An Update (I'm Almost Back!)

I am taking a break from unpacking and allowing myself a few minutes of relaxation before I get to work on a couple of custom orders (which are currently being held up as I wait on a particularly tardy shipment of saint medals... I am beginning to suspect that the Canadian postal service has taken off the entire week between Christmas and New Years because usually shipments get here very quickly!).

I am going to push the giveaway announcement for this week back a day (we should get internet service back Tuesday morning, so you have an extra day to enter if you haven't already!).

It has been a crazy couple of days, but things are starting to come together. The girls' room is unpacked, or at least, it looks unpacked. I know there are still a few boxes of the girls' stuff somewhere and I'm sure I'll get around to unpacking it in the next few days. The living room is beginning to resemble a living room (instead of a giant pile of boxes) and the dining area is half visible beneath the cardboard.

The master bedroom is still a disaster. The bed is half uncovered. Paul has been sleeping there. I've been sleeping on the floor in the girls' room because I was afraid Sadie would try to run to our room and with all the boxes between there room and our room I figured it was a recipe for disaster. I'm hoping the boxes will be out of the way in the next day or two.

Grumpa and Paul (and some of our neighbors!) have been amazing! They replaced the floor boards in most of the house, dried the place out, patched leaks and fixed plumbing disasters (to name the beginning of the things they've done!). And they helped us move!

The floors are beautiful! I'll post pictures in the next week!

The old place is sparkling clean (and the manager has promised the return of our cleaning deposit after we told her about the hundreds of pictures of filth that we took when we moved in, along with a several page long list detailing what the apartment's condition and it became clear that we were going to fight to get our deposit back). Paul photographed it again to show how much cleaner it was when we moved out than when we moved in (there was nearly a scene when they told me I had to pay someone to clean the carpets and I said that I would steam clean them myself, but since they were filthy and uncleaned when we moved in there was no way I'd be paying a service to clean them when we moved out).

I can hardly wait for the last box to be unpacked and the internet and phone to be up and running. For now though I'm just relieved that we found the stove temperature knob so that we could have a hot lunch today!