Lots o' Work Ahead

We finally got the keys on Thursday last week and have been trying very hard to create order out of chaos ever since.  

Next time you move, I highly recommend ordering up PODS for your move.  They drop the POD off in front of your house, you fill it up with your belongings, then they either come and take it to the new place or put into storage until you're ready for it.  Expensive, but much more convenient than putting things in storage because there's a month gap between the old place and the new place as there was for me.  

We filled up two of the big ones and still had things left over.  Ugh.  This is the first one, that was delivered on Saturday to the new house. We emptied it into the house/garage (mostly garage), and will be spending the next few days assimilating the goods into the much smaller new house.  The second one will be delivered Friday.

But before any assimilating, we needed to get a few essential chores done.  The people who flipped the house didn't do all that good a job, slapping paint seemingly randomly and not cleaning anything.  

First up: Removing carpet.  It's new carpet, newly laid, but I really really hate carpet, so out it is going.  

It's a bit of work to pull it out, and yes, we'll be living on bare concrete until we decide for sure what to do with those floors (and have the shekels to do it), but we'd rather live on the concrete than the carpet. At least you can clean it, which, given what we found under those NEWLY LAID carpets, clearly was not a priority to whomever flipped this house.

This is what we found under the carpets, piles of it.  Ugh.  This is what I do not like about carpet!  You have no idea what's really under it and it's impossible to keep clean.  Good riddance, and it'll go off to the Habitat for Humanity store later this week.

When we got to the kitchen, we found that the cabinets had been painted without cleaning or priming (no lie, there were gobs of food spills that were just painted over), and this is what we found happened when we tried to clean it all up:

It was hideously disgusting, but it's clean now.  Only problem is that the outside of the cabinets were also painted without cleaning or priming, so we will eventually need to strip the paint off of them too.  

But that's okay.  It's mine, so I can do as I like with those kitchen cabinets!

Then on to the garage:

Before we could start using the garage as a staging area, we had to clean and clear out the battered cabinets that are in there now.  They were filled with cans of paint--full, partially full, and these, which are empty.  Not only that, but all three bins were filled with construction debris, so we needed to empty the recycling and yard waste bins before we used them for what they are supposed to be used for.  A trip to the dump is in our immediate future.

The yard's a disaster, too.  The grass is lush and green and way too long for the push mower I bought, so I've had to hire someone to come in and restore some order to the greenery before I start playing with it.

Once the carpets were out and the garage semi-neat (it still needs paint very badly), we were faced with the POD:

All of this needed to get out of the POD and into the house.  And it's only one POD!  We've been working on this for a few days, and finally have most of it at least temporarily incorporated.  

Not all the glassware is even here, but at least what is here is finding its home again (after anchoring this Billy shelf from Ikea securely to the wall).

And once the cabinets were cleaner, we could start putting what food we have away.  

This is just a start.  We're all tired of it, but perhaps nobody is quite as knackered as the dog:

We're all rather envious of her ability to find a safe corner somewhere and let the humans do all the work.

It's a start, after six days in the new place.  And since I'm back to work next week, it's going to go more slowly.  

But it's mine, so that's okay.