So March has been a giant slavering turd of a month, but for the most part it’s over now. Well, except for the garage. Right now our garage looks like a particularly energetic bomb went off, but I don’t live in the garage, I only interact with the garage for a few minutes a couple of times a day and it can, by god, stay looking like a particularly energetic bomb went off until I damn well feel like doing something about it.

We would, once again and forever, like to extend our gratitude to the following:

Curt, Shawn & Annie (and Anastasia for keeping Della busy), & Steve for the gracious gift of a Saturday afternoon to help friends move heavy shit. We have no words but thank you.

Mom & Dad for lunch, companionship, good suggestions, and a remarkable chocolate stout cake. Also for bedtime stories without which I wouldn’t have been doing much sleeping over the last few weeks.

The Lenzers and assorted hangers on for grief, support, chaos, humor, and a lot of love. They say you don’t actually know someone until you see them under the most stress. In the last month Lenzers have shown me that you don’t necessarily need great stress. As always you have provided grief, support, chaos, humor, and a lot of love. It’s nice to know that I’ve always known the real people.

And I’d like to add a shout out to my boss lady, Melinda Cumming, for putting up with me missing shifts, leaving early, being frazzled, short tempered, and glum without getting too worried about it.

All that having been said…..

So let’s go back to, oh, about the 21st or so.
Friday the 21st, I got up, ate breakfast, and started truly alarming my cats by, instead of sitting at my computer for a couple of hours as is my habit on my day off, started moving things. And moving things. And moving things. The scope of this project encompassed the entire upstairs of our house except for three small bedrooms, and the entire downstairs except for Andrew’s office and the laundry room. Which meant that we had to compact about 2/3 of the house into 1/3 of it.
I got things off walls, I packed up books (note to self: books are HEAVY, use SMALL boxes the next time). I moved fragile knick knacks, I took apart shelves, I moved what furniture I could and I wondered how we’d managed to move so much shit into a small house in such a short period of time.
Saturday? Same thing! Except we were also emptying the fridge so the guys could move it Monday morning.
Sunday? Same thing! Only add Shawn & Annie with Anastasia and Della, Curt, and a metric boatload of sushi as a bribe for helping to move the heavy shit. Andrew’s hand is well healed from the surgery that he had earlier in the month, but he only had surgery three weeks ago and is strictly forbidden to lift anything heavy. As I can recall it Sunday afternoon was the last time before now that we had any peace and quiet. After we finished moving heavy shit and after we’d finished lunch, we adjourned to the porch for talk and toasted marshmallows. For the record, if you don’t have graham crackers Girl Scout Thin Mints work amazingly well for S’mores.

Monday morning I packed up the cats and went to work. Ivan The Installer and his goons showed up Monday morning and proceeded to move the stove, the dishwasher, and the fridge then pulled out the godawful carpet, the vinyl in the kitchen, and started to put the new flooring in.
This is the dining room before:

Please excuse the disgruntled cat in the foreground.

And here’s a closeup of the dining room carpet:

I believe it’s what’s called a berber carpet? Not sure. Small, hard loopy things with a raised diamond shaped pattern that was guaranteed to be almost impossible to vacuum. Who puts carpet with what amounts to PITS in it in a dining room?

Vinyl in the kitchen? Mostly white. Who puts WHITE vinyl anywhere, let alone in a KITCHEN?!

This is what the living room looked like when I left on Monday.

Please excuse the disgruntled cat in the background.

Closeup of the carpet:

Powder. Freakin’. Blue. No one, but NO ONE with children, grandchildren, friends, pets, a garden, or FEET puts powder blue carpeting ANYWHERE. There are colors that are harder to keep clean, I’m sure, but it’d be hard to find one.

Came home Monday evening and the stove and dishwasher were in the living room. The refrigerator was on the back porch, there was no carpeting anywhere, and no where to sit. We had a pair of wickedly annoyed cats. Ate pizza in bed, put the cats away for the night, and woke up way too damn early the next morning to do it all over again.

Ivan the Installer and Vlad the Installer showed up Tuesday morning. Andrew reports that it was loud.

Andrew checked into our home away from home, The Embassy Suites, on Tuesday afternoon. The cats, thank god, adjusted to the whole situation fairly quickly. The cats, in fact, thought that sleeping with people was a charming idea and they were enchanted with having an UNDER to the bed. We have a captain’s bed on a solid base so there is no under to our bed. Under the bed was a BIG favorite.
People sleeping with cats, however, was not so popular. The cats might have slept well, we didn’t so much. Pogo likes to sleep on my head.

Wednesday and Thursday passed pretty much in a blur. I was really glad to hit Thursday evening and not have to plan to go to work again the next morning.
And Thursday afternoon Vlad called and said he was done. WOO HOO! So we planned that I’d come back from work and we’d go to the house to see whether or not we’d be able to move back in on Friday.

No. No we couldn’t.
We got home Thursday evening and opened a door. Two people each took one step inside and were promptly shoved back out the door by the STANK. It was literally breathtaking. Eyes watering, lungs shrieking, we backed out and closed the door. A little planning and we mounted an assault on two doors at once. In the house, outside to breathe. In the house, open a window, outside to breathe. And so on.
We were here for probably a half hour opening windows, turning on fans and marveling at how ABSOLUTELY FREAKING GORGEOUS THE FLOORS ARE!!

Stairway:

Living Room:

Dining Room/Kitchen:

These photos, by the way, weren’t taken on our whirlwind tour Thursday evening. By the time we left Thursday evening we could both feel our DNA unwinding so the idea of staying to take photos was one we did not entertain.

Friday morning I was back at the house at 8:30. I had had romantic notions of sitting on the porch with all the windows open enjoying the sunshine while waiting for the dudes to show up to re-install the dishwasher and deliver the new fridge, but it was, as is has been for most of the last six weeks, pouring. Also the house! Ay-yi-yi! As much pre-planning, moving, smooshing, taping, and covering in plastic as we had done, the house was COVERED in microfine dust.
So Friday morning I came home, I opened all the windows (actually the stank had dissipated considerably) I turned on all the fans and I started to clean. I was here for (totting up on my fingers) 10 hours cleaning on Friday and I’m still finding little patches where there’s dust.
We were actually scheduled to stay at the hotel Friday night, but Andrew in his wisdom, asked why we should. The house was livable, the stank had dissipated, why stay at a hotel, as comfortable as it was, full of high school chorus members when our bed was calling?
So we ate dinner bundled up the cats and checked out. Our bed is GLORIOUS!

Andrew and I have both spent the last two days unpacking, cleaning, re-cleaning, moving, pushing, shoving, reeling, writhing, and fainting in coils. The house looks like ours again (except with MUCH better floors), the cats are settled and happy (except that it’s 10 after 7 p.m. and I’ve not fed them dinner yet), and I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS EVER AGAIN.
Except that the house needs painting.
That, however is going to have to wait until we recover from this.
Living Room:

Kitchen/Dining Room:

Family Room:

Come on over. Just please take off your shoes!