Playing Catch-Up

I have been putting too much pressure on myself with this blog. I have SO much to write about that I haven't been able to make myself start. Hell, I haven't even done Junior's first birthday party, which is now 2.5 months ago. And I just remembered that Christmas was in there too. So instead of remaining overwhelmed and just avoiding trying to play blog catch-up, which I've been avoiding for over a month now, I'm just going to give a status update on things right now. Birthdays and Christmas can come later.

We are officially in our new house! 



This picture was obviously not taken by me, being as you can see green grass and a blue pool, and not the brown mud that has been present pretty much since the day we moved in. And we're praying that the pool actually looks that good when we uncover it this spring since we haven't actually seen it yet. But we're not holding our breath. The people who lived here before us were absolute PIGS. Disgusting. When mom and I opened the refrigerator to clean it, there was solidified liquid spilled on every shelf and mold growing in the door compartments. And let's not forget the one inch thick layer of burnt, caked crap on the bottom of the ovens, or the drawer freezer, who's bottom was completely covered by a one inch thick layer of....something. And yes, they fed their kids out of those appliances. The rest of the house was disgusting too. I honestly don't think they ever cleaned. When something spilled, they apparently just left it, as evidenced by the sticky piles of goop in the corners with pet hair stuck in them. Needless to say we had our work cut out for us when we moved in. It was so bad that we had Empire come out the same day the moving truck came to replace the upstairs carpet. We didn't even want to imagine what kind of critters were hiding in the old carpet.

Closing day was interesting. Our original date was December 20, but that got pushed back to the 21st. Which was lucky for the sellers, because when we showed up on the 21st to do our final walk through before closing that afternoon, they were still packing! Never mind that the closing date had been set for 2 weeks by then and had bumped back a full day just a few days prior. Had we been able to delay the closing we would have, however we had a moving truck showing up the next morning at 7am so we were between a rock and a hard place. We had no option but to close with the assumption that they would be out by that evening.

Closing went off without a hitch. After we were done, we (my parents, Kevin's parents, and us) headed out to the house to do what we thought would be some minor cleaning before the boxes started arriving the following morning. HA! See above. We were there until 11:30 that night cleaning (and gagging). On top of that, there was still so much stuff in the house that it looked like they hadn't finished moving out. So Kevin calls the old owner and asked him when he was coming to get the rest of his stuff. He tells us that they don't have room at their new house and we can throw it all away. Are you kidding me? Why in the hell would the moron think that WE wanted their trash? Kevin told him we'd get it together and out by the garage and he needed to come get it the following day. And the previous owner actually did hire a guy to come get it which we weren't expecting. We figured we'd have to rent a dumpster to get rid of all of it. Yes, there was that much.

Moving ended up being a little more stressful than we had anticipated. On top of the disgusting conditions the previous owners had lived in, we had the Moving Nazi freaking out the entire time. (In case you didn't guess, the Moving Nazi was Kevin). In fact, he's still freaking out. In the beginning it was because Mom and I weren't unpacking the kitchen boxes fast enough for him. His genius idea was to get all of the boxes unpacked and everything put somewhere. It didn't matter where, as long as it was in a cabinet, closet, or cupboard. Mom and my genius idea (for real) was to unpack everything and put it where it belongs, thereby eliminating the need to handle everything we own twice when we have to re-unpack it from wherever the hell it got stuffed, per Kevin's method, in order to put it in it's correct place. Assuming we could actually find what we were looking for in the first place. Now his big hangup is the fact that we still have a few boxes around and not everything has a home yet. But in my world it's coming along nicely. The only boxes we have left are some decor, a couple of spare bedroom boxes, and a couple of boxes in the office. I think we've come a LONG way when you consider the fact that we were doing all of this over the holidays.

I think my favorite part of the whole process has been all of my ideas I'm coming up with to have the entire house redone. HA! Every time I say that, Kevin flips out (yes I make sure to mention paint colors and/or cabinet options at least a couple of times a day). The whole house doesn't need to be redone The basement is actually great. But the colors on the main level are just not doing it for me. For example, we have the honey oak hard wood floors throughout the first level. So of course the previous owners decided to play off the honey orange color and paint the entire two story living room a faux orangish color. 





