Life is Grand!

So, I actually have a little time at work to write about what's going on with our house and everything! I can't blog at home because. . .well, you'll read about it.

We closed on our home the week of September 4 and moved in the following week. It's been quite the adventure. Because the previous owners live out of state, they sent their papers by mail overnight when we closed, but it didn't get there that day like it was supposed to. So we had to wait to get our keys the next day when the paper work arrived, putting us a day behind schedule right off. Fortunately we got a lot of help from friends, family, and Church wards (old and new) so we could move out of our old apartment on time.

Since then pretty much everything has taken longer than planned--which is always expected, but it seems like there have been some unexpected, exceptional hurdles:

--Sprinkler pipes buried exactly where we planned to finish fencing the yard.
--Leaking through the bathroom fans when it rains hard.
--A huge, previously unknown-to-us mouse infestation, which meant I got to basically pull everything out of the kitchen after I'd put it away, re-clean it out, set out poison and traps, and put everything away for a second time (thankfully I think we have the mouse problem conquered).
--No internet yet, since every phone jack in the house seems to be broken and we can't seem to get them fixed.
--Tyson is putting a shower into the master bath (it only has a tub right now) and at one point a pipe broke. After searching a half an hour for the water shut-off valve, we found it only to discover that the handle has been broken off. Fortunately Tyson was able to get some pliers and twist the tiny bit of screw that is left of the broken handle and turn it off.

Since it's an older manufactured home there are just a lot of quirky things about it that are tricky to fix or replace, like the bathroom fans, because they have to be the exact same shape and design and such as the old ones to get them to work.

And then all the other things that we DID know about are just taking longer to fix anyways, like repainting walls and ceilings (with much difficulty choosing colors) and getting all the windows replaced with people not getting back to us and such. I think about the only thing that happened promptly was replacing the orange shag carpet in our bedroom with nice new carpet.

Our new home is smaller than the apartment we were renting, and so now we are also constantly de-junking and getting rid of as much as possible. Tyson likes to have "sharing time" with the kids after Church where they go through everything in their rooms and decide what to "share" with the thrift store (the kids always start moaning at that point). We've started selling a bunch of stuff we just don't have room for, like dressers and other furniture, and we've hauled boxes and boxes to the local thrift store of clothes, kitchen items, and toys.  It actually feels quite liberating getting rid of things we previously had room for but hardly ever used and didn't need.

The best part about our new home is our yard. We have a big back yard that came with a swing set that our kids have already spent hours playing on. We enjoyed a little cookout burning stray sticks and roasting hotdogs in the backyard.

Although it's a ton of work, it's also fun to just be able to do and change what we want about our home such as wall colors, ripping out stuff we don't want, changing and adding and improving so many things that this poor, neglected house has needed for so long. It's fun to give this little house the love it should have.

Other news: Miri started officially crawling on her eight month birthday. She'd been planking since six months and rocking on her hands and knees since seven months. She tried really hard for a couple of weeks to stand instead of crawl first--squatting and trying to push up--but she's so little that she just can't do it yet. So she settled for crawling. And she's decided that she doesn't want to breastfeed, take a bottle, or any sort of liquid our of any sort of cup. But she loves baby food, and she's mostly happy.

So that's it--life is grand and we're loving it!