I haven’t forgotten that I’m halfway through my Pacific Northwest trip report, but things have been a bit crazy over the last few days. You see, on Friday, we bought a new home. Hooray!

Even better: initially we had planned on painting the lower level (living room/dining room/breakfast area/kitchen), plus the three bedrooms upstairs. It was looking like it was going to be a long slog of work (although the assistance of genet and takaza‘s mom would have made things easier), but on Thursday we got a call from the painting contractor who had painted the place initially. He does painting jobs in the evenings as well and quoted us an excellent price to do the painting for us. His timing was fortuitous, since the amount of cash we were supposed to bring to the closing was a lot less than we had initially expected, so we actually have the reserves to pay someone to do the work. Sold! Plus, we get to keep our sanity intact.

We celebrated on Friday night with Genet and roho by setting up some folding chairs in the breakfast area, ordering some pizza, and enjoying a couple of beers. On Saturday, we dove into the projects we had planned: I replaced the kitchen faucet with something a little better suited for us and I installed a ceiling fan in the master bedroom while Dan and Lydia prepped the garage floor for coating. On Sunday, I did some fabric shopping with Dan’s mom and we picked out material for the curtains in the guest bedroom, then Lydia and Dan’s mom helped us put down an epoxy coating on the garage floor.

So now we’re into the home stretch before the big moving day on Saturday. Last night Dan and I moved all the boxes that we have packed down to the office, pretty much filling that room. Tonight I’ll be breaking down the shelving unit in the garage and we’ll be taking that and the chest freezer over to the new place. We’ve got some packing to do tonight as well – hopefully we can clear out a couple of closets and maybe a little more of the kitchen.

Oh yes, we also seem to have a washer and dryer that we don’t need – the washer is a GE Model #WCSR2090G5WW and the dryer is a GE Model #DBXR463GG7. These have never been used, and they retail for $850 together – we’ll be happy to sell them for $500 to whoever is interested.