The Shrinking List!!

It’s been a great weekend – for many reasons…First, it rained most of the weekend, which normally wouldn’t have been a positive, but we really needed it. You can’t even tell now where those bagsters sat on the lawn; the grass looks great. Secondly, we slept in until almost 8 o’clock this morning!! I can’t remember the last time we slept that late in the morning. And last, we knocked SO MUCH off the list this weekend!

Harry had three big things on his to-do list – all finishing touches of previous projects that have been put off for quite a while – the door to the deck had to be stained,

 

 

 

and the living room closet and bathroom closet needed new flooring.

 

 

 

 

They are all DONE!

 

 

 

After I got home from work yesterday, I worked on the table downstairs and the shelf next to the laundry area.

 

 

 

I still have a few edges to finish up, but this project is pretty close to being finished.

 

We both also took care of some other loose ends.

 

 

Harry finished the trim in the upstairs closet and put in the closet guide.

He also had a little piece of the door trim to fix around the office door.

 

 

In the meantime, I was up to a few more mundane types of projects…I cleaned the refrigerator and emptied it out. We have a few things to use up out of the freezer but I have been avoiding the purchase of frozen items as much as possible, so by the end of August the freezer should be pretty empty too. I cleaned out a few more picture frames and gave the kitchen cupboards a wipe down. I also did two loads of laundry from our trip. There are no pictures of any of these exciting activities unfortunately.

We are SO close! We have two more weekends in August to work on these projects, but we feel much better about it now that we can cross so many items off our list from this weekend. Next weekend, we will take a break with a trip to MA to visit our little guy.

Heading Into a Working Weekend

With our final list compiled, we are getting ready to head into the first of our last three weekends to work on the house. That will leave us the first week of September to do the final cleaning before we will need to have the house available for showings.

We went to Home Depot last night to pick up the last five outlet covers that we needed, only to discover that they hadn’t replenished their supply yet since we cleaned them out a few weeks ago. So now we plan to visit another Home Depot in Albany sometime next week in search of the wood style outlet covers.

I will be heading off to work in a bit, and Harry will get started on his projects for today. He is planning to finish up the closet floor in the living room and in the downstairs bathroom. Who knows what else will be accomplished today – depends on how long those first two projects take.

Once I get home, I plan to work on painting the table downstairs in the basement. We have some paint already that we had planned to use on the upstairs bathroom before we decided not to repaint it. So I want to get the table cleaned up and painted – I think it will look so much better. The other item on my agenda is to clean up the kitchen cabinets, and start sprucing up the wood trim around the windows.

 

I may paint this shelf too – I haven’t decided yet.

 

 

 

 

Once this painting is done, we are pretty much set downstairs…just have to sweep the floor and clean out a few cobwebs.

 

 

Time to head into our day…progress report to follow later…

Progress in the Home Stretch

While we were away this past week, our realtor came over and took some pictures of the outside of our house. The weather was a little hazy those days, so she wasn’t quite as happy with the look of the sky against the house – she said they would be ok, but she would prefer a more blue sky as a backdrop. She will try again in August when we head out to go north.

I was just looking at a calendar and five weeks from today is the 31st of August. So we have five weeks to finish up our little projects around here, get the place all cleaned up, and ready for the inside pictures. Out of that five weeks, we are going to be away for two of the weekends, so that leaves three for actually working on stuff. The things left on our list aren’t big items, thankfully, but still we feel like THE LIST has been hanging over our heads for so long that we are going to feel so free when it has all been accomplished.

 

 

We are even making some progress in the garage. We moved everything over to one side so that we could bring the car inside while we were gone.

 

 

We have a few more things to get rid of, so I will be listing them on freecycle this coming week.

It’s hard to believe after all this planning, but we are on the home stretch – we are almost finished. Both of us are so looking forward to having a weekend when we can just do nothing, and know that we don’t have a LIST hanging over our heads!!

Time Away Goes Too Fast

We have had a wonderful time here at Brook n Wood Campground. I can’t believe that our time here is winding down to a close already. Matt, Hannah and Andrew headed home yesterday afternoon. We sure had a great time with them. I took loads of pictures of course, so I will share just a few of my favorites…

After weeks of basically no rain, we had two days with several hours worth of rain and storms. We were glad that we had tv for the kids to watch and some inside activities for them to do, but also glad that it cleared up so we could get back outside!!

 

A huge favorite activity for everyone was going swimming. This is definitely one of my favorite pictures – heading to the pool.

 

 

We managed to go swimming all three days even though the weather didn’t always cooperate. We had so much fun! You can see in the picture Uncle Harry defending himself in the seahorse wars!!

 

 

 

Ariel is usually very skittish around pretty much everyone other than myself and Harry, but Hannah managed to get pretty close several times.

 

 

I guess I have a lot of favorite pictures from our few days here, but I will have to start drawing this post to a close.

 

 

 

 

Suffice to say, I think we all had a really great time.

 

 

And now it’s time to think about heading home. We have an appointment this morning to get the fiver inspected on our way back.

This weekend we have to get back to working on the house. We have a list (is anyone surprised?) of those items we need to accomplish before the inside pictures are taken. So now that we have had a few days away, we will be getting back to business – AND looking forward to trip #4, which is now 24 days away!!

Making Fun Memories

One of the things that Harry and I look forward when we start traveling is being able to share some fun camping memories with the younger members of our family. And today was the first of hopefully many such times. This morning bright and early, my sister and brother-in-law came over to the campground and dropped off our company for the next few days…Matt, Hannah, and Andrew.

