Our house appears to have this burning desire to prop up the economy all by itself. The good news is that the tile re-grouting wasn’t as expensive as it could have been and, against all odds, the electrician believes the basement wiring is safe. However, I had a guy come by to service our fireplace and now I realize the only way it passed inspection was by us misinterpreting what the fireplace receipt, forwarded by the old owner, actually said. Apparently the pilot hood (?) is being held together with bailing wire and some electronic part that shuts off the fireplace if it gets too hot has a short in it. So, the fix is less than a new fireplace but more than we truly want to spend for a feature we’re rarely going to use. The good news is this house allows us to stay just as busy as we want to be, sometimes a little more.

In other news, I’ve been looking for interesting chapter books to read to Calvin. A while back I perused the catalog looking for good candidates. I requested several including Have Space Suit Will Travel, by Heinlein, and Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Just for the record, I know that both of these books are way above Calvin’s comprehension. However, he seems to have a pretty good tolerance for listening to me read random things.

I checked out the books from the library today and started with Have Space Suit Will Travel because Cosmic looked thicker than I was expecting. I thought Calvin would be intrigued by a boy getting a space suit but I forgot how much commentary there was in the story. So, we gave up on that one pretty quickly because Calvin didn’t care that Kip’s education is subpar. Cosmic turned out to be a better fit.

Cosmic is the story about how Liam, an almost-thirteen-year-old-boy who looks thirty, accidentally gets lost out in space. He records an audio diary of the events leading up to him being lost in a space ship so he can hand it over to his parents as an explanation if he survives. The writing is amusing and Calvin seemed willing to flip through another picture book while I read it to him (I thought he was going to play with duplos while I read. Me reading was a sneaky way to convince him I shouldn’t build another firetruck/rocket/garbage truck for him).

While reading the book, I found a library bookmark in it with the query on one side, “Why was the dinosaur afraid to go back to the library?” with the answer, “Her books were millions of years overdue.” I tried to explain the joke to Calvin but it’s a little old for him, plus, I didn’t find it particularly funny. Anyway, the book reading experience was going fairly well until Liam recounts attending Waterloo High for the first time and accidentally getting mistaken for a new teacher. Instead of fessing up at once, Liam allows the principal to shepherd him on stage at assembly to introduce him to his future students. For some reason, this particular scene had me laughing so hard I was crying. I kept trying to keep reading only to break down mid-sentence in peals of laughter. Meanwhile, Calvin was still obsessed with the bookmark we had found and kept trying to repeat the joke. I would patiently read it to him, then start reading the book and once again, start laughing hysterically. Calvin believed I was laughing at the bookmark joke and, apparently believing he found the best joke ever, proceeded to mostly memorize the joke. I have visions of Calvin completely confusing his preschool teacher on Monday when he tries to recount this joke to her.

Yesterday, Calvin and I went to The Flower Bin to pick up an assortment of herbs and vegetables. I always walk away with more than I meant to buy. This year, I got:

• Thai Basil
• Columnar Basil
• Genovese Basil
• Mint Julep
• Oregano
• Pineapple Sage
• Lemon Grass
• SunSugar Tomato
• Bush Early Girl Tomato
• Patio Tomato
• Fanfare Cucumber
• Bambino Eggplant
• Cocozelle Bush Zucchini
• Edamame

I’ve had variations of all the herbs before. I’ve gotten a different variety of sage and mint in the past but I assume it’s mostly the same concept. I’ve had middling luck with tomatoes before so this time I put them in huge containers. The cucumber, eggplant, zucchini, lemon grass and edamame are all new. With the exception of the edamame, all were labeled to grow well in containers and I found an independent source claiming edamame also grows well in containers. Hopefully I’m not being overly optimistic.

We’ve now owned our new house for two weeks. I’m starting to get a feel for which house quirks I can live with and which need to be fixed.

