69. The Home Stretch

Monday 2/28/22 - Thursday 3/3/22 - With our border run complete over the weekend, we are now back to where we left off. Ramie has been spending a good chunk of time each day down at the house making sure all of the little things were being handled. He worked on repairing, finishing, and keeping any contractors going as much as he could to keep things moving along. As you can imagine, we are in the heart of tax season in the US, so I have been staying busy with my tax prep work and spent most of my time working. I feel bad that I can’t be at the house and helping him with all of this detailed work, but he assures me that he has everything under control and comes home every afternoon with updates about what has gotten worked on, finished, and what is left to be done.

Whats The Report Give Me An Update GIFfrom Whats The Report GIFs

We are really getting anxious and feel like there is so much left to do and so little time to do it. We have to have everything ready to be lived in and actually move in (and be somewhat organized) in less than 2 weeks!!! Taylor and Dylan are coming down to visit and we need a place for them to stay. I want to be moved in and at least mostly organized before they get here, because who wants to come on vacation to a disorganized mess of a house?!

Messy Clean GIFfrom Messy GIFs

Friday 3/4/22 - We started our day as we always do with coffee on the balcony, while I started working. Instead of Ramie going down to the house by himself today, though, we decided that I was going to go with him. We were sort of ready to start moving in some of the furniture and appliances, but we weren’t ready to move in quite yet. I brought my laptop with me in case I finished whatever I could do on the actual house work, and would just hotspot in from my phone if I needed to work (we still have no prospect on the internet at the house. What’s the deal with us and not being able to get internet where we live?!). So, I grabbed my computer, Ramie grabbed his tools, and we went on down to our house. When we got there a couple of contractors were already working and the cleaning girls were there cleaning up the dust and dirt left from the construction. We had all of the patio furniture delivered last week but had been storing it in the house so it wouldn’t “disappear”, so we arranged where we needed it to go out on the deck. 

When the cleaning girls were finished, we were able to move the living room furniture into the living room after having been stored in the laundry room since it was delivered. 

There really wasn’t a whole lot else for me to do, so I set up my computer and got to work. Ramie can always find something to occupy his time, so he did a little bit here and a little bit there. Now that we were ready for more things to be moved in, we got a hold of Randall, the guy who is storing all of our appliances & our pallets, and who also owns the delivery truck, and scheduled a time for later today to get our appliances delivered!

Since we didn’t have a ton to work on right now, we decided to have a celebratory drink & lunch at a restaurant that we can literally almost see from our backyard (we would be able to see it, but there is a church in the way). Eating at restaurants is very leisurely here, if you are in a hurry or on a time crunch be sure to politely let the waiter know at the beginning, otherwise lunch might take over an hour. We really were in no hurry, there weren’t really a ton of house things that we could work on right now, and I had figured I’d be taking most of the day off of work anyway, so we spent over an hour enjoying our drinks and a delicious lunch before heading back to our house for the afternoon. 

I stayed at the house and worked while Ramie went to meet Randall and pick up our appliances. Before too long, they showed back up at the house with the appliances in hand, ready to bring them in. They had the luxury of the forklift when they were loading them onto the truck at the shop, however now at the house this was going to be all man-power. Luckily Ramie & Randall are pretty strong guys, otherwise we may have had a problem. There were only 4 pieces- fridge, stove, washer, and dryer, but by the time they got all 4 into the house, they were exhausted. Randall helped Ramie get the washer & dryer to the laundry room, but Ramie and I would be on our own to set everything into place. That’s ok, they got the hardest part, getting it into the house and close to where they needed to be, done. The rest was just unboxing and pushing it around. 

Saturday & Sunday 3/5/22-3/6/22 This weekend we did a lot of the “heavy lifting” when it came to getting the house set to move into.

