Keys

Tonight at 5 o'clock, we will officially be new home owners. We will be handed the keys and given permission to do what we please with our new house. This makes me happy.

The buyers of our house have graciously allowed us some additional time to be out of this house. We explained our situation to them (ie: yucky carpet in new house, 3 babies crawling around, son with asthma, etc) and they agreed to give us until the end of the second full weekend to be fully out of this house..provided that they can start moving things into the garage that weekend. This is fine with me because this means that overall, we come out ahead and get more time that the originally agreed upon time of 10 days. I'm hoping that Josh and I will be able to slowly over the coming days, do a lot of the smaller stuff on our own so by the weekend, there won't be that much stuff to move.

Here's our new timeline if anyone's interested:
Sign papers for our old house and new house: Sept 18th (yesterday)
Houses close: Sept 19 (today)
Get Keys for new house: Sept 19th at 5pm(ish)
Commence work: Sept 19th-Sept 29th
Finish moving: Sept 29th in AM

So that's all I know as of right now...last time I had made plans, I had also called and asked a bunch of girlfriends about coming during a day during the week and helping out with cleaning/painting, etc. I don't know if/when I'm going to need that this time around. I will see how it goes and keep you all updated if I do decide I need some help. I do have a friend lined up to come help this friday morning, but I just don't know how much additional help I'll need...however, with that said, don't be surprised if you all get a call in the next few days. At any rate, I know we will be asking for help with the actual move in the morning on Sept 29th.

Gotta go change diapers.

Disappointment

I'm sitting here at the computer right now frustrated beyond belief and overwhelmed with stress. We were supposed to have been closed on both our houses at this very moment. We were supposed to be over at our new house tonight getting ready for the coming weekend of work. We are not.

As I sit here, our backyard is a mess from all the projects that have gone on over the last few weeks, Josh is under the house sawing into the pipe under the bathtub because the drain has clogged about a week ago and nothing we have tried has unclogged it. Apparently God thought we didn't already have enough on our plates. I have literally had about 1 shower in the past week. And it was rigged with the hose running out our front door in order to drain the water. I have been washing my hair in the kitchen sink and "sponge bathing". In addition to this, Bryce and Jayden are in the kitchen making a huge mess in order to make themselves dinner because the order from Taco Bell wasn't correct and they wouldn't eat it. First they started to make sandwiches and got out all that stuff. Somehow Jayden ended up pouring honey all over the counter as well as over the edge so that it dripped all down the front of the dishwasher. Now since that didn't work, they have moved on to oatmeal and I have no idea how much mess that's going to be. At this point it's more worth my time to go in and clean it up after they go to bed than it is for me to try and make them clean it. So much for being a good parent who teaches their kids to be responsible...

The babies are in their bed crying because they are tired and want to go to sleep but can't because the way to get under the house is through their closet. They have been extra cranky this week...I think because I have to wake them up early in the morning to take Bryce to school and wake them up from their afternoon nap in order to pick him up. Isn't the cardinal rule for parenting "never wake a sleeping baby"?

I'm incredibly stressed about the house thing. We had it all planned out perfectly and now "the best laid plans of mice and men have often gone astray". We had planned to have 10 days from closing to be out of our current house. We had planned closing to where we had 2 full weekends in there...the first weekend we planned to be at the new house and work. We had a bunch of helpers lined up for this. Then we figured we had all week to finish as much as we could before we moved. Then we had another full weekend in order to move out and ask for help again. Well, our moving weekend is still going to be the same, but we will have only a few days in order to get things done...both at the new house and the old. And now we've lost most of our help. Stress. Stress. Stress.

Now I have to figure out how to pack the rest of our house and get a new 1300+ square feet of new floor laid, and the new house scrubbed from top to bottom between Josh and I. In about 3 days. Maybe 4. I am fully aware that this is an impossible task. Stress. Stress. Stress.

For those of you who are dying to help...

