I thought I would take a break from the routine series and give my friends a little update on our home.

Almost exactly one year ago, a wind storm (possibly a tornado) blew through

Estacada and knocked a tree over on our house. You can see it in the photo to the left. See window right under the tree? We were looking out of it when the tree fell!

We had insurance, and they were quite willing to pay, but then we discovered that there were serious issues with the foundation and other code violations that were not caused by the tree, and therefore would not be covered by insurance. Some of the foundation cracks were made worse by the tree, so we hired a lawyer to help us get as much as was fair from the insurance so that we could afford to fix or replace the home.

Eventually, it came down to replacing the home. It would cost more to fix than we could get from the insurance. That meant replacing the not-up-to-code septic system as well. So we’ve spent pretty much every penny the insurance has given us, and then some. But things are finally moving along.

Last Friday we went out to see our new home brought in. You can see it in the

picture here. It’s actually a little more yellow than it appears in the picture, because, as usual, it was cloudy and actually misting a little. It started raining harder in the afternoon. All the brown dirt was mud that stuck to our shoes and made them very heavy! This view is almost the same angle as the picture above (the tree in the foreground on the left is the same). Obviously, we are getting a much smaller home–about 1,000 square feet less. But that’s okay. I will miss the basement, but it can’t be helped. This home has four bedrooms, and we are going to install some kind of laminate flooring. I just emailed Pergo floors to find out which of their laminate floors put out the least emissions, so hopefully I will hear back from them on that soon.

Anyhow, they had a real time trying to get the home situated. It’s hard to see in the picture, but the property slopes down a hill. This angle is facing southeast, and the hill faces due south. The slab of concrete for the home is partly on a built-up surface that sticks out from the hill, and the yellow “crawler” that you can see in the picture wasn’t able to pull the halves into precise position. Hopefully they were able to figure something out today and get it properly situated so that it can be put together and tied down.

So once that’s done and it passes inspection, and once the sand filter for the septic is installed and the floors in, we will be able to move. Weather permitting, that should be in about 4 weeks. And I really hope it doesn’t take longer than that! Because insurance was very generous to give us an extra month in this home–since the original cut-off date was based on the time it would have taken to actually fix the house, but there were unavoidable delays, from the county taking time to inspect things to the record rainfall we’ve had this winter. Hopefully this extension will be enough to get all the last-minute things finished. I sure hope so!

I just hope we can get a garden in this year. We have not been able to do one every year since we moved to Oregon, because of moving or not knowing when we would move. Even if I have to grow lettuce in the flower bed or something, though, we really want to be able to grow some of our own food. Sprouts are nice, but more variety would be nicer. So yes, I’m really looking forward to moving!

Okay, this is going to be a random post full of random details about my life.

Unless you haven’t read anything on my blog lately, I am pregnant. Working on month 4 now. I’ve been bad and haven’t had any prenatal check-ups yet. But I figure at this point, I’m not too worried. It will be easier to deal with that after we move next month. That, and I’m procrastinating trying to find someone who is covered by my insurance who will do the prenatal care knowing that I am planning a home birth with a midwife. The one place I tried said they wouldn’t do it. They referred me to a birth center, and I haven’t asked my insurance if they cover that. But I’ll do it. Soon. I promise.

Morning sickness is almost gone. I still get queasy moments, but I don’t have to eat before breakfast anymore, and I haven’t thrown up for at least a week, so I know the queasiness will disappear soon.

I bought some wheat grass recently. It was on sale, and I figured that it would be good for the baby and me. I need all the nutrition I can get. (Speaking of which, did I take my second dose of prenatal vitamins today? I don’t remember.) For two days, my son loved it. I’d put it in his milk, and he would drink it as if it were chocolate milk! Then he decided he didn’t like it anymore. And I haven’t found a way to disguise it yet. His meals are too plain for that. Oh well… It was nice while it lasted! I, on the other hand, love the stuff. In juice or a smoothie. Especially a smoothie. Tonight I had it with a banana and blueberries. Mmmmm! That was bliss!

I wish it would stop raining. We are supposed to be out of this house by February 20. Since that’s a Monday and a holiday, we are having things picked up from here on the 17th. They have done some work, but it’s been raining so much that the contractor hasn’t been able to get as much done as would be ideal. That, and the other contractor who said he could do the septic, well, it turns out he isn’t licensed to do septic systems, and he didn’t know what he was doing, which meant he stalled and wasted two weeks. Because he isn’t licensed, we were able to void the contract, and Rafael got his money back last night. Thankfully the guy has an account at the same bank we do, so he was able to verify that there were funds for the check and the money was transferred instantly. This is good, because he needs to write a check tomorrow to the new contractor!

