Move

You know when you can’t get a towel off of a towel holder because it bunched up at some point because you tried to get it off at an angle because why would a towel be at an easy angle when you need it the most and all you really need to do is yank on it a little harder and it will come off and you can dry yourself? Just minutes ago that scenario happened in my downstairs bathroom after my very first shower at my new house. In this case, the towel bar was actually the handle of the freezer that is part of a freezer/fridge combo that was left by the former owners. It works, but it isn’t plugged in for now. Also in this case, I yanked extra hard to dislodge the towel and the freezer door opened explosively and the sharp handle smashed me in the middle of my forehead and I used an expletive that is not appropriate for children to hear at a volume that was not appropriate for an environment in which children are sleeping. This picture is the accumulation of the past 48-hours of packing, moving, moving shit around, being an electrician, not being even close to settled in yet, and being completely exhausted.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t look that terrible, but it’s the biggest bump I’ve had on my head since I was robbed by a knife and fist brandishing maniac almost four years ago.

That is not how I planned on starting this post. I am so happy to be here in this new place with the ones I love, that I want to share some more of my life’s progress with you in the form of pictures and words. So, here goes.

 

Two posts ago, I inserted some internet pictures to replace what I had wanted to show you from the closing day, and these are those pictures.

 

The photo is staged: nobody points at lines on which to sign; they're already clearly marked. I just thought it would be a good photo opportunity for my boy Roy (mortgage guy) and originally I wanted him in the background doing something creepy or funny. The second photo is a genuine moment of happiness. The seller had given me the set of keys and I handed one of them to Amanda, and I held the other up and smiled with pride.

 



When we were done, we drove to the house and we managed to take this selfie the old fashioned way: with a camera. It is perfect, and it captures the cheer and bliss we were feeling. This was before we had to do any of the hard work.

 

This is what covered every wall in the kitchen, laundry room, guest bedroom, and half of the bathroom. I had heard horror stories from people about the difficulties of removing wallpaper. I heard tips, tricks, and got advice from old people at hardware stores and everybody really was saying the same thing: it sucks. Well, they were right.

The wallpaper itself tricked me because it came down in giant sheets. We had all of the paper down in every room in about three hours. The glue. The fucking glue was another story.

This is that same wall with just the glue left. About one square-foot at a time, we applied wallpaper stripper, waited, scrubbed with steel wool, and wiped off the sticky mess. My mother and I were able to get the entire kitchen done in one sitting, and Amanda and I have made huge progress on the laundry room over the past couple weeks while trying to do many other things including life itself.

And this is after a lot of hard work by Amanda. I pitched in some too, but she had a lot to do with how beautiful it looks compared to the start. We learned the hard way that painter's tape should be taken down right after the painting is done, not three days later, but we were able to recover a few minor flaws with a little scraping and now it looks more beautiful than ever.

We painted the living room in one day but I don't have pictures of that. I will simply say that it looks more like a place to relax than it did before, and the colors all work well together.

And here we are just last night. This is a view over the mountain of stuff in the living room. The twenty-foot truck you see in the background drove about 120 miles over the two trips, and we carried everything inside just before the sun cast out it's last glimmers of light. We were just getting started, and that is where the next post will begin. For now, goodnight.