Are You Still There?

Sorry it took me so long to post again. It's just that, as you may have imagined, life has finally caught up with me and left me without energy to do anything else. For some reason the little "energy" I had left when I was moving out of the other house motivated me to write and write on the blog, but now I've been feeling fully drained.

It's taking us really really long to get settled in for a few reasons:

- Since this home is a fixer-upper we wanted to do a few things before we moved in. For example, I suggested that we paint the study (downstairs bedroom) before putting the computer and books in, since it's one of the most packed rooms in the house. It didn't happen yet because...

- We needed to install the washer and drier because we didn't want to go out to buy more underwear and school uniform pieces of clothing for Kelvin. This "simple" task took several days and hasn't been fully completed yet because we have decided to do some other things and also found little "surprises" in every turn: 1) K decided to put some vinyl tiles on the floor of the "closet style" laundry and then he also painted the wall and installed a floorboard (which has since come unglued in several places :( ); 2) We found out only when we were finally going to install everything that our drier has a three prong plug, but the outlet on the wall has four. We bought a kit to change the prong, but K hasn't had the time to do it yet; 3) the cold water faucet
for the washer is leaking. K was going to replace it, but hasn't been able to because we can't find where to close the main supply... So we're turning the water on to do the washing and then switching it off afterwards. Thankfully I can dry the clothes outside since we have a clothes line!!!

We won't get the study painted tomorrow either because the weather is lovely and warm and I really really want to go to the beach (the NJ shore).

I did some progress yesterday -- I painted the bright pink closet in the boys' room a light cream color. Mine is next.

The kitchen is almost done -- it also took me forever to put things away since I don't have a pantry there and the cabinets are not the same depth as those I had at the other house. Too bad it's going to take us many months, or maybe over a year, to be able to afford to redo the whole kitchen. At least I finally replaced the ugly curtains on Thursday. Pictures are forthcoming.

Let's see what else. I assembled Linton's crib in the beginning of the week, but Kelvin is still sleeping on his mattress on the floor since we can't find the screws to assemble his bed. I finally put away most of the boys' clothes since we brought their old chests of drawers, but we don't have any for us... so, all of our clothes are still in boxes... what fun...

The yard is lovely and the boys spend a lot of time playing outdoors. Kelvin is doing great in school and Linton has been fine (even though he's been a bit sick with a cold in the past two weeks).

There are moments in which I feel I love this place, but others in which I feel frustrated that the house will never be finished, that it's just going to take too long to redo everything that needs to be redone. Ups and downs, but I guess that's normal.

I hope to be back soon with more upbeat blogging, as well as photos, OK? I hope you're still there.