The long and short of it is that we may end up taking a neighbor of ours up on his offer to sleep in his tiny camp trailer. We spent a couple of weekends there this last summer. Rafael will take the bus to work (it’s cheaper than gas and will give him time to study that isn’t being interrupted by noisy children) and I will have the kids and the car. We have our freezer at his place already, but I hope we don’t have to stay there long, because the fridge in the camper is super tiny and Manny’s special diet requires that we cook double. But it will be nice to be back in the country, where the kids can run wild and explore and play outside. They are tired of our back yard here. It’s just grass, nothing else, unless you count the puddles from all the rain, and they just don’t seem interested in it anymore.

We are also filing suit against some of the people involved in the purchase of our home. I won’t go into details now, because the suit is just about to be filed, but let’s just say, I hope we win at least part of it, because we really need the money. Extra, unexpected costs, such as a more expensive septic system, have drained every last bit of money we have, except our $1,000 emergency fund (which is almost nothing for a family of almost 5). We even had to use the money we got to replace damaged goods like furniture and clothing to pay contractors. Which means we won’t have anything to replace those things with. Which means we can’t afford to buy them. Which means we lose the depreciation. We have lost so much money on this place, because we didn’t know a few things that we just didn’t know about knowing, being first-time home buyers. If we had known even one or two of them, we wouldn’t have made an offer! And I haven’t even begun to talk about how the stress has affected our family, and especially my husband…

But on the bright side, we do have a good lawyer. Honest lawyers are hard to find, but this one really seems to be. She bent over backwards to help us on the first part of things, getting a reasonable amount from the insurance company, for less than pretty much any lawyer would accept. So even if not for us, I hope we win something out of this lawsuit! I mean, 3 or 4 times she came to our home on her way home from work (she lives near us) to discuss details of this or that related to what we were doing, thus saving us the trouble of finding a babysitter and making a trip to her office (about 20 minutes away). And she’s always been on top of things, very prompt and assertive in dealing with each aspect of things. I can’t recommend Sandy Webb enough!

Something else I’ve been trying to do lately is be a bit more organized. Flylady has been helping me with that. If you’ve never heard of her, you should go check her out.

Which reminds me… it’s late and I need to go shine my sink and then go to bed. Manny was congested last night and didn’t sleep well, resulting in Mom and Dad not sleeping enough. So I need to go to bed earlier than I did last night and pray he sleeps peacefully all night!

Good night!

Well, it looks like we are not moving over Memorial day weekend. This might be a good thing, in some respects. There will probably be more people available to help us load and unload that way.

Our original (actually, second) closing date was May 10. If we had closed a few days later, as planned, we would have had all of last week and this week to fix up the place and move in by the end of the month. But thanks to problems with the money transfers from the USDA (we got a USDA loan) to the escrow company, we didn’t close until the 20th. That means we had 1 week to get everything done.

At first we thought, No big deal. The only things we need to worry about are painting and installing the laminate floor. Should be able to do all that in a week.

Or not. My husband hasn’t even started painting yet. He’s been plastering up the laundry room to make it look nicer and fix a leak or two in the foundation, running between Home Depot and the house, sorting out issues with the paint (they couldn’t find the tags indicating which paint was which color, and then they brought him the wrong order and couldn’t figure out what to do with the buckets of silver paint!).

We decided last night to get someone else to do the painting. The living room has a vaulted ceiling, and the darkest brown trim you ever saw. And by trim, I don’t just mean around windows and door frames. I mean there, plus wherever walls and ceilings meet, plus this (I think it is) 8″x12″ beam that runs the width of the living room… not to mention that the stairs and wood stove are NOT to be painted… nor the fan hanging down in the middle of the ceiling… We want the walls to be a very pale pink (that will look white unless next to real white), and the trim and ceilings to be white. So we are just going to fork out the money for someone else to do the painting, and my husband is going to go back to work for the rest of the week, starting this afternoon. And then he’ll go back to work on it Sunday.

But that’s not the half. The kitchen cook top is broken. It might work if I turned the nobs with a wrench and lighted it with matches (it’s gas). But we need to replace it. We went back and forth between just replacing the cooktop and putting in a whole stove/oven unit. The wall oven that it has is too small to fit my large cookie sheet (which I use every week to make oven fries), so I need a larger oven. We finally figured out that the oven that is there is smaller than the space will allow for; we have room for a 27″ oven (instead of the 24″ one that’s there now), so we’re going to get an electric oven to put in its place–but probably not until after we move. The two pieces separately will cost almost as much as a new all-in-one unit, but the installation will be much cheaper (since we won’t have to remodel the island to accommodate it!). And I think it will be nice having the oven up higher, out of reach of little hands.

