been done for years, and has seen more of its fair share of living, I would always remember sitting there eating PB&J sandwiches with Ryan and Cole. We ate with badly-in need of paint-holes-in-the-walls, with animal hair stuck on them.  Not the most glamorous lunch, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

I do plan to post pictures, but I want to post before and after pictures at the same time.  In the meantime, I’ll leave you the paint colors of the rooms a paint consultant helped us pick out, since we are so awful at picking colors:

Colors for the entry way, living room, and dining room:

Yellow Freeze  &    Man on the Moon

Colors for the master bedroom:

 Baja Dunes &       Jade Tint

Boys’ Room: (they both wanted blue)

      Marguerite Blue

(color swatches from myperfectcolor.com)

Categories
house hunting Household

Home Inspection

On Sunday, we had the home inspection for the house we are buying.  

If you are ever in doubt if it is worth the money on a home inspection, I would highly recommend it.  If everything checks out okay, you have just bought peace of mind and reassurance that probably, what is one of your biggest investments ever, is sound.  

I think a lot of home buyers can relate to the movie, The Money Pit, with Tom Hanks and Shelly Long, where they buy a house for a good deal, and as soon as they move in, everything and everything starts breaking, leaving them bankrupt.  If nothing else, you will know that you are not buying a money pit.

A few years ago after an inspection on a house we were buying, we realized that the pipes under the house were not up to code with the city- they were clay pipes and due to some city regulations, as soon as the house was sold, the new owners of the house (meaning us) would have to replace them.  The rough estimate- $50,000!  Needless to say, the money for the inspection, paid for itself! 

It was disappointing to realize we weren’t going to be able to buy the house, but in the long run we knew we did not want to undertake such an expensive problem!  Even though we spent a few hundred dollars for the inspection, we were made aware of the potential of having to spend $50,000!

So it was with cautious optimism, Joe and I felt on Sunday, as we had the inspection.  We felt we knew what the issues were in the house, but having had that $50,000 issue come up, before- you just never know for sure.

Thankfully, Ryan and Cole’s grandparents were able to watch them for us, so we could focus on the inspection with the inspector.  He was really thorough, and took three hours, to check every last detail of the house for us- from the top of the roof, to the last corner in the basement, and everything in between!

He mentioned the few minor issues we knew of, and caught a few more minor things that would need to be taken care of, but overall he said the house was a very well constructed house, with no $50,000 “surprises.” 

A little added bonus was the owner was there, doing some chores.  He was very nice, and hospitable, and was able to fill us in on a few things, and even pointed out that the back yard has some very nice, and healthy fruit trees!

Needless to say, we were very happy and pleased.  Our next step is to close on the loan, and in the meantime, get an appraisal.  We are trying to contain our excitement until we sign on the dotted line, but looks like this is really happening, and we just cleared another hurdle.  We are getting closer!

P.S. In case you were wondering, the picture at the top of the post,  is not a picture of the house-it is just a stock photo. 🙂

Categories
Activities Household

Under Contract

If you remember a few months back in our house hunting,  we had found the one, but the sellers weren’t interested in selling it, so we were not able to get it under contract.

Since then, we have looked, looked, and looked some more at houses in the town we are currently living in, and also in nearby surrounding towns. We were coming up empty.  Either the houses were too small, needed major remodeling, or we just couldn’t find what we were looking for. 

I had an idea that house shopping would be like wedding dress shopping- you just know the minute you spot that perfect wedding dress.  I would see pictures of houses for sale on the Internet, and from the pictures they looked promising.  I knew the minute we drove up to a house, it would be the one. 

Uh, not really.  After two months, we were not finding what we wanted: a house that had- at least three bedrooms, a back yard on the bigger side, and room in the house to grow: translation- a basement, oh yeah, in our price range, in a neighborhood that we liked.

