Moving Right Along
Good news: Dad (our architect) started the survey this week! He’s spent two evenings measuring and drawing, and we’re all really excited to see what we have to work with. Hopefully I will get an electronic file to post (my dad is still pretty old school and draws by hand, which I love, but his assistant will be able to do the CAD drawings).
Better news: We went to the house Monday briefly to let Dad in, and since we were there, we decided to bust out the EPA-certified lead paint test kit we bought at Home Depot over the weekend. The house was built in 1935, there is no way it couldn’t have lead paint, right? Wrong! By some stroke of good fortune, all of our tests, interior and exterior, came out negative. I even tested the thin layer that sat right above the concrete block in the living room (thinking that I was looking at the oldest paint in the house), and still, negative! I am really relieved – we will still be cautious when working (gas masks!), but at least we don’t have to wear full on body armor.
Musings:
I think the enormity of this task is starting to really sink in. The problem is that we cannot dedicate ourselves to it 100% right now, and we feel pulled in a few different directions. First, if we are going to rent out our condo, we need to get it ready – that means between trips to the new house, we are packing stuff up, taking things off walls, patching, sanding, and eventually priming and painting. Not a huge task, but definitely something that needs to get done.
The other issue we are facing right now is no weekends. We work regular 9-5s, but every Friday night for the last 3 months we have packed up the car and driven to Bethany Beach to help my parents take on their latest project – which needs to be finished ASAP, before the first renters of the season come! The Beach House is a typical one-story beach bungalow, but the upstairs was a finished space, complete with a pitched roof (6 feet at the peak, much lower elsewhere!). When the roof needed to be replaced this year, I (naively) suggested we raise it too to make the space bigger and more livable. You can’t blame me for the addition of the bathroom, though – that was all dad’s idea. The new upstairs area will be 6 feet high at the edge of the house, with a now 12-foot peak. It is going to be amazing, but it has been a lot of work, and it means we can’t all fully focus our energies on the new house until at least the end of June – and considering we are hoping to move in mid-August, that impacts our timeline significantly.
Somehow, though, I know it will all work out.
