We’ve been putting in a lot of work on the house. Matt & I took two days off last week to clean and get some work done. I think we got rid of half the stuff in the basement, most of the stuff in the upstairs “den” (I’ve never been sure what to call that little room on the back. Library sounds too pretentious, but it’s where we kept our books and the computer). We brought several loads of stuff to Goodwill, took three bookcases to the pawn shop, and got rid of a whole bunch of garbage bags of stuff. And we still have a lot to do.
We also had a handyman come over and fix a bunch of stuff. The floor in the entry closet had some water damage, there was a hole in a bedroom ceiling from before we got a new roof a couple years ago that I’d been avoiding fixing, and there was the hole in the bathroom wall from the plumbing issue that had also become the hole in the bedroom wall on the other side. While he was here, we asked him to fix the living room ceiling. Our house has a lot of decorative plaster and the living room ceiling (right under the upstairs bathroom) had suffered some damage two owners ago. Someone had fixed it in the meantime, but it wasn’t looking very good, so we had our “guy” fix it again. He didn’t replace the decorative pieces, but we did get him to do a whole lot of repair to the flat surface, plus he painted the whole thing when he was done. It looks soooooo much better.
We’re almost ready to call the realtor. The dining room and kitchen need some cleaning, I need to paint some of the wall patches upstairs, the front entry needs to be painted, there’s a little painting outside, and we have to do something to the half-bath where we took out the wallpaper a few years ago, intending to redo the whole bathroom before the kids came, and then ran out of both time and money. We hope to have everything done or almost done by 11/15. It’s a stupid time to put the house on the market, right before the holidays, but if we wait, the house’ll just get messy again. This gives us some motivation to keep cleaning and purging.
I’ve got the afternoon off today to get some painting done and then go to the kids’ daycare Halloween party. The painting may or may not get done. I’m exhausted. Jessie was sick last week (the doc thought it was h1n1, but since they aren’t testing anymore, we don’t know) and Sam spent a few nights sleeping poorly (meaning the adults also slept poorly) and now I’ve come down with something and feel crappy. The kids are doing much better, but they were a little crabby this morning when we brought them to daycare. Hopefully they won’t get sick again before tomorrow night. Maybe I’ll just go through some stuff in drawers and decide what to keep and what to toss rather than paint. I can do the sorting and tossing sitting down. Or, a nap on the couch sounds really good, but I’ll feel guilty, knowing how much needs to be done on the house yet.
There are quite a few changes going on at work, too. We’ll be hiring two new people soon. The Dept of Energy has a lot of stimulus funding for weatherization and we’ll need to review those projects – they could be almost as many projects a year for three years as we normally review already. It’s been pretty stressful lately, not knowing if we’d get the funding for extra staff, or if we’d get stuck doing all those reviews with the already-overworked staff we have. Now we’re scrambling to figure out where to put the new people, and who will be doing what, and all that. Plus, it looks like we might be hiring a couple of other people in the office (although not as fast as people to review the weatherization projects). After all the moving we’ve been doing at work for the last two years, it looks like we’ll do it again soon to reconfigure our whole office space. That’s a good thing, but some days it feels like our hamster wheel is spinning way too fast. And some of the new projects are already coming in, so we’re swamped already.
Cute kid story for the day:
When I picked the kids up at daycare yesterday (they were the last ones left), the daycare person came over with a plate of freshly-baked cookies. The kids had made cookies and they’d baked them up in the kitchen. She let Jess and Sam each pick one (so much for eating supper right when we got home) and I got one. Jess got a cat-shaped one and promptly started devouring it. Sam got a bat-shaped cut-out cookies. I told her it was a bat and she carried it all over on her way out of the building, showing everyone that she had a bat. She pestered the heck out of the daycare owner’s mom, trying to get her attention and show her the bat. When we got to the outside stairs, Sam had her hands full with the cookie, so I picked her up and set her down at the bottom of the steps (she’s not quite there with the balance yet for going down stairs without holding someone’s hand) She took two steps and fell down. Broke her bat in two. Oh, the tears, the grief. She just wailed. She was so proud of her little bat, and just like that it was gone. She was the picture definition of “bereft.” I tried to comfort her as best I could. Finally I told her it would still taste yummy. She calmed down and ate the bat halves on the way home. I was quite relieved because the way she was distraught initially, I though we’d be dealing with bat fallout for the next week or two.
Enough stalling. Off to clean the house (I decided it was too dark and rainy to see what I was doing to paint).




