Boy am I sore....

There's really nothing to compare to the unbridled pain after moving
one's overabundance of stuff from one locale to another. I took off
from work on Friday, and Shirley dropped me at the U-Haul joint at
7:30am to pick up the 26' truck I'd reserved. I should have taken it as
an omen for the day when they had to dump TWELVE quarts of oil into the
beast before I could drive it off (apparently that's only about half of
the oil that they hold). So after waiting for the oil to finally get
topped off, and adding 20 gallons of diesel to the tank, I made it to
the apartment at 8:35am to meet the 2 gents we'd hired to help us move.

These guys had helped us before - actually they pretty much did ALL of
our last move - and it's wonderful to hire some folks to do the
schlepping of furniture and heavy boxes down from the 3rd floor
apartment. Unless one of those guys has the flu. Great. So I ended up
working with them, since I was at the post-full-flu stage of lots of
coughing, rather than the full-on stage of weak and snot-filled lungs
and coughing. By 8:30pm we had finally transfered everything from the
apartment, along with the stuff from our totally packed 10' by 10' by
8' high storage unit, which had cradled much of our belongings for the
past year. My body will never forgive me.

Knowing that my body would never forgive me (and it hasn't so far; each
day it displays a new level of rage) - I've spent the past 2 days doing
all manner of settling-in chores: fixing the plumbing in one of the
sinks where the genius plumbers plumbed the hot and cold backwards,
working on a leak in the sink in the other bathroom, installing an
under-sink water filter in the kitchen (details and pics about that
adventure later), installing a toilet paper holder in one bathroom, a
couple of towel racks in the bathrooms, a swag hook and repositioning a
kitchen light fixture, front door brass kick plate, front door security
peep hole, repair damage to outdoor table (it apparently got some owies
during the cross-country move last year) and assemble the table back to
it's former self...

And Shirley's not gotten off chore-free either. She's been faux-painting and regular painting several walls (we hate
plain boring bland lackluster white walls!), unpacking lots of boxes,
assembled the barbecue that we bought yesterday, and much more.

Now I am going to skip the 2nd half of the Superbowl (I mainly just
wanted to catch Paul McCartney in the halftime show), and I'm gonna go
slather some Ben-Gay all over my shoulders and neck and go to sleep for
many hours. I'm really looking forward to work tomorrow, when I get to just sit on my bum and think :-)

The house is done...er, ready for us to start

A few weeks ago, this was the appearance of our house. Lovely trim color, huh? What genius came up with that scheme? It was not us! But we had signed and agreed to what - on paper - looked ok. So we talked to the builder and paid a few bucks to the painter to change the trim color.

Here's how the house looks today, after landscaping and after, um, 'adjusting' the colors a little!

This is a pic of the pool and decking, after the pool guys applied the final coat of paint on Sunday. This just blows me away! Every time I look at this, I just feel a big Ahhhhhhh.....

And like any self-respecting anal retentive type, we primed and painted the garage floor before ever using the garage :) ...ok, to be fair, I wasn't feeling very well, so our son Ben did much of the priming, and then Shirley and I applied the paint this evening. If we're feeling well enough, we may see about moving our stuff to the house on Friday or Saturday. We'll see.

Almost move-in time

OK, Shirley keeps beating me to the posts and pics ...but here's one that she doesn't have (ha-HA!). Anyway, as my better half has posted , we're getting set to close on the new house. This pic is from the family room looking to the kitchen. We LOVE the openness! You can see into the front entry on the left of the pic. Next Friday, assuming all goes well with closing, we WILL be posting pics of us jumping into the pool! Hey, we don't care if it's gonna be some frickin' COLD water. This is Florida and we have a new house and pool, and we'll be damned if we're not gonna jump in the pool to christen our home :-) ...Anyone have a wet suit I can borrow?

Sod should be down tomorrow

houseSod,
originally uploaded by Joe Litton.

Shirley was still at work when I got home (Yup, she started a new job today...back to TWO incomes - yay!) ...so I swung by the house site to see what was new. There were at least a couple of gents working inside (final work on texture/paint), so I didn't go in. I know *I* don't like folks looking over my shoulder when I'm working, so I prefer to let these folks do their job without me peering at their work. But I could see all this sod piled up (how could I miss it?) In fact, there was a little more stacked in the lot across the street. So I suspect that tomorrow evening we will see that a lawn has magically appeared. And that means I'll be needing to mow. My goal is to find a battery-powered mower and rig a solar panel in the back that I can use to charge it. THAT will be another blog post (or several) as I get that figured out :-)

Pool pad poured at house

They
poured the concrete today for the pad around the pool. There's still a
coating to go on top of the concrete, and a screened cage that will go
around it. After we're in, the solar panels for the pool heat will be
installed, and a salt water filter system (keeps the water clean
without using chlorine). I think I need to go do another test on one of
our tropical drink recipes :-)

Oh, and a few more pics are in the "house" category on my Flickr page.