Things I Like:

• The back yard is fabulious. It needs a lot of work. Jaeger has compared it to The Secret Garden’s garden. Someone obviously loved it at some point and landscaped it beautifully but the last couple of homeowners must not have had the time to deal with it. However, it’s fully fenced so Calvin can wander in and out at will without me worrying about him ending up on a busy road. There’s a door from both the diningroom and family room to the outside so Calvin can wander around the house and outdoors in a circle.
• There are two beautiful windows in the kitchen that let in a lot of light.
• I now have a convection oven. At the moment, I’m mainly using the conventional heating part of the oven but when I have more time I want to experiment with the convection aspect. I’m really liking that part. I’m not as excited by my stove. It’s a glass top which is incompatible with my cast iron skillet (which I love). I’ve heard rumors that it’ll work ok if I buy a heat diffuser so I’m going to try that. However, the main problem is I haven’t figured out how to get the burners hot enough without being too hot. It seems like I either can’t get hot enough to saute or I burn my onions. I think a little more familiarity will smooth out some of the worst of it but my last stove didn’t have a learning curve, it just worked. The oven also has a warming drawer which I haven’t used but like the idea of. All-in-all, I really like the oven and will learn to live with the stove top.
• The kitchen is smaller than my old kitchen but even with more windows, I somehow end up with more cabinet space. I still can’t figure out how this happened. So, in general, I think the kitchen is a win.
• My piano sounds fantastic in the livingroom with the vaulted ceiling.
• Our old house had one “livingroom” that was large and a little awkwardly shaped for anyone that didn’t have a piano to take up half of it. Our new house has a family room and livingroom. The family room has a corner fireplace which makes positioning furniture really hard. Google Sketch-up saved me an immense amount of time by letting me figure out where to place the furniture ahead of time. (Jaeger posted my sketch-up models on his site.) I was really excited when I walked in after all the furniture had been moved to see that it worked out exactly like I had envisioned. At the moment, I’m envisioning the family room as the place where Calvin has his toys and art supplies. It’s down a half-level from the dining room and is positioned so that the mess is largly obscured by the viewing angles. I’m planning the livingroom to be an adult reading area. I shelved our fiction books last night in the living room and immediately felt the general relaxation effect that many books have on me (every so often I get light headed walking through libraries, the book ambience is so pronounced). The biggest obstacle at the moment is getting reading seats that will fit. My piano is taking up a disproportionate amount of the floor space and there’s a large, but awkwardly placed, window and heating vent that is making this a challenge.
• The kitchen and dining room has hard wood-like flooring. This means that any eating messes Calvin makes, such as the mountain of scone crumbs he just left, can be easily cleaned up.
• Both the windows and the blinds are very spiffy. The windows open both directions. As in, the vertical windows can open from the top or the bottom and the horizontal windows can open from either side. The blinds are cordless and work very well. You just push the blinds up and they stay up. All the bedroom blinds are equipped to either slide up or down.

Things I Dislike:

• All the interior walls needed a paint refresh. The colors weren’t what we prefer and there was some really weird trim coloring. However, even if the colors had been fine, the walls appear to have not been painted for years and were really dirty. A previous owner had obvious tried to do spot painting to cover up some blemishes but just made it more apparent because the walls were dirty enough the paint ended up a different color. We spent the entire last week getting our house painted. It was really annoying to try to live with our furniture and boxes piled up in the middle of each room but it was worth it. The house looks so much better.
• I have a love/hate relationship with our master bath. On one end, I love the tub. It’s nice and deep and will be perfect for winter baths. However, the general layout is awkward and the walls and trim are weird. Our painter took one look at the trim and said it’d cost more to repaint it than to replace it so the master bath is the only room in the main house area that wasn’t painted.
• I’m use to people not putting in overhead lights and most of the time this can be fixed with floor lamps. However, I can’t live without decent light in the kitchen. This needs to be fixed but I’m not quite sure how yet. I’m pretty sure it’s going to involve an electrician though.
• The half bath in the family room is waaaay too small. It’s hard for me to manouver in much less anyone larger than me. I think some of this may be fixed if we change the door to swing out instead of in. However, that’s a pretty low priority project for the moment.
• The current refrigerator is a very small top-door freezer. I want to get it replaced but first Jaeger has to see if it’s possible to shave a 1/2″ off the top cabinet. We have 39″ in width so that shouldn’t be a problem but almost ever fridge I’ve looked at has been at least 68 5/8″ in height and I have exactly 68 1/2″ inches to work with at the moment.
• The shower heads all seem low to me. It works fine for us but I’m afraid they’ll be awkward for some of our taller guests.
• I think I’ve counted 5 differently colored outlets. We have white, beige, black, metallic, and western. I would like to standardize these all to be white. However, the outlets themselves alternate between white and beige for reasons I don’t understand.
• The furnace needs to be replaced (we got a seller concession for it) and the air conditioner needs to be serviced.
• The kitchen has solid-stone tile counter top. It looks nice but it’s not particularly good for baking as when I roll out dough it consistently gets stuck in the grout lines.