I don't know how many of you all who read my blog also read Josh's blog. But in case there's some who don't, he posted the other day about our schedule of working/moving and was asking for specific help on specific days. Here's a link to his post:

http://themckenneyfamily.com/

The only thing that he did not mention (because it is new) is that I am going to plan on having a girl work party on Monday the 17th at the new house. I am planning on being there all day so if someone wanted to come and help just for a few hours at their convenience, that's fine! This day will involve mostly cleaning and painting. Please email me or comment if you are interested in coming and I'll give you specific directions/address, etc! Thanks in advance for all you willing helpers!

Our life as we see it...

Well, I have been putting off blogging for a while because I had promised that I was going to post pics/stories about each of the girls for their birthday...bu-ut we haven't had any time to get/process any recent, good pics of the girls. So I guess I might as well blog about everything else going on since I don't know when we'll have any time to get good pics.

So here's an update on our house and our life currently. Over this last weekend (labor day weekend) we prepared to tear off our current roof in preparation to installing a new one. On Monday bright and early, Josh headed up to the roof and got started on the tear off. Now let me tell you this..we had three layers of roofing up there on our roof. It was a brutal job and I didn't even go up there! (My firm and fast rule is that I will do/learn any home improvement project that you throw at me..in fact I enjoy them. But I do not go on the roof or under the house. That's my rule.) A little while after Josh got started, his brother Jay arrived to help. A couple hours later another friend came and my dad showed up. My dad wasn't doing very well up on the roof for some reason so he didn't last long up there..plus there were only 3 roof taker offer things. Well, not even being up there, I saw what a hard job it was..Josh and Jay kept coming off the roof and collapsing on the ground and chugging Gatorade and water. I literally thought I was going to have to go catch Jay a couple times as he was descending off the ladder. Wouldn't that have been a sight! Well, 90% of the tear off got finished that day and that evening, we had a whole team of helpers helping clean up...boy was it a mess. And my poor flowers. I've worked so hard for my flowers. And they all got squashed. =( Anyway, we got a significant start on the clean up thanks to the help.

Tuesday morning, Josh worked from home a little in the morning so that I could take Bryce to his new school and get him registered. I got to take him to his class and meet his teacher. And then I left. It was hard. Last year when he started school, the girls had just been born and weren't even home from the hospital. So we had so much else going on that I didn't even really have time to think about him going to school. Not that we don't have a lot going on this year! But I've had more time to think about it and worry and grieve about it I guess. Plus the fact that all summer we haven't had any idea where he was going to go and what was going on..so we hadn't had time to really set roots of thought into any one place. Does that make sense? Anyway since we hadn't even found out that he could, in fact attend Corbett Grade school this year until Friday, we had never even been inside. So I was taking him to a new place that neither of us had ever been and I had to leave him there all day. Anyway...I didn't cry...but I did have a hard time leaving. But he was fine. And so far he LOVES school and he seems to be making a lot of new friends already. He really likes his teacher and LOVES the fact that not only does he get 3 recesses, but also a snack in addition to lunch. If you ask him, these are the best things about his new school. If you're like me and wondering why they get three recesses, it is because at Corbett, they only have a Mon-Thurs school schedule. So the days are from 8am to 3:30. 7 1/2 hours of school a day is a lot! Hence the three recesses.

For the remainder of this week, Josh will be working to finish repairing parts of the roof that need to be replaced and laying down the remainder of the tar paper in preparation for the contracter coming on Friday to put on the new roof. What a relief that will be after all this! This coming weekend, will be full of repairing some dry rot that was found under our house during the inspection and possibly having to take out and replace our bathroom floor. Not fun.

In case you're thinking that we must be made of money in order to do all these things, you're mistaken. We are, at this point getting a bit worried about our money situation. I always thought that you made money when you sold a house..not the other way around. I had no idea at the cost of having to do all these things. We sold our car a while back in preparation to do the roof..but it's costing more than we had expected and then we have to add in the dry rot repairs. Which hopefully won't be terribly expensive, but still. I now know that when we sell our next house, we need to have money set aside for these things..somewhere in the ball park of $5,000. So that's my advice for anyone who's thinking about selling a house any time soon!

The good news though is that we're on track to close on both houses on or before September 14. Holy cow! That's in 8 days. Yea! We also got the results of the appraisal for our new house yesterday. It appraised for $301,000...we are paying $243,000! Wow! I wondered if the appraiser had actually gone inside the house...