We've Moved!

We're finally in our new house!!! We closed on it July 31, and immediately after the closing, J and his dad started working on sanding and refinishing all the hardwood floors--basically the entire upstairs of the house (it's a ranch, but there's a full basement, which is *awesome*). On Saturday they took off moulding and prepped the house for the sanding; on Sunday they worked like fiends sanding and cleaning the floors with mineral spirits and put one coat of finish on. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, after the in-laws left to go back home, J single-handedly sanded down more spots throughout the floors where the finish from the first coat was a little lumpy and put two more coats of polyurethane on the floors. He was pretty wiped out, and I just felt bad that I couldn't help at all.

Then we left the house alone so that we could give the floors time to dry. The in-laws came back down the following weekend and J and his dad rented a truck from Budget and moved all of our boxes while his mom and I hung out with R and got some last-minute packing, organizing, etc. done.

On Sunday J and his dad cut new moulding strips and J spent Monday nailing them back in place so that we wouldn't have to worry about it after our furniture got put in. We had movers come on Tuesday to move all our big furniture. Then Wednesday and Thursday J and I got every last thing out of the house (it took 7 or 8 trips in our Camry-- that car fills up fast!) and cleaned the old place from top to bottom. It really wasn't until just Friday that we were able to start really thinking about the new house and how we wanted to arrange things.

We're getting a new dishwasher installed on Wednesday. The one that came with the house was at least 30 years old and at first we thought we'd just make do with it until it REALLY broke. But the first two or three times we pulled out the top rack to put dishes in it it collapsed on the bottom rack. And then I noticed all this brown melted crud on part of the bottom rack and I was just like, "Let's get a new dishwasher! Today!" So we went to five different places looking at dishwashers and ended up getting ours from Sears-- a Maytag that was discounted more than 50%. I'm pretty psyched.

We also have most of the furniture arranged how we want it. The trouble is just figuring out where to keep a lot of stuff. There's not QUITE as much kitchen storage in this place as there was in the other house (it's close, but the other house had more drawers, so we're struggling to figure out where to keep some of the things we USED to have in kitchen drawers) and we gave R a dresser that we used to keep in our dining room to store linens, napkins, and other items like that, so now we have to figure out another spot for those things.

I seriously love this new house. I never thought I would be all about a ranch style home but I really like one-floor living for the most part, especially because we have such a great basement for our "family room" type stuff.

The house is not without its quirks, though:

--There's no bathtub, so we're getting used to giving R showers instead of baths. It's still a little weird, and she doesn't love the shower yet. One of us usually has to take a shower with her in order to get her in. We'll see how that goes after awhile.

--Several of the doors don't latch shut. This is an easy fix, I know. But I'm not sure how quickly we'll get to it, so for now we're living with it.

--I hate the faucets in both the main bathroom and the half bathroom. We'll get that sorted eventually.

--The basement has some really old (and really in-need of replacement or something) linoleum, as well as one room that is carpeted in 2" thick dark and light green shag carpeting that makes me want to mow it down with the lawn mower. It'll be awhile before we get to changing that, either though.

But seriously, this place is great. I can't wait for folks to come see it-- any of you are welcome anytime you're in Delaware!