Sunday, February 27, 2011

Goodbye Spiral Staircase


The first change we made at our new house was to get rid of the spiral staircase.  It was on the right immediately inside the front door, and it went up into the master bedroom.  It was made of black iron, but it had a rubbed finish so that gold showed through the rubbed areas.  Noah didn't want to walk on it by himself, but it was a climbing magnet (a very unsafe one) for Isaac.  We were sure that some owner had installed the staircase over the years as a renovation, so we were very surprised to see the spiral staircase in the original blueprints for the house.

We thought we had found a guy who would remove it for free because he wanted to install it in his own house, but that didn't pan out.  Matt tried to unbolt it himself, but that didn't work.  He tried using a sawzall to cut through it, but that didn't work either.  Finally, Matt found someone who would make it disappear for the great rate of $50.  It's been the best $50 we've spent on the house so far!

Noah had so much fun looking up at Matt through the hole.


New sheet rock was installed right before we moved in, and the wood floor beneath it was patched and repaired.  Goodbye spiral staircase!
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So Cozy


I took these pictures of Noah just a few days before we moved.  He was wearing his new sweatshirt and track pants for the first time and he said they felt so cozy, but it's much cuter when Noah says it himself because it sounds like "so tozy."  He's been "tozy" all winter long because he says his jammies feel so "tozy" and when we tuck him into bed he says "make me tozy."  Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and calls out for us just so we can come in and make him "tozy" again.

Sometimes when you feel "so tozy" you just have to dance!
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Friday, February 18, 2011

Moving is a Mess

The mess was bound to happen.  It was inevitable.  But, moving and the mess involved with it is starting to get cleaned up.  Time has flown by, and it's almost been a month since we moved to Charlotte.  The first week was a wild one, and we couldn't have survived if my parents hadn't been in town.  Really.  We couldn't have survived.  We probably would have tried to figure out how we could just call the whole thing off.  But, we made it through (story and pictures to follow...) and we're on the other side of the "hump."

God is good.  Life is good.  The move really has transformed our family life.  Matt can come home for lunch or pop in to play with the boys in the afternoon if he has an evening meeting.  We've had a number of family dinners at 5:30 on a weeknight.  It's wonderful.  And still surprising when I see his car pull in our driveway in the middle of the day.  It still doesn't quite register that he can just pop home for a few minutes.

I've been looking through our pictures from the last month and wondering where to start with our moving story.  It quickly became apparent that I should start with the mess...



and packing, packing, packing...



and boxes, boxes, boxes...



Isaac thought the whole thing was fun, and Noah was a very good packer and inspector.  He was very concerned about fragile items and looking around to make sure we didn't forget anything at our old house.

We were very blessed on our moving day to have the help of many friends who came to load up the biggest U-Haul truck available and then also load up about six additional cars and SUVs with left-overs that couldn't fit in the truck.



Which then created this mess in our new house.

We didn't have enough time to clean our new house before we moved, so thankfully my mom was such a big help and she cleaned the kitchen cabinets and painstakingly put contact paper in the drawers and shelves.  These cabinets and shelves really needed contact paper.  The paper really helped transform the kitchen and made it actually usable.  We found lots of evidence of past (hopefully past) bug life.  Ugh.

Moving and the mess involved with it has turned out to be quite therapeutic for us.  We have been able to take inventory of our (way too many) possessions, and let go of many of them.  We are donating and giving away so much more than I could have before the move.  There are already so many boxes that have been taped up for three months or so, and we have no idea what's in them, and we haven't missed whatever it is.  It's good for us to get rid of some of the stuff we've accumulated over the last nine years.  I'd almost recommend moving once in a while as a way to help let go of the extra baggage.  It's been a good process for us to go through.
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