Home Sweet Home

We're home!!

Actually, technically we're not 100% there, as we are still sleeping in the loft - since I'm paranoid about dust, paint, carpet, and general new house fumes. But we spend our waking hours there, and -supervised - Ben is finally allowed inside the house too. We have a couple of nice days coming up, so I'm hoping that with some more cleaning and more open-window air-out time, that we'll return to our house permanently on Sunday.

So the house overall turned out beautifully. We love the upgraded bathrooms, the new floors and we picked out some rather bold paint colors that ended up looking pretty cool (at least we think so). Some of the details aren't so great though - and we're trying to not let that bug us. The engineer in me is trying not to obsess about crooked light switches and mis-aligned cabinet knobs. The handyman in Mark is trying to not obsess about all the parts of the job that would have been cheaper and turned out better if he had done it himself. But the house is truly way nicer than it was pre-flood, and we're both so relieved and grateful to have a home of our own again.

And so far, it looks like our stuff made it through the move okay. We were both pretty nervous about that - as we hired movers to pack and move our stuff into storage - unsupervised - as we were desperately trying to get the house back into order in the early days when we thought it would be a matter of days - or at the most - weeks. However, despite very serious orders from Mark to NOT pile anything on top of the percussion instruments, when he went to pull the furniture from storage, he found boxes and chairs piled on top of the xylophone, vibes and marimba. Gasp. Mark has examined but not yet played the instruments. They look okay, but there may be rattles and other extraneous noises when they're played. Those are hard to get rid of and difficult to say whether they're from age or from the storage situation. We're both dreading the process of dealing with a claim with the movers and figuring out how to get the instruments fixed if they are. Let's just hope for the best.

Our furniture (or at least the furniture that we are not replacing) is back in the house, and about 60% of it has been cleaned. Once we finish cleaning and unpacking for immediate needs (clothes & kitchen stuff), we'll embark on unpacking and cleaning the contents of the 75 boxes still in storage. We're planning on paying for the storage locker for the month of February - so that should give us plenty of time to deal with our stuff. Oh, all our stuff. Who actually needs 75 boxes worth of stuff?! I'm hoping by the end of this, it won't be us. :)

And amidst all of this change, we are also moving Benjamin into a new daycare program. There is now space in the small church Montessori program that has been at the top of our list for almost one year. Today was his first "transition" day into the program - where he and I spent an hour visiting the class together. Mark continues the transition tomorrow - and I think he leaves Benjamin in the room for about 15 minutes. Our little man has been such a trooper - and I think he will transition well. He slept in 4 different places over the last four nights - as we moved from the loft to a hotel, to another hotel, to our house (until I decided the next day that it was still too fumy), back to the loft...

Anyway, it is with mixed emotions that we make this move to the new program. I'll have to write more about that in another blog entry.

In the meantime, please pray/think good thoughts that the fumes will dissipate, the dust will soon settle (and not contain lead particles, which I OBSESS about these days), and that our house will soon be a healthy place for Benjamin to live. Oh yeah, and that I too will soon stop obsessing about whether the house is "settled" enough to live in 24-7. And finally, that Benjamin will make a smooth transition into his new class. Thanks. :)

I'll try to take pictures of the house soon and post them - but unless I do so before Sunday, it may be a while. The router for our internet is packed away somewhere in those 75 boxes...