Seven Weeks After The Move…

Where am I? Well, the boxes are still full to the brim for the most part. The painter spent the last seven days doing “prep” work, basically filling cracks and repairing imperfections in the floor and walls. I had no idea about the details of the preparations involved. I just thought he was going to bring in gallons of paint and slop them on the walls. That’s what my father used to do. The only prep work my father did was to push all the furniture into the center of the room.

Of course, I can’t unpack anything until all this work is done. Today he came early and with a helper. The helper is sanding the doors outside while he finishes prepping. The doors are stain dark cherry but I am having them painted white. Before anyone else has a stroke (like my daughter and cousin), the doors have many imperfections that cannot be eliminated without a costly restoration job. It would be cheaper to buy new doors. Also, I like the idea of white because the house tends to be dark and I want to lighten and brighten it up. I’ve seen the way the white doors look in another house and it has a very nice clean appearance.

It feels like I have been surrounded by a fortress of boxes for months…oh, that’s right, I have been. My house sold in March and I started packing even before that. Now it’s September! It looks like there will be about seven days more of painting, which may start tomorrow. What can I do in the meantime? I can’t unpack and put more stuff in the way. I can’t clean when the next day more dirt and dust are stirred up. My hands are tied.

This “limbo” state I am in comes at a convenient time though. It gives me a chance to help my friend, Kelly, promote her new book, Breaking Limbo. In a way, I am literally breaking my own limbo by sitting on the couch with my computer looking for ideas. It allows me to research different suggestions and websites where I can post her book, it’s reviews, and link on Amazon. So all in all, I am still being productive in my new role as editor.

Once the painting is completed I will be unpacking as much as possible. I still have things to buy like a media center, curtains, area rugs and bathroom towels and accessories. I will have plenty of cleaning to do too…not looking forward to that. Right now I am keeping up with laundry and cooking an occasional meal. It’s even hard to cook when people are working in you house. In fact, although I am sitting around all day, I am totally exhausted. I don’t quite understand it.

In a week or two I should be hearing from the contractor who is doing the front yard/patio. At least that work will be outside and I’ll be able to get things done inside (or so I hope). But, in any event, that will be the last of the work we are doing for now. I will be concentrating on the inside of the house and getting that all done before the holidays. I set Thanksgiving as my goal to be done and settled, so we will see.

Getting The House Ready To Sell…

I’m exhausted and we have hardly begun! Last week the painter came to paint my bedroom. It really needed some plastering and a good paint job. It took him two days to do it, but it took me several days to take out all the knick knacks, books, pictures, and so many little odds and ends. I filled five boxes with those items, but I am leaving them packed away. I only put a handful of them back out. Still, it was exhausting for me to get all those things out of the room.

Meanwhile, the painter put a lot of scratches on my nightstands. I was upset over that. I have had this furniture for 29 years and, though I put a few scratches on it myself over the years, I never put as many as he had. It was making me a little sick, so I hurried to get my cleaning supplies and used an almond stick to hide all the scratches and then some furniture polish. The next morning I covered them with towels and told him about the scratches, which he pretended not to know about. This is why I hate to have anyone come in the house to do any work. It’s always something. I was still trying to decide if I wanted to keep this bedroom set or get a new one when I move, maybe for my 30th anniversary next year. I did a little looking online and so far I didn’t see anything I liked better than what I have now. I polished all the furniture last Friday, in preparation of bringing everything back into the room. It still looks great. I am now leaning towards keeping it. I still have a few things to get rid of before I am done with this room.

