Holly’s Happenings

And before you ask, no, the house hasn’t sold! We have a good friend that lives just around the corner from here and his girlfriend has been pestering him to get the remodeling done on his house so that he can sell it. But the fact is, he doesn’t want to sell it! The current real estate market is in bad shape and with the amount of work that needs to be done on the house, he’d have to invest about $25,000 in it right now to even get a decent amount out of the house. On top of that, he bought this house more than 10 years ago as his “retirement” house.

It’s a cute little house that sits on a little more than 5 acres of land. The house itself has a little more than 1,500 square foot of living area, basically the same amount of room we have here. But right now, it’s in complete disarray! Our friend has been working on it, little by little, for about 5 years now. The walls are currently nothing more than drywall and the floors are nothing more than sub floor. He’s gone over all of the wiring and plumbing in the house and is currently finishing up the wiring and insulation in the attic. Once he gets that done it will be a matter of getting all of his clutter out of the house, then he’ll start working on all of the finishing work.

Right now he has a brand new kitchen and bathroom, complete with some really sweet looking Hansgrohe faucets, sitting in boxes in the dining room. So we told him that we’d come down and help him get both rooms installed and get the painting done, in lieu of a deposit. The house will still need more work done after we move in, so part of the rent will be “taken out in trade”, in other words he’ll provide the materials and we’ll do the work.

The best part about this house is that it gets us out of the horrific school district we’re currently living in! We’ve lived in this school district for the past 5 school years and it’s literally been a nightmare! Rather than putting the focus on important things like making sure the kids get a good education, they’d rather put the focus on a ridiculous uniform dress code and whether or not the kids are wearing a shirt to school that has a logo on it or whether or not they have a frigging belt on. But it gets even better! Depending on who you are in the eyes of the school administration staff, you can actually get away with wearing what you want to because the uniform dress code is NEVER administered across the board. One child can get into trouble for wearing something and another child who is wearing the same thing or something worse will get away with it. And the school is so poorly underscoring that it’s currently rated in Academic Emergency. But hey, at least the students all look the same, that’s what’s important, isn’t it?

Although the new house is about 900 square foot smaller than the house we moved from, in many ways we actually have more room. One of the more obvious ways we have more room is the addition of a second full bathroom. That alone has been a blessing! Also, all three bedrooms have nice sized closets in them and my bedroom has a wall of shelving, so with our dressers we have ample room for storing clothes.

Then there is the fact that we have a living room AND a family room, both of which are nice sized rooms with plenty of windows to let natural light in. But, having a living room and a family room puts me in a little dilemma. Back here in the family room is where mine and my husbands computers are, as well as a sofa,a recliner and the TV. The kids’ computer is in the front living room as well as a love seat, a rocking chair and a TV. My dilemma is that I can’t make up my mind as to which of the tv stands I want back here in the family room. And I’m driving my husband nuts by telling him I’m thinking about switching them around again…LOL!

The majority of the things that I’d like to change in the new house are simple cosmetic changes. Things like painting, new window treatments and area rugs. The next painting project is the small bathroom off the family room. It’s currently painted a green color that is somewhere in the middle of lime green and pea green, and I really don’t like it! It also has a medicine cabinet placed oddly beside the sink making it very inconvenient for my husband to shave, so I’m thinking one of those wall mounted makeup mirrors might be just the thing to make that bathroom a little more workable!

OK, I’ll admit that I’m not one to say that I do believe in ghosts or spirits, however I also won’t say that I don’t believe in them either. Tonight, when I was uploading the photos for the bacon cooker to my computer, I also uploaded the pictures that I took of this house when we were cleaning and painting before we moved in. As I was looking through the pictures I seen something that made me go “HUH”!!!! I’ll upload several pictures so that you can look at them and tell me if you see what I see. The pictures were taken one after another with little time in between them. And PLEASE pardon the mess!!!! OK, here goes, click on them for larger pictures! Click “MORE” to see the pics!
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Please don’t get me wrong, I did not move into this house in the woods thinking that bugs wouldn’t be part of it.  I know that you can’t live in this type of setting without seeing bugs, especially spiders.  But what I seen this morning totally creeped me out!  I hadn’t been awake but maybe 20 minutes when I seen my husband come to a dead stop not too far from my desk and say “OH MY GOD”.  I jumped up to see what he was looking at and seen one of the biggest and oddest looking spiders I have ever seen.  I only stood there for a second before I ran out of the room freaking out, and my husband was quick to give it a quick squish with his shoe, so I also wasn’t able to get a picture of it.  But to see him freaking out over a spider let me know that it was pretty bad!  I’d pull the tissue out of the trash that he picked it up with, but the thought of that grosses me out…LOL!  So you’ll just have to use your imagination and take my word for it.  I’m thinking that I need to seriously consider setting off some heavy duty bug/spider bombs in the house this weekend!

