laundry room...

This post may not be as exciting as some of my other posts (...have any of my posts really been exciting???), but there are those (like my momma) who will be just as thrilled to read this one as my other ones. The reason? She wants to SEE the house sooo bad, and this is the only way she can for now. One day, Momma. You'll get here one day! :)

Anyway, the laundry room is by far the least exciting room in the house, but it's one of the few that's pretty much done, and the fact that you can call it a "room" is exciting in itself to me, since I've never really had a laundry "room" - just a laundry area, really.

I had the multi-colored baskets in our bathroom cabinet at the old house and I thought they would add some "excitement" to the laundry room here, so I decided to put them on the shelves there. One is holding all the huge ziploc bags we used to move clothes, pillows & such, one is holding miscellaneous canisters of air freshener or pre-wash and one is holding all of Kassie's "stuff". I do have room to the right of the dryer to put my ironing board, broom & (new) Swiffer WetJet (that thing is "on-time", as Henry would say!), as well as a small trash can.

I think Jeff's plan is to add one more long shelf above the one that is there to hold items that need to be kept but that we don't necessarily need to get to very often. Thankfully, I can close the bi-fold doors to any "clutter"! :)

not just any garage...

One of the main projects Jeff had in mind for our new home was to put down an epoxy on the garage floor. There are some really good advantages to putting down an epoxy including covering up any cracks in the floor and making it a little easier to sweep out. That's not to mention it just looks great (and all your buddies think it's cool)!

So Jeff set about doing some research on the different brands/types out there and finally decided on Shield Crete from Sherwin Williams. He chose one of the 4 colors they offer and put it down late Saturday night after we moved in (a week ago).

He needed 2 kits to do our double-stall garage and I think it took him between 3 & 4 hours to finish it. I've included some photos in the different stages so you can see how it went on. You roll the paint on in sections (and we all know Jeff is an expert "roller of paint"!) and you sprinkle the decorative flakes in those sections. As the epoxy dries, the flakes sink down & embed into the epoxy. It's really a nice touch without being to "un-manly"... :)

It takes a while for it to dry and then for it to be dry enough to have foot traffic or items (such as heavy power tools) sitting on it, so he put it down late Saturday night so it would have all night and all day Sunday to dry. We were able to walk on it Monday. He gradually began moving his shed at the old place over to the garage this week while he was off from work.

I think he did a fantastic job on it and I know he's glad to have it done. It changes the whole look of the room, to the point of making it look more like just another room of the house instead of a garage (that is until he gets all his "stuff" in it!). And I think it will give our garage floor a lot more life in the long run.

...projects...

So we - er, I mean, Jeff has been working on some projects around the house since we moved in (I've been working on "projects", too, but they're of a different nature). He had several things in mind to be done to the house relatively soon after we moved in so he and his buddies got to work straight away.

First up was the attic ladder. We definitely need to utilize the storage space we have in the attic but to do that, we have to be able to get up there. Jeff had already purchased his attic ladder of choice from Lowe's and we'd been storing it in the storage facility down the road from our new house until we could move in. Friday came ("come get your keys, Wenzels!") and with it came Joel Greco, Joey Alphin & Brian England. They came to help Jeff put the ladder up. And they did a reallygreat job. I personally have not tested it yet, but I think Jeff has and he feels perfectly safe on it. Thanks a bunch, guys!

Next was the A/C unit that Adam Batts & Joel installed in the garage. Jeff knew with the garage being mainly a workshop for him (with an extremely small space for my car in there when he's not working on one of my projects) that he would need to have some sort of climate control so he could work no matter what the season. [I married a smart one.] He got the unit from Adam's wife, Melissa. Her family owns Pleasant Heating & Air. The guys came out and installed it for Jeff on the Saturday after we moved in. They worked their butts off and I know Jeff (and I) really appreciate their hard work on that. It's so nice in the garage at any given time. It's more like another room of the house now, instead of just a garage. Thanks, guys!

The other major thing (so far) was the storm door on the front of the house. I love fresh air in the spring and especially in the fall (my fave season...can't wait for it to get here!) so I really wanted a door on the front that had a screen in it. Also, I wanted a storm door simply for the fact that I like leaving my front door open when I'm at home (Kassie, our cat, appreciates that, too). The problem was that Jeff flat out told me he wasn't going to fight with a full pane of glass in the summer & winter months and a full screen in the spring & fall months. I was going to have one or the other for ALL of the months. Hmmm...that was a problem. But did you know that they have doors that are both without ever having to take one or the other out??? At Lowe's (yes, they know Jeff by name...), they have a glass storm door that has a dividing line in the middle and all you have to do is "unlock" the middle part and pull down from the top of the door and the glass slides down into the bottom section while a screen unrolls from the top. So you have screen in the top half and glass in the bottom half (I can live with that). It's the coolest thing ever! So Monday night, Jason Parker came out to help Jeff put in the cool storm door. His sweet wife, Jackie, brought dinner, bless her kind heart! The door works great and it's so nice to be able to leave my front door open now! Thanks so much for your hard work, Jason!

I'm sure we have (many) more home projects in our future but I wanted to share those with you for now.

we're in!

You'll forgive me if this is brief...and maybe it won't be so brief...we'll see. But I know some of you have been wondering how the move went and when I might post something to the blog. Well, I might've posted something before now but we had some issues with our DSL switch-over so I just last night was able to access my email and internet connection for the first time in a week. I wanted to just get a quick update and a couple photos up to keep you in the loop.