We have had a jam-packed fun day!

Some bike riding…

 

 

 

 

Playing with trucks…

 

 

 

 

 

Playing some games of catch…

 

 

 

 

 

Having some fun in the pool…

 

 

 

 

 

Playing some card games…

 

 

 

 

 

Hanging out…

 

 

 

 

 

 

…and after some bbq for dinner, of course there has to be a campfire and some s’mores!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now we are relaxing and ready for a good night’s sleep – well, Harry and I are anyway!

Tomorrow promises to be another fun day!

Settled In

Trip #3 has begun!

We are settled in to a nice quiet site in a pretty open area. We got our satellite with no problem, which was awesome. Especially since I’m not even sure that this place has cable. Maybe. They have wifi thought so I am happy about that. And so far the wifi seems decent. (Harry just checked and there is cable, but I’m still glad we have our directv.)

We have a back in site, but backing in went very well, thanks to the owner. I had asked about a pull through, and turns out they don’t have any, but the woman said, “oh don’t worry, Joe is great at getting people in their site”. Wow, was she right! Joe lived up to his reputation – stood next to the open window on the passenger side and told Harry, turn it left, a little right, crank it hard this way. Voila! Right into the site.

We thought that our setting up would be so painless with a simple back right in under Harry’s belt. Umm, not so much. The front of our site angles quite a bit, so we had to hook the truck back up to take our wood supports out from under the front jacks. Even all the way down, we were out of level because the back end was already higher than the front. So we hooked back up, raised the trailer, and took the wood supports out. Lowered it back down, opened the handle, and the hitch jaws wouldn’t open. What the heck? Harry moved the truck a little back against the hitch and finally we got the jaws to open. We think it’s because the ground angles up right at that point, so maybe there was still a little weight on the hitch or something. Who knows. We’ve never encountered that issue before. We are just glad to be set up now.

So now, we are hanging out in our chairs, enjoying the sound of the crickets, and the coolness of the night air. Ahhh! Life is good.

Tomorrow our company arrives…

As Ready As We’re Gonna Be

This week has sped right along, and tomorrow we will be leaving for our third trip of the summer season. Along with getting ready to head out tomorrow, we have been having one last blitz of straightening up around the outside of our house. Tonight, on my way home from work, I picked up a pizza so we didn’t have to spend any time cooking a meal, and then after a quick bite to eat, we went out to the fiver and finished packing everything up.

After getting all of the furniture arranged and everything secured, we headed back outside to take one last look around. We are ready, as ready as we could be. Time’s up!

I just took a few pictures – the sun was starting to go down so they’re a bit dark.

 

 

We managed to keep our grass somewhat green with frequent watering.

 

 

 

I can’t even imagine what this view is going to look like without the fiver in the driveway.

 

 

 

We got this area all cleaned up!

 

 

 

 

A view from where the shed used to be…

 

 

A portion of our back yard…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A view from the front corner of our yard…

 

 

 

And one more picture that doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but I thought it was cute…

 

As if it hasn’t been warm enough, Ariel has to find a patch of sunshine to lay in.

 

 

 

Next blog will be from Brook ‘n’ Wood Campground…

Time’s Ticking Down

It seems like such a long time since we met with the realtor back in early April, and set the date for the outside pictures. Now we are down to the last couple of days and are trying to tick off as many items as we can before we leave for Brook n Wood Campground on Saturday.

Our third bagster was picked up yesterday. We were happy that it was only on the lawn for a few days, so the grass was still in pretty good shape. You can barely see now where the first two bagsters sat on the lawn. The grass has almost recovered.

 

The area where all of the shed debris and other garbage was gathered is almost all cleaned up. Whatever we still have out here to go will be brought into the garage before we leave here on Saturday afternoon so that it looks nice and tidy for the pictures.

Last night after I got home from work, we headed over to Walmart to do some grocery shopping for our trip. By the time we got home it was after 8 o’clock and then we had a quick dinner and watched a little tv before heading to bed.

Today being my day off – my main project is packing the fiver, doing laundry, getting the groceries put away, and all those other miscellaneous things that have to be done before a few days away.

Then we will just have Thursday evening and Friday evening to put the last finishing touches around here. The next couple of days are going to fly by!

It is super hot and muggy, and I am looking forward to being somewhere with a pool for a few days. Three more days until trip #3!!

A Fun Family Day

Yesterday was a great day with some downtime from working on the house. We headed out bright and early yesterday morning for my sister’s house (with a truckload of stuff!). I didn’t take a picture of the truck, but I do have a picture of the nice empty spot in our garage!

Almost the whole gang…my mom and stepdad, my sister Denise and her husband Mike, my brother Joe, Harry and me…

Even though all of my family lives in New York, we are still all three or four hours away from each other – my mom lives up north, my brother lives out west towards Syracuse, and my sister and I live here in the capital region.

 

 

So unfortunately, we aren’t able to all get together too often. This is the first time we have all gotten together in over a year. Well, almost all of us…we were still missing my sister-in-law Terri and my oldest nephew Joshua.

 

 

We had a great time and lots of laughs. AND, we have already managed to find another date to get together in the fall.

 

 

All too soon, it was time to head home. Harry and I were excited to see our lawn and bushes, as they were being trimmed and evened up while we were away.

 

 

We were extremely happy to see the bushes with their new “do”.

We are down to crunch time now – there are only a few days before our outside pictures are taken. It’s going to be a busy week!!

 

A view of our house from the corner of our property…