Just stunning, don't you think? Here is the kitchen, with is peachy walls and pickled oak cabinets:



And the other half of the kitchen.



The master bedroom:



Yes, that's porn 70s burgundy baby. Not quite my style at all (I'm much more partial to porn 80s mauve). 


The basement:




The back of the house:





Kevin's baby. He thinks a virtual bow hunting simulator is going on the second floor. He thinks wrong.  



More of the backyard:





And the front. Hopefully we will be able to get our lawn to look like that this summer without our trusty Mexican lawn crew. I think the last time we mowed a lawn was 2005.  No, I'm not joking.



So that's our house tour. I took all of the pictures from trulia.com. I considered taking new pictures so you could see it with our stuff, then realized that you couldn't actually see the rooms because of our stuff. So I'll wait on those shots.

Another aspect of our new Michigan life is that I'm working from home. Being the social butterfly that I am, I had my doubts. I like human (adult) interaction. But I am seriously loving it. The biggest challenge I'm dealing with is the quitting work at the end of the day part. It's really hard to shut down my email, especially when Houston is an hour behind me. So when I'm "done" working at 5, it's only 4 there and the emails are still flying in. Plus my boss works late so when she's emailing me at 6:30, it's 7:30 my time. I think they're getting their money's worth out of me. Kevin is threatening to put a door on the office. 

Overall, I am loving being back in Michigan. Our location is amazing. We're in the country, yet we're about 6 miles from both Brighton and Hartland, where I can find everything from Target and Meijer to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Best Buy, and an outdoor mall. And I'm actually liking the snow! (This is most likely because when there's no snow it's muddy and brown outside.) Although I have to say, one of the things I was looking forward to the most about moving back was the outdoor winter sports. I was all gung-ho to go skiing, snowboarding, sledding, skating, and snowmobiling. Then we got up here and I remembered I was pregnant. My winter activities just dwindled down to snow shoeing. Yay. Maybe next year (actually, it had better be next year, because if I am in this predicament again, we will have much bigger problems than the fact that I can't go sledding.)

Speaking of outdoor activities, we actually took Greyden outside to play last weekend! The poor kid hadn't been outdoors to play in over a month. I know, we're horrible parents, right? The fact is, we just hadn't thought about it. It's been cold out, and when it's cold out in Texas, you stay indoors. It wasn't until last weekend I realized that if we continue to follow that mentality, poor Greyden wouldn't get to go outside to play until June. So we bundled him up and hit the (ginormous) play set (that the previous owners paid $15K for. Who in the hell pays $15K for a play set????). I actually took a ton of pictures because it's cold and who knows when we're going to get the kid outdoors again.
 

Not only was this Grey's first time dressed up for winter, it was also his first time in boots. Or any shoes for that matter. He looked like Frankenstein walking around for the first few minutes.

He's not quite sure what this huge, open expanse is. Or who turned off the furnace

  

 

He insisted on climbing up the slide. Yup, he's all boy.

 

I'm not moving, Dad. What seems to be the problem here.

 

  

This one was blurry, but pretty much captured Greyden's feelings on playing outdoors.

Watching the Texans game last weekend

And let's not forget the fact that I'm pregnant! I unfortunately accidentally found our bathroom scale today and realized that I'm up 9 pounds at 14 weeks. Stupid me decided to look back at my old posts and saw that I was only up 10 pounds at 17 weeks last time. This obviously isn't going to be pretty. I was told that I'd start showing earlier with the second one, but so far all I'm showing is some cellulite and a major muffin-top.

Now that I've done a brief catch up, I will hopefully be keeping a little better tabs on this blog thing and not waiting so long until the next post. My goal is two posts per week. My reality is not so ambitious. Next time I'll try to include my pregnancy progress (mainly to keep myself on track) and some house before and after pictures. That is, if we ever get around to unpacking those last few boxes. Of course if I do that, then Kevin won't have anything left to complain about, so I might just hold off on those for a few more weeks. After all, we've got plenty of time. With the absolute hell that we went through trying to move across the county over the holidays, I seriously don't plan on moving again. Ever. It's a good thing Kevin picked the right house.