The house, of course, is still a disaster area, but we're making progress. We flew Jeff's mom down as our "cleaning crew" and GOD BLESS HER SOCKS OFF! It was such a load off knowing that our previous house would be cleaned while I was busy unpacking our stuff. And it was just nice to see her, too! :) She was here from Saturday to Wednesday.

I have the kitchen put away (I think; until I find another box labeled "kitchen") and some other miscellaneous things. We're waiting on the rest of our furniture to arrive this Saturday and then we'll be able to do more with the living room. Our bedroom seems to have become the "catchall" room so that will be long in coming together, I think. We both have our computer desks set up in the back bedroom so we can at least check email (and post to the blog!) but that's about all that's happening in that room right now. No crafting yet; I haven't unpacked my stamp/scrapbooking stuff yet...mostly because I don't know where I'll put it at this point (Jeff will eventually build me a wall of cabinets to store my stuff). The guest bedroom & bathroom are pretty much set up but the bedroom is a work in progress as I have more plans for that room than the budget allows right now. :)

I want to take this opportunity to give A THOUSAND THANKS to those who were able to come out and help us get moved in: Joey & Amy, Brandon & April, Adam & Bekah, Adam & Melissa, Trent & Anjie, Brian, Scott & Brooke, Matthew, Joel...and to those guys who came out again to help do other house projects like attic ladders, a/c units & storm doors: Joel, Adam B. and Jason - you'll never know the value of your help! We are so blessed to have such kind, caring friends - we love you all!

More posts to come as we work to get our house unpacked and looking just the way we want it!

emptying out...

Yes, the rooms are emptying out...those are the shelves in my makeshift "craftroom" sans my stamp sets. I gotta tell you, that made me pretty uneasy - to have to pack all my stamp stuff up. You can be sure that will be one of the FIRST things that get unpacked! :)
Everything is getting piled in the living room where we have no sofa/sectional anymore (we sold that Saturday to the very excited proud new owner of our sectional). Jeff's pretty glad we don't have to move that honkin' thing...that joker's heavy!
We're pretty much to the point of just throwing things, pretty haphazardly and with no real direction, into a box and taping it up. The question to ask yourself is this: Will you/we be using this in the next 2 days? If the answer is no, PACK IT UP! I cleaned the coffee maker, in fact, last night in preparation of packing it, after asking myself that question.
Jeff is mowing the grass for the last time as I post this... We're eating cereal & sandwiches for meals... The countdown is on - 2 more full days and then we're off to the attorney's office to "close the deal"!

it is done...almost

We had our official walk-through with the builder and superintendent today and everything went really well. We had our realtor, Lisa Matthews, with us since she has experience with this sort of thing. We only came out with a very short list of things that need to be taken care of, and Tommy, the superintendent, informed us that most likely those items would be taken care of today. We're both very pleased with how the house looked on the inside (wanna see? click here); the only things we even saw were very minor cosmetic-type things to be fixed. The builder, Gary, was very nice and had great tips on upkeep of the house that would save us money in the long-run. Super-nice guy. Both of them.

In other news, THEY MOVED OUR CLOSING UP!! We are now closing next Thursday, August 16 (instead of Friday, August 17). The sales guys wanted to move it up one day because they said although they aren't planning to have any "snags", if something happened at closing on Friday that caused it to go longer than anticipated, it would possibly be Monday before they could give us the keys. Uh, no. No. It won't be Monday. With it being on Thursday now, if we encounter a "snag", we'll get it resolved before the weekend and still be able to move in over the weekend. Yeah. That's what we're doing.

So, 6 more days. Less than a week. To get all the rest of our stuff packed and ready. Omigosh. :)

"yards" of grass...

Went out to the house tonight and we have grass! And bushes! As a matter of fact, the yard is done. The inside is done (with the exception of a few things that need to be corrected; things like switches that don't work or don't turn on what they're supposed to turn on). We have electricity & A/C (oh, how GLORIOUS that was to feel when we stepped into the house!). They are planning to do the inspection tomorrow and hopefully have the CO (certificate of occupancy) by tomorrow or Thursday. Then our walk-through will be Friday at 8am.

We are 9 days away from moving into our very first home...I can't begin to tell you how excited we are...

my beee-uuu-teee-ful stove...

It has been a week since I've seen the house and I was going into withdrawal! Jeff goes by everyday on his way home from work so he'd been telling me the things they'd been doing, but today was the first day we got to go see it. They have pretty much finished the inside. The carpet is down in the entire house and the linoleum is down in the kitchen now. It looks good! My "beee-uuu-teee-ful" stove is in - boy, am I excited about the fact that it's a smooth-top...it really doesn't take much, you know? You can see in the video just how excited I am about it. :)

They have also put in things like towel racks in both bedrooms and all the doors have doorknobs now. We have big gigantic mirrors in each bathroom, too (you can see that in the video, too...oops!). We're starting to measure the rooms to try & figure out how we're going to place our stuff...

They've picked up all the debris in the yard and have re-graded it in preparation for the sod. That will be going in pretty soon, I suppose, since the walk-thru will be NEXT FRIDAY!!! I can't believe we're 2 1/2 weeks away now...it seems like we took so long to get to this point, and yet, it seems like they just started the house.