Big day today! Having the whole day to work on the house and my parents here to help means we got so much done. Plus the plumbers finished up the drywall before we even got there this morning, so that job is officially done.
We loaded everything we had packed into my parents’ van and Josh’s car in about 20 minutes. If you haven’t heard of Bungobox or a similar crate rental company, you should seriously consider it for your next move. The crates are stackable, and you save a ton of time by not having to assemble and tape boxes. Packing the car wasn’t the usual game of Tetris, either.
Once we got to the house it was fun to give my parents a tour! I feel like I’ve spoken negatively of the house (mostly about it being dirty), but it really is a great floorplan. My mom also knew all the names of the plants in the yard. We have a few Japanese maple trees, and apparently this is a big deal.
Speaking of trees, Josh met with someone to discuss trimming and removing a few trees. There are two cherry trees on the left side of the house that are growing into the house and leaning on the roof, so those need to go, and they’re too big for us to take down ourselves. I also learned we have a Bradford pear tree in the front which is disappointing. If you’ve ever smelled one of those in bloom, you know what I mean.
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Moving everything into the house was only slightly more time consuming than getting it out of our old house. We can’t unpack much since we need to keep things out of the way for the painters, but we did make good progress on the kitchen.
My mom was gracious enough to offer to line all of the cabinets for me. Even though scrubbing those shelves gave me a new appreciation for shelf paper, I still hate measuring and cutting it. Plus when we moved into our current house, I sliced my knuckle open with the rotary cutter.
My dad did the majority of moving everything into the house and then set up our TV downstairs. He also accompanied Josh to Home Depot to rent the equipment for the rest of the day.
The gutter cleaners came while we were setting up the kitchen. The house we bought has been vacant for almost a year, and they blew a ton of leaves, dirt, pine needles, etc off the roof. Thankfully they also blew off the front porch and deck afterwards, so they were cleaner than when they got there. Clean roof and gutters – another job done.
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After my parents headed out, Josh and I spent some quality time with the shop vacs we rented from Home Depot. We made great progress by vacuuming out all of the cabinets and windowsills and every section of tile floor, but that came to a grinding halt when we got ready to use the tile and grout steam cleaner.
First, the machine calls for distilled water only, so I ran to Publix to grab some. We followed the instructions but couldn’t get the “ready to go” light to come on and then noticed the water was leaking out from underneath the machine. At first I thought we had the release valve open on accident, but 2-3 tries later we were out of distilled water with no green light. The only thing we could think of was that Home Depot rented us a faulty machine, so back to the store we went. Thankfully they didn’t charge us since it was indeed leaking/not working.
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Even though it was a disappointing end, the day was still incredibly productive. The house is significantly cleaner and actually holds some of our stuff! I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to tackle those floors.
Sara Morrison 