Here’s the scoop

Oh my goodness, friends. Daily life has been plenty busy lately.  It’s been awhile… I think I was last here before the holidays, so here is an update on what’s been filling up my days and my head.  I am in need of a big-time break. I wish I could whisk myself off to a hotel for a few days. In the meantime, I’ll keep putting my feet up and massaging my hand muscles.

We are just days away from tearing down our home.  Actually, it was supposed to have happened by now, but there have been some crazy weather days here and everything is a little behind.  They are disconnecting electric panels and water pipes today and demo day is Monday. More to come about that soon, I’m sure!

Side note: Aside from the 4 extra weeks of summer we had after the storm, we’ve now had these 2 “snow” days and the Astros victory parade day off of school too.  It was a little absurd to cancel school just because the temperature dropped into the 20s, but Houston is just not prepared for that.  Essentially the entire city shut down since the roads were icy: city buses not running, trash collection cancelled, people working from home.  Plus this happened (see photo above).

We all know that I appreciate family time, but I really look forward to weekdays when my own projects can get done on my schedule in peace and quiet.  A 3-day weekend was expected, but not a 5-day weekend!

We are finalizing the plans to begin building our new home.  I am super excited about it too! I’m going to have a craft room and a small office space off the kitchen. And wait till you see our front porch! Right now what’s happening: we are beginning selections of things like bathtubs and appliances.  Also soil-testing, a property assessment for the construction loan, and the plans are in the hands of a structural engineer, who will also deal with floodplain and drainage issues.

We have moved from the apartment and into a rental home.  It was a hectic December as I packed up the apartment while scheduling all of the house utility disconnections, arranging for movers, and doing what I could in advance for the new house.  We had some rugs and furniture deliveries that went to the old house’s garage temporarily.

On the big day, we went from the apartment (completely forgetting to empty our storage closet there) to the old house to collect a few boxes and those rugs, and finally to the rental house. Our storage unit was delivered to the new house too so we were able to see what we had hurriedly packed up in August.  I paid for 4 people to come the following day just to empty most of the boxes, collapse them, and put them in our attic storage.  Wise investment! Now we have been living in the rental house for about 2 weeks. There is still plenty of stuff to arrange and put away, but at least I’m looking at only a few boxes. And I am slowly making it our home.  We’ll be here for at least a year.

We went on a fun Eastern Caribbean cruise.  Not the best timing really, as we moved the day after we returned from the cruise, but we’d made reservations long ago and it was too late to cancel.  We went to St. Kitts/Nevis, St. Maartin, San Juan, and Labadee, Haiti. We brought home stunning shells we collected, mostly in St. Maartin.

We are in Girl Scout cookie season. Please let me know if you want to order any! Going door-to-door has been difficult this year since our neighborhood is fairly empty.  Even our rental house neighborhood is under construction.

This is more of a “before” photo because I’m working on unpacking the office right now, but it does have my book fair planning stuff on it! The school book fair is coming up. This year it’s a one-day event because of lack of space.  We are in a temporary location this year and it’s a tight squeeze. I’ve had no trouble asking for help with xeroxing and other small jobs and I know the event going to be great.  It’s really a good feeling to be able to do something for our school community. The students really look forward to this every year so I’m glad they get a little piece of it… that’s something normal for us!

I have been assembling furniture more than before! Some instructions are simple and some make no sense.  Mr. B and I put together an IKEA sectional and that was a little much.  I don’t really know what will fit in our new house, so we haven’t spent a lot of money on things for the rental house.  That’s probably part of the assembly frustrations.  These are not quality goods!

I guess it seems frivolous to even say this, but we really have a lot of clutter! This morning I gave myself 20 minutes to collect as many items to donate as I could. I ended up with 3 giant boxes of 3-year-old games, books, toys, notebooks, closet hanging organizers, clothes, stuffed animals, etc. and 2 giant bags of trash. I got those outside just as the trash truck came down the street and felt pretty fantastic about myself! I will be going through it all in the coming days. It really makes moving harder being weighed down with so much.  The kitchen was fairly simple to unpack and put away this time because we’d lost so much.  Rather than a whole cabinet of tupperware, it was 2 items.  The closets and SG’s playroom… not so much.

I’ve been taking “before” photos so I can show you what I’ve been up to here.  Here’s one corner I tackled already:

More transformations to come, along with book reviews, cruise photos, and house updates.  I hope everyone is well out there!