Back To Normal...Whatever That Means

Our life is somewhat returning to normal...if there is such a thing.

It's been high excitement and busyness around here the past few weeks.

As you all know, we got the carpet laid upstairs on February 22nd. We spent that week getting our things moved upstairs and getting settled up there. We also started the process of moving things around downstairs and making the preparations for carpet to be laid down here on March 8th.

This past weekend (March 6th & 7th) was crazy busy getting all the last minute things done before Monday morning. Here's a rundown of a few things we Ross did!

• Moved the computer desk into the girls old room and starting setting up our new office.
• I began moving a lot of my books from the bookshelves in our old bedroom onto the shelves in the office.
• Making piles in the living room of all the rest of the books that had to be emptied off of the shelves so we Ross could paint our old room/new play room for the girls/guest bedroom.
• Going through all the massive piles in the living room and deciding where their permanent home needed to be. If it was going to be in the playroom/guest room, it got piled into the office until after the carpet was laid. The office didn't get carpet, we're eventually going to put hardwood floor in here.
• Ross laid some bamboo wood flooring at the front door so we wouldn't ruin our new carpet tracking in and out the front door.

Those are just the things that come to mind off the top of my head, plus trying to stay afloat with the laundry, dishes and other housework. We also squeezed in some more time with Ross' Uncle Vance. Saturday evening we went bowling and had pizza. And Sunday evening we went down to Ross' parents for some popcorn and cards.

During all the craziness, Ross took our computer to a buddy of his from work to have him clean it up for us and remove any junk it may have collected. It's 4 years old now, so it's about to become obsolete I'm afraid. I think we'll upgrade to a laptop when we do need a new computer and get rid of this big ole desk and get something much smaller that takes up less space.

Back to house stuff. We had to get everything up off of the floor that could be easily lifted and then the carpet installers were going to move the furniture out, rip up the old carpet, lay the new and move the furniture back in......or so we thought.

Monday morning comes, we're ready. The installers arrive and are surprised to see furniture and carpet. They weren't expecting to have to do that because apparently that cost an extra $234 over what we had already paid to have the install done. When we purchased our carpeting, Ross made sure that they knew our upstairs was empty because it was new construction, but our downstairs had furniture and old carpet to be ripped out. They said, "Oh, that's fine." Something got lost in translation....bummer.

The installers were nice enough to help us move the little bit of furniture that we had out and rip up the old carpet, simply because they didn't want to come back another day, because we were not about to pay to have them do it.

That process took no time at all and soon they were on a roll getting the new carpet laid out. It was a gorgeous day out, so we all just hung out on the front porch and Isabel played in the pack-n-play and Alexis ran around being crazy. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. The installers got one of the seams glued and then had to wait for it to dry, so they left to take a break. When they got back, we ran into Subway for some lunch. By the time we got back they were almost finished. They helped Ross move the big, heavy entertainment center back in and then he and I did the rest ourselves.{It was only living room furniture because the other room was already completely empty from being painted and the we had the office so crammed full of stuff you couldn't even get into the room.}

We're checking things out and being all super excited about how great it feels to have new carpet and be "done" with our monster of a project that took almost a year to complete. I haven't decided if we are being to critical or if the installer did a bad job. We started finding things we didn't like. In the kitchen doorway, it looks like he cut the carpet just a smidgen shorter than he should have and you can see a little blank stop under those little transition strips when you go from carpet to some other floor type. The carpet in the closet of the playroom doesn't even look like it was stretched at all. It's real loose and bubbly in places.

Those things probably aren't that big of a deal really, but then I found something else that ticked me off. They put a hole in our wall, patched it very poorly, and didn't even bother telling us about it. It really doesn't bother me that it happened, our house is old and the drywall in the living room isn't the best, but they really should have told us about it happening. It reminded me of the time when my brothers broke something on the wall and were desperately trying to glue it and blow drying the glue before mom got home, trying to fix it so they wouldn't get into trouble. It was just very unprofessional in my opinion.

So, while we are very happy that we have new carpet, we are unhappy with the service we received. Someone from Lowe's will be out on Monday to look everything over and decide what needs to be done.

Moving on....

It feels so nice to have come so far with our house. I finally have a living room again! There is tons of floor space for Isabel to roll/drag/crawl around in. And there is only one small basket of toys out there. The rest are in the playroom.

I love it that I can tell Alexis to go play and make a big mess and I don't have to pick it up 15 times a day just to be able to walk across my living room! We are working on getting her to understand that she needs to leave the toys in the playroom, because we made it just especially for her and Isabel to play in.

It's felt so nice to have this complete feeling about the project that I've kind of slacked off the past few days and not done much, but it's felt so nice. I know Ross is so relieved that it's finally "done" (still have those little odds and ends things to finish up), he was getting so burnt out on doing it.

My head is such a jumble of things right now, I'm having a hard time organizing my thoughts and getting them out on the keyboard, so I'm going to end this post and start another one about different stuff that's been going on.

PS. I didn't proof read this, so I apologize if there are any huge mistakes in it. Thanks to Firefox I know my spellings okay!