I wasn’t too thrilled with the outdoor lighting that was on the house when we moved in, so I insisted that we get something that would light up the area around the house a little better. My husband was wonderful and installed motion sensor flood lights at both the front door and the patio door that is near my desk.

Last night I had one of those “I can’t sleep” nights, so I ended up playing on my computer until around 3:00 a.m. this morning. At one point I ended up closing the blinds and pulling the curtains across the slider door because the flood light by the patio kept coming on. Although I’m thrilled that our new exterior home lighting choice works well, it sure is freaky when you are the only one awake and it keeps going off right behind you…LOL! Maybe we need to adjust the sensitivity a bit?

After being in the new house just a couple of days, I have no doubt that I want to be able to stay here! I love being surrounded by the trees, it’s such a peaceful feeling! And although I haven’t seen much wild life yet, I have seen and heard all different types of birds, which I love! I’m going over to the old house today to get the last of my bird feeders so that I can get them set up over here. So I guess the next step is to find a realtor and have them get things ready to make an offer so that we can make this our home for keeps!

As anyone that has moved knows, something always gets broken during a move.  Last night we were getting my husbands desktop computer hooked up and all was going well when I smelled an “odd” odor.  It smelled like melted plastic, but I couldn’t pinpoint what the smell was or where it was coming from.  The next thing I knew his computer just shut down out of the middle of nowhere.  Come to find out, that “odd” odor I smelled was his computer frying.  Yes, our move casualty this time is a computer.

So, to say the least, I was a bit apprehensive to even hook my computer up!  My thought was that it was some sort of omen or something, a sign of other bad things that were going to happen.  But my hubby was VERY quick to let me know that it was just a fluke accident and that I really didn’t need to look at it as an omen type of thing.   So we simply didn’t plug  any other computers into that specific outlet.  So far, the rest seem to be working fine.  And yes, I do realize that it’s more than likely not an omen, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still a little apprehensive!

As you probably read here, not too long ago, my husband and I helped my sister and her husband move into their new home. The biggest difference between their move and ours is that they had a few months to get their house ready and we got this house and moved within a week. Some of the other differences include things like my sister had her house packed where I had barely anything packed, she had several people to help her with their move, we only had my sister and her husband and they moved into a home larger than their old one where we moved into a house that was smaller than our old one. Also, we didn’t find any adult diapers tucked away in the bathroom cabinets like she did!

Tonight is the last night I will have internet here at the old house.  I was informed by the phone company tonight, after a HUGE argument, that sometime in the middle of the night the phone/internet here at this house will be turned off and sometime tomorrow between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. the phone/internet will be turned on at the new house.  Unfortunately, we’re not moving until Saturday, so that means no computer/internet time until sometime late Saturday, unless I go into major withdrawl and hook something up at the new house before….LOL!

So this is bye for now, but I’ll be back!

I decided that just in case you wanted to know what I’d be doing for the next week, I’d give you my itenarary:

• Saturday - Class from 8 a.m. to noon, then homework, housework and packing the rest of the day, I’ve canceled the visit to my sister
• Sunday - Cleaning and packing here with the kids while my husband works all day (FOR DOUBLE TIME…YAY!)
• Monday - Class from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., go to the bank and get a cashiers check for the new landlord, give cashiers check to new landlord and get keys to new house so that I can start cleaning, make phone calls to get utilities switched into my name at new house, go to new house and clean until I have to get my daughter from the bus, bring her home, give kids instructions on cleaning and packing, go back to new house to clean until it’s dark.
• Tuesday - Class from 9 a.m. to 12 noon, come home and change my clothes, head down to new house and clean until it’s time to pick my daughter up from the bus, bring her home, give kids instructions on what I want them do do, go back to new house to clean until dark.
• Wednesday - Classes from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., come home and work on things here for a change.
• Thursday - Class from 9 a.m. to 12 noon, come home and change my clothes, head to new house and clean until dark.
• Friday - NO classes, and hopefully I don’t get called into work, be to new house by 8 a.m. to wait for DirecTV tech to come and install our service at the new house between 8 a.m. and noon, finish up cleaning because Saturday is moving day!
• Saturday - Class from 8 a.m. to 12 noon, unless there is an exam, then we’ll be out by 9:30 a.m. or so, head to U-Haul to get a moving truck, come home and start loading stuff onto the truck to move.

There you have it, that’s what I’ll be doing for the next week.  Would you care to join me?  I sure could use the help/company!!!!!!!