Weight Lifting GIFfrom Weight GIFs

While it wasn’t quite ready yet and we were still waiting on a few more things to get finished before we could officially move in, we could get a lot of our stuff moved in. Today we decided that we would bring Breeze down to the house, too, so she could start getting used to the new place, yard, and all of the newness that she would experience. We started Saturday morning by stopping at the storage where we have our pallets stored. Randall trusts us, so he left us the key and also the keys to the forklift if we needed to move other people’s pallets. It’s nice that he trusts us enough to leave us the keys, this way we didn’t have to rely on someone being there in order to pick up our stuff! Being the early-birds that we are, we went early, loaded up a truckload of bins and boxes, with just a tiny corner of space left for Breeze, and brought them all to the house.

You can just make out the top of Breeze's head behind the black bin with the yellow lid

Before unpacking the first load of stuff

We unloaded that first load and decided to go back immediately for the 2nd load instead of organizing the things that we had brought to the house already. We left Breeze at the house alone for the first time (she would probably cry and whine the whole time, good thing we don’t have any neighbors yet), and went back for another load of bins and boxes. 

Breeze got to come to the house for the 1st time

We realized once we got back to the storage that we would be able to fit everything that was left here into the truck! It only took us 2 trips to get everything that was left on the 2 pallets that we had sent down. Everything else had been brought down to the house and used in the construction over the last couple of months. I guess 2 truckloads (well- it’s an SUV so it’s not like a WHOLE truckload, plus the first trip we had to save room for Breeze) of non-construction stuff wasn’t a terrible amount to ship down. Some people ship entire 20-foot (or even 40-foot) containers of household things! We brought it all back to the house and now just had piles of bins and boxes stacked around in the living room/kitchen area. Well, at least Randall will have a lot of extra storage room now for his next customers, we have freed up a lot of space for him over the last 2 days! 

First carload delivered

Oh boy- but now where to even begin?! We had an idea of what was in each bin just by looking at what was on top, and we had somewhat organized things into categories where we could while we were packing them so many months ago, so we decided to start with the bins that were mostly kitchen things. Other than Ramie’s tools, the kitchen items were the bulk of what we had brought down, and we actually knew where all of this stuff would be put (where other things would go, we weren’t completely sure yet because we were still waiting for the carpenter to finish the shelving to be installed in our dry-room/closet and laundry room). As we were taking things out of the first bin we just started setting it on the counter so we could really see what we all had here before putting it away. When we opened the 2nd bin we discovered something that we really did NOT want to see: Mold. Well, that’s not cool! 

It turns out that even after 5 months of being unused and sitting in the open while stored at Taryn & Stevens, the coffee maker must have still had a little bit of water in the lines. That fact made the decision for us what we would do next: wash ALL of the dishes, all of the towels and just about everything else that we could. Especially for everything in this bin! So, we finished unpacking the moldy bin and washed everything in it (which was mostly kitchen things and fortunately almost all things that were easy to wash). Since we don’t have a dishwasher, (well actually we do, his name is Ramie), we had to wash everything by hand! Imagine taking everything out of all of your cabinets and washing and drying it by hand… yep, that’s exactly what we did! Fortunately it was a nice warm and sunny day and we have plenty of patio furniture. Ramie would wash, I would dry half way, and then we would spread it out on the picnic table, benches, lounge chairs, and deck to finish drying naturally. Before we started putting everything away we also had to wipe out all of the cabinets- there was still sawdust from construction in there (I guess the cleaning girls didn’t do inside of cabinets). 

Breeze found a spot overlooking her new kingdom, oh and ignore the green pool :)

The rest of Saturday and all of Sunday were pretty similar to this. We unpacked, washed what we could (we didn’t have the washer and dryer hooked up yet so we couldn’t do laundry, but would need to wash all of the sheets and towels that we brought down too), and organized. For any of you who have ever moved, you know how it is… deciding where everything is going to live until you decide that it needs to move. It was a little tough to do because we didn’t have all of our shelving yet, so some things went back into bins to wait for later.

We are getting so close we can taste it!!  I guess Breeze thought the green pool looked tasty!

Pura Vida!

The pool had been filled a while ago and looked beautiful, but the pump hadn't been completely hooked up yet- we'll have to get this fixed this week!