The Wayward Celt

In preparation for a blog soon to come, I figured I should get all the other minutiae out of the way first…

Cut for a long, boring post to make way for a proper 3DC posting at some point

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Here’s what has been taking so much of my time and energy recently. Behold, Brazilian walnut flooring; And lo it was good… 3/4″ thick, 2 1/4″ wide planks. Yum. Installed in the living room, master bedroom, office, and both guest rooms.

I apologize for the uber-crapiosity of the images, but my good camera is at Canon being serviced, so my phone camera will have to do…

Next on the list is to carpet the hallway and closet/loft area, as well as the back stairs. At some point we will even finish the front stairs too!

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It seems that I have gone more than a month without any sort of content rich post. Wow. I AM teh sux0r, as the kids say these days. The lack of communication has only been driven by my own tired emotional state. Too much to do and worry about makes for no energy left to make any meaningful posts. So, what follows will be more of a brain dump in some unorganized fashion. You were warned….

-Work has been, well… work. Busy as ever trying to get two full time jobs to fit in the space of one.
-We have been at the new house every night and weekend since taking possession of it, excluding the 4 days Jean’s parents and sister were in town.
-Playing host to in-laws can be a very emotionally taxing role, especially when you have 5billion other things to think about.

We have been refinishing the front stairs, which has amounted to a huge amount of time spent hunkered over them with sand paper. We FINALLY got the first two coats of stain on over the weekend and are very please thus far with the results. Next up is the polyurethane coats and then cleaning up the base-boards, rail spindles, and risers with a nice coat of white semi-gloss. Pics follow under the cut below…

The next few weeks are going to be very interesting in a BUSY sort of way.
We are waiting on our flooring to be delivered, which may or may not make it in time to be installed before we move in. I am still hopeful, but I don’t think it is going to happen, so we are planning on moving in without the floors installed.
I am also working on getting an electrician out to resolve some grounding issues in the old 2-wire part of the home and to split off some unwise double-tapping in the breaker box.

Of course, work had to get in the way. We move into the house on Jan 18th, and then I am off on Jan 21st to fly down to Irvine for 3 days of work. I fly Back to PDX on Jan 24th, so the trip will be short and stress filled I am sure. During that time, Jean gets the fun task of staying home and making sure the rental is clean enough to hand back to the property management group, as well as organizing the new home as best she can before I return. Once back from the trip, we’ll be able to focus properly on getting the work on the floors done. In the mean-time, we will need to figure out how to move in such a way that things can be easily moved around to accommodate the flooring work.

Right now, I just need to see progress. Sitting around and waiting is NOT doing it for me. Having ONE project finished would go a long ways to helping me deal

Now, on to the work in progress pics…

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We got the keys, have ordered flooring, and begun some minor demolition…
Read all about it here: http://siobhan-genie.livejournal.com/88945.html

Sorry bout the cop out…

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Ah, yes. We are now officially in debt and tied down to property, again.

Yesterday at noon we met with our escrow officer as well as lender and real estate agent to sign all the paperwork involved in buying a home. The seller had their appointment scheduled for yesterday afternoon as well, so everything should be finalized at this point and recorded on Tuesday.

Since the seller had requested a few extra days after Escrow closes to move out, we won’t be taking possession of the property until December 15th. Once we do get the keys, however, we will begin the whirlwind of repairs and improvements which need to be done prior to move-in.

We plan to move around the middle of January, so that should give us a solid month to get the floors done to a point where it is livable. I expect the next month will be a very long one… I foresee long hours spent at the new home working to get it to move-in ready, and at the same time, slowly moving the smaller items every time we go over.

As it stands currently, we still need to decide on flooring, then BUY it and have it shipped over to the new place after the 15th. We also need to get in and do some serious measuring and some destructive investigations to determine what exactly needs to be done and how to do it. Unfortunately that means we are stuck in a holding pattern until the 15th when we can get in and really get to work.

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The following was posted to a motorcycle forum I frequent. I am posting the text here to retain a copy for reference later. I don’t expect this to interest any of my LJ friends, so you may all ignore this at your discretion…

Cut for severe length and lack of any interesting content to my friends list

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