First week in the new house

We are in and getting settled! The list of things to buy, things to fix, things to re-arrange, etc is always in my head but things are quite livable.

Friday morning my parents came up to help with painting and projects at the new house.

We did the big furniture move on Saturday and it went well, great weather and lots of willing hands (hooray!).

Sunday my good friend Becky came over to help me organize the kitchen. I stuck her with the tedious job of cutting the shelf liner to fit our cupboards while I opened boxes and tried to organize things. The kitchen has very little counter space, more limited cupboard space (although some cupboards go up so high I have to be on the 2nd step of a step-stool to reach things!) has no dishwasher and had no microwave. The microwave I decided was a priority so purchased one on Sunday. Dishwasher we will wait and see on. If we put one in, that means less cupboard space for me. Counter-space we plan to supplement with some sort of table or butcher block counter or something. Before move-in we had talked about remodeling the kitchen in a year or two so I do not want to spend much money if things are going to change and old things will no longer fit after the remodel. We will see. The stove and oven are gas and are an adjustment for me, not to mention that there is no working exhaust fan for them which makes me nervous.

I have only walked through the yard once. It is small and in need of some serious TLC!

We upgraded from 1 bathroom to 2 1/2 and they all get a lot of use! Etta is using the potty consistently for poops and we decided we were sick of her using the little babybjorn potty that we had to clean out. So Matt installed toilet seats that have a built-in kid-size seat (genius!). Within one minute of him installing it upstairs int he girls bathroom, we had one girl sitting on it to poop and the other waiting to try it out for pee. Then 10 minutes later he put one in on the main floor toilet and they both had to try again!

The neighborhood feels so quite! We have taken some nice walks around the block on the sidewalks, and the girls love looking at the different houses and yards and seeing how many cats they can spot. Yesterday we walked to Greenlake so we could play at the playground there. Pushing the double stroller up the hill to our house afterwords was quite an effort, but we will try to do it a few more times before the weather gets too nasty. Along the way to Greenlake, just a short walk from our house, is the elementary school that Addie will most likely attend in 2 years.

My mom took some pictures but I have not had the time to look through them yet. I will try to take some of my own soon too.

In other news: our old house now officially has the upstairs rented as well (I need to take the keys off my key-ring!). Matt spent some late nights doing fix-it projects there and it looked really nice, but I was not too emotional about the transition. The girls and I had been visiting the old house once a day so I could check my email on the laptop I left there, because we did not get internet set up here until last night. So we had time to see it vacant and run around the empty rooms and then come back to our new home. While we were there today doing walk-through paperwork with the new renters, I picked what might be my last load of tomatoes. They have been flourishing! I made a quadruple batch of homemade pasta sauce earlier this week, and now I need to again! I won't say I am actually sick of homegrown tomatoes, but my enthusiasm for them has been satiated for now. In a month or so the apples should be ripe on the trees at the old house, and the renters know we intend to come back to pick them!

And lastly, a quick snippet of our first night here: at 3:30am Matt & I were woken by a thud! and a crying girl. Addie had fallen out of her bed. And gotten a bloody nose! When her bed was moved in, the safety rails were put on the wall side, but when I pointed it out to her she said she wanted to try sleeping in it like that. I thought it was worth a try, but we switched the bed around after that experience :)

That's all for now. I am going to go enjoy the new house some more!