Evidently this is harder than I thought.  We found a house in August, that was almost the one.  It was in a nearby smaller town.  It was a few years old, but had only been lived in for a year.  It looked almost brand new.  We were really close to making an offer on it, but we hesitated.  It would have been fine for us now, but as the boys grew, it really didn’t have any more room to grow.  We both felt like we would outgrow it in five years, and it felt like we were settling for something we knew wasn’t right, but hoping it was.  

So we passed on it.  The evening we decided to pass on the house, I was checking the listings again, and a brand new listing caught my eye.  It was in the same neighborhood (that was our first choice) where we had tried to buy the first house.  We set up a showing right away.

While looking through the house, we both just knew it was the one.  It had everything we were looking for, with a few extras.  However, nothing is perfect.  The house was getting ready to be foreclosed, so it needed some work.  It needed to be cleaned, painted, new floors and carpet.  It needed a little more work than what we were hoping for, but that was the only negative.   

We made an offer a day later, which turned the deal into a short sale. This was in the middle of August, and we had to wait for the banks holding the mortgages on the house to approve our offer.  As of last week, we were still waiting.  We technically didn’t have a contract, because we didn’t want to start spending money on the inspection, mortgage application fees, etc., until we were sure the banks would approve the offer.

Last week, we were still waiting on the final bank holding the first mortgage, which is the no-brainer, because they would be paid in full.  We didn’t understand what was holding up their approval.  Turns out, they needed a signed contract to assure them, that the sellers really would be selling the house.  So as of last Thursday, we were officially under contract!

Hopefully the bank will get the approval processed- they already said they would, once we had a contract, and once they do that, we will close within 30 days.  But in the meantime, no one else can come along and make another offer on the house, while we wait for the bank. 

We are trying not to get too excited until we close (because you never know what can happen between now and then), but we definitely just got one step closer to moving.

Categories
Household Me

Mama vs. the Yellow Jackets Part II

You can click here, to read Part I of this post. 

In order to really assess what we were dealing with, I took some of my dad’s advice.  He said you can usually spot a yellow jacket’s nest by watching them at dusk.  He said they make a bee line when the sun starts to go down to their nest. 

So later that evening and the next evening I watched.  Of course I was watching the one enterence that I knew of, and there were a lot of them entering.  I saw a lot buzzing around our tree, but I didn’t really see a spot where they were all trying to get in.

Joe and I figured the one entrance that we saw was hopefully the main one.  Not wanting to risk another episode like the one from a few days ago, we waited until it was dark and had cooled off.  Joe hung up a Rescue yellow jacket trap from the tree they were buzzing around.  I filled in the hole that I had dug, when I hit yellow jacket oil.

Then we were ready.  Joe sprayed an entire can of a white foamy wasp/yellow jacket spray into the entrance.  I watched from a safe distance.  Nothing.  There were no angry yellow jackets swarming up.  I figured the trap would be filled by the next morning.

At the risk of sounding a bit obssessed at this point, the next morning I checked the trap, and there was not one yellow jacket in it.  There were also none entering or exiting the opening to the nest.  Had we succeeded?  Maybe this wasn’t such a big nest after all.  Only time would tell.  I was cautious though.  Look what happened last time I thought the nest was killed.

A week later, happily, there is no yellow jacket activity to report.  While I am not stupid brave enough to try to dig the nest up again, even though the new can says you can as well, I think we may have solved our yellow jacket problem for now.  When it gets cold, we will dig up the area and see what is under there.  But for now, I’m just happy there aren’t hundreds of those suckers buzzing around.   

I will see a yellow jacket in the trap every day, but then they are gone, out of the trap.  It is eerie.  We have used those traps for a few years now, and always had a ton of them captured within a few days.  A week later, there is not one in there.  Could it be the yellow jackets have gotten smarter, and figured out a way to escape from the trap?  I have a vision of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in my mind now, but with yellow jackets stinging away instead of pecking.  I do find it interesting nevertheless.

Hopefully we won’t have any more battles with the yellow jackets.