let's pretend i was here all along

Oh, hello, dwindling blog readership. Is that you? I've been gone so long I hardly remember what you look like. Here's the thing. Lately, instead of working on our house, we have been living in it. It is AWESOME.

When last I wrote (in, uh, March, sorry about that), the floors were being finished up. After the flooring people cleaned up and left, we sat down and tried to make a cohesive plan to get the rest of the smaller tasks done so that we could finally move in. Things like crown molding, window trim, replacing the front door, etc. We just couldn't figure out a way to do it quickly while Don's graduate school classes were still in session. Turns out grad school is a lot of work, who knew? At the thought of waiting until his classes were over (last week, actually) to sit on my beloved still-in-storage couch, I may or may not have thrown a tantrum. Once I allegedly calmed down, we realized that there was, in fact, another solution: throw up our hands and just give up!

Okay, not really. What we decided to do was to move in with the house as it was - finished floors and walls, no window trim, no crown molding, unpainted upstairs, unfinished upstairs bathrooms, front door still unreplaced. We elected to just stop working on the house for the rest of the semester, to just move in and enjoy having a house that looked mostly finished even if we knew it really wasn't. We would pick back up as soon as classes were over, and hope to get the rest of the finishing stuff done this summer so that we could focus on the next big project we'd like to start (which involves filling the nursery upstairs). This way, we can finally actually live like normal people in this lovely house we happen to own.

So. We've been doing just that - living. And in the process, the house got really messy, because we are huge slobs, and then I was too embarrassed about the mess to take pictures of it for you all but also far too lazy to do more than cursory cleaning. We're, uh, looking into a cleaning service.

But! We cleaned the house up this weekend in order to host a Mother's Day brunch (a raring success, incidentally), and I took the opportunity while it was still clean this morning to snap a bunch of pictures. So I'm writing up a bunch of posts so you can see the house as it now is, and what there still is left to do. Don's classes are over, and we've got big plans.

not a bloggy time of year for me

The holidays are a serious danger to my blogging. This is always the time of year when things start to lapse around here, internet-wise. Last year it was a surgery -- this year it's work, work, work! We've been slammed at the office, churning out proposals as fast as we can and working a lot of overtime.

And the holiday weekend, unfortunately, was NOT a break for me!


We were vendors at Darkover 2007 all weekend -- setup started Friday at 11 AM and the show ended Sunday at about 4 PM. The picture above is of me taking down our booth on Sunday (I'm sorting rocks!). Lindley's full set is here. It was fun -- our first real convention, and successful enough to merit going back next year -- but it's definitely work to be a seller at these sorts of things, and more work after three weeks of full-tilt proposal writing plus a long Thanksgiving day over at Chez Brinkley was pretty wearing. (It didn't help that I had to be up at five AM Sunday morning to take Don to the airport in the middle of all of this!) By the end of the weekend I was ready to sleep sleep sleep. But of course I didn't get to, because my mom and I had arranged to spend Monday Christmas shopping together. Most of my list is crossed off after a successful day (and a few online orders in the evening), but I woke up on Tuesday running a fever, aching, and exhausted. My body just wanted to finally shut down. I called in and said I was staying home to rest, but not more than an hour later I got an emergency assignment from work that HAD to be done, and had to be done fast. By me. Sigh. No rest accomplished.

Then it was back to work yesterday, for another extra-long day, and more of the same for the rest of the week. I'm hoping that this weekend I can FINALLY relax a little bit -- and maybe clean up the disaster area that is my house after three weeks of coming home late with no time to clean, plus Anapurna displays and inventory strewn wherever we put them after unloading the car Sunday night, plus the detritus of family visits (in addition to my mom this past weekend, my dad and grandparents were here the weekend before that -- and my sister is coming to visit on Tuesday! Augh!) -- restaurant leftovers, empty boxes, souvenirs from Dad's trip to Greece, a box of Grandma's cookies (Don LOVES them), bags and bits from shopping trips and crafty discussions with Mom, and all the other things that build up when people come over.

So, uh, maybe not so much relaxation. Just cleaning. Lots of cleaning.

a project and a deadline

It's official. The HVAC crew will be at the house on July 9th. They've been very accomodating, and they're going to be installing our system in two stages. Since we're getting a two-zone system with two units (one in the attic and one in the basement), it's possible for them to install it one floor at a time. So on July 9th, they'll be installing the HVAC for the first floor. It should take them about four days. After that, we'll move downstairs and gut the upstairs (be warned, helper-people!). Once that's done they'll come back to install the upstairs system.

So, by July 9th, we have to be ready for them to come. Which means we've got to be ready to move downstairs, basically. So I've got a project:


Clean this room. That's our back bedroom, which will someday be the calm, relaxing, zen-like guest bedroom (which my mother has been anticipating since Don and I moved in together). Right now, it's serving as both our temporary office (read: where we spend the majority of our time, attached to our computers by steel umbilical cords like the desperate Internet addicts we are) and storage for everything that "goes upstairs".

As you may recall, all of our downstairs stuff is in "storage" -- aka the garage -- while we renovate. Most of the stuff pictured above is destined for the same fate; it's boxes of craft supplies, or knickknacks, or whatever. Our dining room chairs are just out of sight in the closet on the left, too. It's all got to be lugged out the garage eventually.

Then there's the stuff that's got to stay, to get moved downstairs to the new temporary office (the dining room). All of my jewelry-making supplies, all of the Anapurna inventory, shipping supplies, and various other business materials. All of my writing stuff -- and anyone else who writes for a living will tell you that it somehow generates a huge mess. Papers, binders, files, blah blah blah. Our desks are staying, of course, and our computers. There's also some stuff laying around in the giant mess that's meant to go up on eBay, some stuff we found in the house that we don't really want but someone else might. I've given up on actually listing it myself -- I'm going to take it to an eBay auction place and have them do it. So all of that has to get pulled out and boxed up. And don't forget the office supplies! Those have to get organized somehow.

This should be fun. If anyone's got organizational tips for giant messes like mine, feel free to share.