I’m sure I’ll find more likes and dislikes the longer we live here but the list is a good start

I was sadly mistaken in my belief that life would get back to normal after the holidays. Ever since we’ve moved to Longmont Jaeger has been wanting to move away from it. We moved to Longmont because, at the time, it was half way between my workplace and his. However, now that I’m mostly working from home, it’s much harder to justify living in Longmont.

In January we talked to our friendly real estate agent and she suggested we should try to get our house ready to sell as soon as possible because there were very few choices on the market at that point. This upped the timeline I had been considering by a couple of months so January and February we spent frantically trying to get the house up to snuff. This involved donating a massive amount of stuff to thrift stores. We also spent a lot of time and money refreshing the house in hopes it’d look like someplace someone else would like to buy. I started getting a little obsessive and each time Jan, our real estate agent, emailed to see if we were ready to list, I would mention two or three new things I had discovered that needed to be done to the house. Eventually she told me we should go ahead and list now because the house would never be perfect and there would always be something else to fix.

Our house went on the market on March 2. I had been reading staging and real estate books for about a year and one thing they all emphasized was it was important to have an immaculately clean house. Well, I like a clean house anyway but with a toddler, the realty often falls short of my goal. However, for our house showings I think I managed to keep the house to a neat-enough level that Jaeger started worrying about my sanity (and possibly his). We got one offer that was lower than we felt our house was worth. Even with countering we couldn’t bring it up to a level we wanted so we passed. In the mean time, we found a property that looked interesting down in Boulder. It needed a little work but was a level that we could do without bankrupting ourselves (probably). I really didn’t want to offer without having an offer for our house. However, the housing options were really, really low (in fact, there still hasn’t been another house listed we’d consider). This was the first house that both Jaeger and I thought we could live in so we went ahead and made an offer. After a bit of haggling, we agreed on a price for the new house.

I had a weekly cleaning service scheduled to come in on Tuesdays. However, we were getting a lot of showings so it was tricky to make sure the cleaners didn’t come during the showings. One Tuesday afternoon I had a showing scheduled for the morning so I called the cleaners and asked if they could come later in the day. I gave them the time of the showing and they said they’d come in early afternoon instead. Then, I got a call for a second showing later in the morning but didn’t bother telling the cleaners since they were planning to come in the afternoon. Then I got another call for an agent walk-through in the afternoon. I asked my agent if I needed to reschedule or cancel the cleaners and she thought the other real estate agent would be fine with cleaners being there while she evaluated whether it was worth bringing her clients through. So, I didn’t change the schedule. Between the 2nd morning showing and the agent showing in the afternoon I nipped home to grab some stuff before heading out for lunch. To my horror, I discovered the cleaners had already been there. I prayed that they had just been extra efficient and had somehow managed to clean the entire house in 40 minutes.

A couple of days later our agent emailed to say that there was a couple that wanted to make an offer on our house. Apparently they were the couple that were scheduled on the 2nd showing on Tuesday and my cleaners had come while they were there. However, it turns out they were very impressed that I had a cleaning service coming to make sure the house was in good shape. So, it turns out what I had been stressing over was an advantage after all. Also, I felt slightly justified in the obsessive lengths I had gone in cleaning the home since that was obviously important to these people. The offer came in and after a bit of haggling, we accepted the offer.

The next couple of weeks were probably more stressful than anything else. I was stressing over whether our loan was going to work out (we wanted to put 20% down but needed our home equity for that and the lender was dubious about same-day closings) and I worked on packing and all the other details that go with moving. To my surprise and great relief, we closed on time and everything ended up working out perfectly.

We started the move into our new home the last weekend in April. So far, the house has a myriad of little quirks but I’m liking living here much more than I expected. The house has a fully fenced back yard so Calvin doesn’t need much supervision outside. He spends hours entertaining himself outside which frees me up to unpack, work, and do other chores. It’s amazing.

One of the things that needed to be redone was the painting. We basically need to repaint the entire house. This isn’t something I want to take on myself. Among other things, we now have a vaulted ceiling. When the painter came he took a look and told us that painting the house, and fixing some of the existing paint quirks, would take a full week. This is the painting week. So right now Jaeger and I are stuck in a half-packed/half-unpacked limbo. Our essentially stuff has been unpacked and stored. However, our many boxes of books are piled in the middle of each room along with all our furniture so our painters can paint everything.

It’s going to be fantastic when it’s done. Today was the first day they started and already it’s looking much better. However, I’m tired of not being able to live in my house. I will be very glad when we can really unpack and get settled in to this house.