So… here are a few pictures for you to see, to get an idea of how it looks now. I’ll post “after” pictures later.

Here’s part of the yard from the deck:

Some trees by the driveway:

The deck has some issues; also notice the horizontal slats:

But it has one nice feature–we don’t know yet if it works or not:

This is about half of the kitchen. The fridge and freezer and more cabinets are (or will be) to the right. Dining room is beyond that on the right. You can’t see it, but the floor is all wood:

Here is the cooktop. It doesn’t work. From here you can see the stairs to the living room (detailed below), the stairs down to the basement, and the hallway leading to the sewing room and front door:

Here are the steps from the kitchen into the living room. They appear to be made of fir; quite worn, aren’t they:

Here is the old wood stove. It’s not up to code, so we have to get a new one. That’s okay. The new one will have a glass door, which is so nice:

Above, there was a leak:

You can’t see it (my husband didn’t get a picture of it), but to the right of the wood stove is a cute little bay window. I’m going to make cushions for it similar to this one, and then finish it off with a couple of pillows. It will make a nice reading nook.

The living room has vaulted ceilings. Not sure why my husband didn’t get a picture of that very dark brown 8″x12″ beam beam that runs the width directly under the peak:

With the stove behind, here’s a view of the stairs and back door, which leads to the woodshed and parking area. The steps are bright because there is a skylight at the top of the stairs:

Upstairs the first room is the kids’ room. It’s made in two parts, with a skylight in the first section, then double doors, and another section with the closet and a window. They will probably sleep in the second section, and the first section will be for their toys and other things. Someone was painting in here, and they just set the paint cans down on the carpet. I don’t know if you can see the rings of dark olive green paint they left behind or not:

Here’s the wall they were painting. It’s just too dark. You can see the hallway and the living room ceiling out the door:

Here’s the tub in the kids’ bathroom. I think whoever left this house (it was foreclosed) hadn’t cleaned it for a few months. You can’t see the rest of the bathroom, but it’s a lovely rose pink, and the tub door has swans on it, I think. The counter is pink and white tile. This is one room that isn’t going to change, except for getting cleaned:

Here’s part of the master bedroom. It has 2 windows. The trim around them is pretty, I think, but my husband thinks it’s hideous. It’s a dark magenta. We’re going to change it to a nice olive green to match our bedspread:

Here is a wall that juts out into the master bedroom about 8 or 10 inches. I think it’s pretty; my husband doesn’t. We’re going to just paint it white. The little door is a laundry chute, and below to the left is a heater with the cover off:

Here’s the master bedroom walk-in closet:

There is a master bathroom, but I’m not including a picture. It’s not so bad, just white and black tile, similar to the kitchen counter. We’ll change it at some point, but not right now.

My husband didn’t take any pictures of the office. We’re not going to do anything with it before we move in, so I’ll take pictures later.

Downstairs, we have another bedroom. Whoever did the texturing on the walls was… well… I don’t know. There is no rhyme nor reason to it. It’s deep, painted over with glossy paint, and it’s absolutely hideous! We’re probably going to just get thin (1/4″) sheet rock and cover it, then paint over that. Sanding it down just didn’t work:

Here’s the laundry room, from in front of where the washer and dryer will be. It’s large. I’m going to put a table with fold-up legs along the right wall, beside the washer, and definitely make use of the rack and shelves to the left! I may someday install a fold-down ironing board in here:

Here’s the wall to the right of the picture above. My husband has plastered some of it with cement. The washer and dryer will go on the right:

Here is the water heater and holding tank. We are going to replace this water heater with a new one. Can you see where the laundry chute comes out?

That’s all for now, folks! Hope you enjoyed the tour. Check back frequently to see updates as things get fixed. Or just subscribe so you won’t miss anything!

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Just a note on the subscription contest. Subscriptions have been rising, and we are nearing our first goal of 25, which means I just may be able to pick a winner. But we still have fewer entries than we have subscriptions, and there is no excuse for that, since multiple entries are allowed. Even though we aren’t moving until the 6th, the contest still ends the 31st, and I will be mailing out the prizes to the winner(s) before we move! There will be 1 winner for ever 25 subscribers, with no upper limit! So copy that link, share it all over the internet. See how many entries you can make!