The Move

You know when life happens, and you don't think much of it, but then when the occasion arises that you have to tell somebody about what happened, they think you're crazy? Happened to me.


Rick spent all of Thursday working on the house - taping off windows, doors, light fixtures, etc. Then he rented a professional paint sprayer so that we could prime and paint basically the whole house. It was peach inside - have I mentioned that? Rick is not a fan of peach. Oh, and he also scraped popcorn off the ceiling, and had to prime and paint that. So we picked out a khaki color we really like for the walls ("Cottonwood", actually) and off Rick went to paint the house. Friday, I left work early and we headed out to Weatherford to prime and paint. It was a beautiful Friday - 70 degrees or so - but was supposed to get colder that night, so I packed a warm outfit for Caleb for the evening, and we headed out.


So Rick got started. And everything was going swimmingly, until the painter broke. (The painter machine broke, not Rick the painter.) I'm going to say that was about 7:30pm. I was at WalMart running errands (where a young guy asked me how old I was and then said I didn't look that old. Since when is 29 "that old"?) Once I got back, I found Rick covered in Kilz primer and fairly dejected looking. We loaded up the machine and went to Home Depot, and they thankfully gave us a new one for no charge! (Thanks, Home Depot!) By the time we got back to the house though, it was probably 9:30 pm. We realized we were going to have to stay all night to finish, because our friends from the church were coming to move us at 7:30 Saturday morning!


With a baby, all of this got a little more complicated. We had enough diapers and food (since I'm the food), but we did not have warm clothes for the next day, or really even blankets. We had two towels that we bought at Wal Mart when we realized we forgot to bring towels to shower with from Plano. At 9:30 we said, ok, we'll just sleep in the car with the windows down, because it's SO nice out. At 10:30 when we were going to take our nap, the cold air had blown in and it was literally freezing. So what did we have ... two towels and one blanket from the car. (My mom and PauPau Hardy always say, never travel without a blanket in the car!) The floor in the house is tile (not warm), and the only room in the house that didn't smell like paint fumes was the bathroom. I'm going to guess it was about 6 feet by 5 feet, because I don't think Rick could completely stretch out in it. Add a tub, toilet, and sink and there's not much floor space. So we put the towels on the floor to keep sort of warm, we shared the blanket from the car, we wrapped Caleb in one of Rick's shirts to keep warm and used our change of clothes for pillows, and we napped on the bathroom floor for 3 hours. (Caleb napped comfortably in his car seat in the tub.) It made perfect sense at the time.


We couldn't both lie on our backs, because shoulder to shoulder we didn't fit in the bathroom. So somebody had to be up on one side all the time, but it made for good cuddling, and all in all it was a little chilly, but it wasn't that bad. After a 3 hour nap, I got up to feed Caleb and Rick got up to finish priming, then we put Caleb back down and we taped and painted all night. Side note: We're too old for this sort of thing.


Since then, we've been chastised by the church, because there were probably 5 empty bedrooms that we could have called people and asked to use within about 5 minutes from our house. But seriously, late Friday night, the bathroom floor just seemed like the place to be.


And hey, by 6:30 the next morning we were done! Except with the back room, because I can't decide what color I want it. Rick had just enough time to shower, hitch a ride with the guys from the church, and head to Plano to load up all of our stuff from storage and the apartment!

It's an adventure I know we'll remember. Saturday night we slept on the couches at least. :) (our mattress had to stay in Plano since we're living there until Friday)

But the move went great - the guys from our church were amazing, and organized a truck and a moving crew and got us completely taken care of. The ladies from the church had food for us and helped us clean, and one incredible woman (Hi Linda!) came over and helped me scrub the floors all day since the painters we hired didn't put plastic down. (yes, that would be Rick and me) Apparently renting a professional painter machine did not make us professional painters. Rick's mom and sister came and cleaned our kitchen, one family took the painting machine back for us ... we had so much help, it was really a great move.

All in all, we're moved in! (mostly) It's so exciting. Some day I'm going to have time to blog while I have pictures too ... it just hasn't happened yet.