The New Digs

OK, OK. FINALLY I am doing a post with some pictures of moving week, painting, packing, and the new house. I am out of excuses.

You can check out the entire collection of 230 photos HERE

The new house! It kind of peeks out from the trees. The front is well shaded, which is great because the sun... NEVER SHINES in the front of the house. The back of the house, where the sun is brutal, has ZERO trees. Zippy. Nada.


The family room before painting. My sister didn't think the green was too bad. I thought it was pretty terrible.


The family room during painting (we recruited Dad to help. He was perhaps not pleased. Painting? Not his favorite thing.)


The family room all done. We LOVE the dark brown wall around the fireplace. The other walls. Meh. They're ok. I wish they were a touch lighter. But the next shade lighter on that card looked like, as John described it "The Caucasian color in the box of Crayola crayons." Not appealing.

Note awesome pictures of Havre de Grace on the mantle - nice housewarming gift from Mom and Dad. Just today I unpacked the box where CoCo's ashes were stored, so now CoCo is on the mantle, looking over us from her proper place. I still miss the little girl every day.


The guest room. Yeah, this didn't need paint. AT ALL...


Dad works on painting the guest room. Ahhhh. That hurts my eyes much less.


The guest room completed. With a bedroom set we bought off Craigslist for $100. God bless Craigslist.


Dexter's room. It was recently painted white, so we didn't need to prime it. Which was good, because painting it took FOREVER.


Why? Because SOMEBODY (ahem, me) decided this bright blue would be an awesome color for the bottom of the wall. And it took three coats to make it look ok. Plus that certain somebody wanted some of this stuff:


(Dad loves painting chair rail)


But the end result was completely worth it. LOVE this room.


We also painted the basement floor before we moved in, so that the concrete dust would stay on the floor, as opposed to being tracked all over the world, which was happening before we moved in. Note oodles of flattened boxes, now being taken to New York so Aunt Jeanne can use them to move in August. Hooray for recycling! Dex will be sad to have his box mountains leave, though. He has fun down here.

In the basement, which I don't have pictures of:
Pool table, which we really don't want, and now has a whole bunch of crap piled on it.
Fancy-ass water filtration system which took our nitrate levels from an Above EPA Limit 11 (somethings per something) to an almost insignificant level of 1 (somethings per something).
Eighty seven trillion boxes.

So what, you may ask, was Dexter doing while all this painting was going on? Why, playing with Grandma, of course.



New fancy water table kept Dex cool during this ridiculously hot weekend

Last day of playing in the pantry before...

Dex moves to the new house to hang with Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Jeanne





Meanwhile, John and Alissa pack furiously:




Good lord, where'd we get so much crap??

And then, in the blink of an eye (seriously, like three hours to empty the old house AND the storage unit) the movers came and our old townhouse looked like this:



And we pretty much did this all day. It was awesome. Movers. Best idea we've ever had.


It was a little sad seeing our house all empty.


We did so much to the house while we were there.


We'll miss it, but we're pretty psyched about our new view...