Progress

Richard has threatened to chain me to the laptop until I write and post something for the blog, so here is my very first blog post ever.  I hope you’re as ambivalent about this experience as I am!

He suggested that I use this space to update our vast readership of 3 (he insists it’s more like 2o, but I think that the same 3 people just read each post like 7 times…) about what’s been going on in lovely Virginia Beach.  We’ve been surprisingly productive, mostly because there really isn’t much else to do.  Since we made the very regrettable decision to leave all of our stuff in storage for the first month in order to lay flooring without having to move furniture from room to room as we go, we have no couch, no TV, no Wii, no Xbox, no Netflix…in other words, none of the usual time wasting devices that have served us so well in the past.  We do have our laptops and the internet, and the first season of Lost on DVD, but we still find ourselves with several hours a day to fill.   During those hours, we mainly do one of two things – buy stuff or fix things.

The buying stuff component has been taking up most of our time lately, primarily because we have so few of the things that we need to update the house, let alone live in it.  On our trip east, we were limited in how much we could bring due to the ridiculously huge cat carrier we bought for Neko, which took up 3/4 of the backseat.  Considering he spent most of the trip on one of our laps, that ended up being a great buy.  In any case, we quickly discovered that although it is possible to live without things like chairs, tables, dishes, curtains, etc., it’s not very comfortable living.  So we’ve become regular shoppers at the 24 hour Walmart, as we only seem to need things after 11 pm.  We’ve also been picking up the supplies we need to bring this house into the current century decor-wise.  So far, we’ve bought lots of paint, laminate flooring, carpet, plumbing materials, and the dozens of parts needed to make a new banister.  And of course, for each project we begin, there are the requisite tools that one doesn’t really need for apartment living.  This list is shorter but more expensive – Richard has gleefully bought himself a miter saw, a shop vac, a new drill, two kinds of automatic painters (which admittedly work incredibly well), and several other hand-held tools that don’t require a power source.   We’re also in the process of buying new appliances, as our house did not come with such luxuries as a refrigerator, washer, or dryer.  Living without a fridge is painful, so a good chunk of time has been devoted to shopping for one of those.  And although our one trip to the laundromat was pretty cool (did anyone else know that they have those massive industrial washers that can do 8 loads at once?  very neat), it was also surprisingly expensive and time consuming – I wouldn’t want to visit every week for the next few years.

Neko after his brush with our new paint

Aside from spending money, we’ve also spent some time on actual renovations and repairs.  Richard successfully fixed our upstairs bathroom sink, which was suffering from some very very old pipes, and we’ve finished painting both of the upstairs bedrooms.  Our only previous experience with painting was pretty negative, but painting so far has been OK.  Our “decorative” plaster walls are a bit challenging to work with, as they don’t accept paint evenly, but I’m generally happy with the end result (you can see some pictures of the process in our new photo album [coming soon], in case you’re curious as to what we’ve done).  The only annoyance this time has been trying to keep the cat from getting into the paint.  Neko has developed a love of corners, something which he didn’t have much access to in our overfilled apartment, and during our first day of painting he snuggled into one and wound up partially blue (picture on the right).   Richard is also in the process of building us a new banister to replace the ugly metal one that we currently have.  Building a banister is a lot more complicated than you’d think, so I’m sure he’ll be posting himself to describe the process once he’s done.

So that’s basically been our lives for the past week and a half.  The next two weeks will likely be more of the same, as we still need to paint the downstairs, remove the hideous wood paneling, drywall, lay tile, install laminate flooring, have our carpet installed, and hopefully have the movers bring our stuff so that we can begin to unpack.   And once all that’s all over, we get to start work on the kitchen and bathrooms.  The fun seems like it will just never end.