Originally posted 3-04-2008

thanks to everyone that has signed up. i can pretty much guarantee there will be a lot of noise at first, but then as the budget dwindles and everyday boredom ensues, you'll stop getting all these messages. so just lie back and enjoy it. Think of England or something.

we're nearing the end of the first week of actually living here, and we've accomplished much and little at the same time!

susan and j's mom and i painted the common areas not-white before we moved in. now they're just a little less white...having chosen a color that's nearly indistinguishable from off-white, i feel good about my neutrality.


then there was also the matter of getting the furnace converted back to natural gas from the propane the crazy ex-owner had installed (did i include a picture of the giant green tank out back???).

that went well. but he had also converted the water heater...the gas guy pretty much just said "forget it" so we bought a new one (much debate about whether it should be a tankless model, but the operating budget and a single-toothed pessimist at Home Depot helped make that decision).

the entire Man-Room floor was ripped out. mold everywhere. much spraying of bleach and water and there's still some down there, but the rest will have to be dealt with later with the ripping of walls and such. a project for a no-snow period. it smells like a cave. the cats disappear down there for hours. i hope they do not evolve into some kind of pale, see-through blind animals.

so then there was the fact the phone lines didn't work. we still have the 4 hole plugs from the...uh...stone age. and the tv cable had been run directly through the stone facade for each outlet, creating a bunch of holes in the stone and making ugly on the side of the house. thanks to the help of j's dad, an ex-telephone do-it-all guy, my dad, and a creative cable man, all of those issues were fixed. there are still holes, but now we have cable and phone everywhere, and we can fill the holes...later.

so the dishwasher at 314 Davis crapped out, we decided to buy a new one for this house and put the one here over there. it's a nice little Whirlpool model that makes a hideous grinding death noise but really gets things clean.

that lead to a level of perverted consumerism from which i'm still not sure i have recovered. we started out at the scratch-and-dent place in Proctorville, but you know...if i'm paying $700 for something that has a giant "ding" in the front of it, i want it to be new. so we went to Sears and after much debate and rationalization, which may not have been so "rational" after all, spent most of Dubya's anticipated refund on a....KitchenAid Stainless Steel Ferrari.
I may perish. It does wine glasses (of which i use many!) and has a special drawer for knives and such (of which we have many), and has a special pot scrubber thing so i don't have to do any work (of which i do little). it also grinds up food bits, which is good, since the current plumbing is too poor to install a real fooderator in the sink right now. i'm assuming that it is also going to learn to vacuum the entire house and feed the cats while we're out of town.

i have done a million tiny things, like replace the wooden (oh, ack!) toilet seat, buy a new shower rod (chrome!, to match the vintage doorknob plate!) and curtain (www.arcsandangles.com...just like the ones they have at the Greenbriar!) and line all the drawers and shelves in the kitchen. You know, the basic stuff.

my parents have helped clean up the leafy yard, dig around for drainage issues, pack things still at the old house, paint at the old house, move things to and fro, and a million other things that we can't take care of in a timely fashion because of work. my dad and j's dad did a spectacular job of replacing the exposed vents from the water heater and the furnace into our crawl space and taping up some heat-leaking gaps. my dad has also helped hang the bedroom door that i had to move from an upstairs closet, replace the closet door that we found in the garage, and re-wire some light switches that went up and down but turned nothing on or off.

madness, i tell you.

i have never seen a house that someone was previously living in that was so unlivable. i mean, this guys wife was a DOCTOR, fer chrissakes. did they just live without heat and the phone, breathing mold spores, heating an empty attic, and with 8 inches of black hair in the drain (different story)?

now all i can do is go to bed. there's a ton of work left at 314, which has to go on the market in April, and i got nothing done over the weekend because it was my weekend to work, and j's been on a gaming orgy since saturday night, so you can see how this could just collapse and go nowhere fast. there's laundry to fold, and that damn motion sensor light out the window behind me keeps coming on and is telling me our new resident feral cat is stalking the yard or some crackhead is going to try to steal some copper tubing from my A/C, which i won't find out until summer.