Yesterday my husband and I went to Home depot to pick up a few things that I could use for some cosmetic repairs. I am not going to redo the whole house, someone else may not like what I do to it. I’d rather keep the price low and let them fix it up themselves. One of the things we got were 48 marigold plants. When I first bought the house, one of the things that caught my eye were the little flowers in the front and along the entire side of the house. It may not seem like much, but it made it feel like a home to me. So I decided to get a bunch of them and recreate that little homey feeling. All the bending wore me out. I only managed to plant 24 of them and them I gave up. I will hopefully get to the others today. While I was doing that, my newly retired husband was trimming the branches on the back tree that were hanging a little low. I also picked up a little wood to fix the back steps a little, before my husband gives them a coat of paint. They are a little run down, but they’ll look a lot better after they are painted. I have a couple of other inexpensive ideas for the backyard too. We’ll see what happens.

Now I am resting a little before doing anything else. The last thing I need to do is hurt my back. I have too much to do and hope to be done in a couple of weeks. In the process I am collecting a few black and blue marks and scratches. That’s the price I’ll have to pay for trying to do a few things myself. My husband isn’t very handy at all and I have little strength, so we make a great pair.

I’ll keep blogging about our “progress” or lack of it. I heard on the news that the housing market has been doing a lot better, so maybe our timing, at least, is good.

Financial Retirement Tip: I am going to pass this along for anyone who is retiring or whose husband is retiring any time soon. We got some advice from a couple of people that my husband should take his full pension, instead of one that would provide money for me after his GOD FORBID early demise. The financial advisers suggest taking the full pension and then taking out a large life insurance policy on him in the event he should die early, so that I would have the insurance money to replace the lost pension. The insurance probably costs a lot less than the reduced pension he would get if he took the pension option providing survivor benefits for me. So think about that and ask someone before you cross that bridge. It may be a good option for you too.

P.S. Sorry I haven't been able to write the past few days, but to tell the truth I have been too tired to think.

Painting With Dad…

Every couple of years my father would paint a couple of rooms in our apartment. He made it look like child’s play. It was nothing for him to do the ceilings, woodwork and walls over a weekend. He’d start very early in the morning on Saturday and by Sunday afternoon he was done. As I got older, I wanted to help Dad, it looked like fun. My brother on the other hand, never wanted to touch a paint brush and could care less about it. My father would let me do the woodwork while he was busy painting the walls and ceilings. I love it. He would say, “she should have been the boy and he should have been the girl.”

But, as I got older and married my husband, painting became more of a chore and hard work. When we bought our house over 23 years ago, we wanted to paint all the rooms and closets before moving in. We allowed the month of August to accomplish this. It was the hottest August I could remember at the time, so that didn‘t help. After a week of working, we were getting no where fast. My mother felt sorry for us. We were so inept for such a big job and didn‘t have extra money to hire someone to do it for us. My mother volunteered my father to help us. He laughed. He knew what he could do and he wouldn’t refuse. He came to the house and open a can of paint. In a couple of hours he had put on the first coat on the ceiling and walls. I would work on the woodwork like old times. By lunch time he had put on a primer coat to the second room. After lunch he went back to the first room and applied the second coat. I was still doing woodwork. My husband was in another room, trying to put on a primer coat. The next day we went back and my father had finished the second room in the morning hours. Then he went over the room my husband was trying to paint the day before. I was still doing woodwork! By the end of the third day, three bedrooms were completed, woodwork and all, because my father did the woodwork that I could not get to. The fourth day my father did the hallway, upstairs and downstairs. It was amazing how he filled that roller with paint and rolled it back and forth with ease. And, yes I worked on the wood work, while my husband painted the upstairs closets. On the fifth day, my father painted the kitchen and pantry. Those rooms were much smaller and he was able to give them each two coats of paint with ease. My husband and I would have never finished the painting if we had worked every day for 30 days. But, my father, who was 66 years old and retired, put us both to shame. He had practically painted the entire house in 5 days! He laughed when it was completed. He knew how much work he had saved us and that we would have never gotten it all done ourselves.

My father was an amazing man. He was as strong as an ox and always there to help whenever we needed him. His hands were big and rough from his work in construction, but he was as gentle as a lamb with my baby girls. His heart was as big as they come and he told us and showed us he loved us every day of our lives.