Packing Up the House

We should know later today whether we've sold our house.  However, Mrs Bugbear and I have been packing up in anticipation of the move anyway so that the house will look better to potential buyers.  I rented two nominally 5x8x8' storage lockers.  The company that I rented them picked them up yesterday so I could finally park in my own driveway again last night.

Item one on the packing agenda was my books.  I have quite a few (two or three thousand) and they took up well over half of one storage unit.  We also got rid of most of the stuff cluttering up our basement.  The house now has that barren lifeless decor reminiscent of the pictures I see in my wife's architectural magazines.

I've decided to get an extra bin when we have the moving bins dropped off.  This bin will come from the local waste management company rather than a storage company though.

Putting the House on the Market

Mrs. Bugbear and I were busy little beavers on the weekend as we finished up a myriad of small renovations in anticipation of selling our house.  So far since we got married we have:

1. Replaced all the flooring. (hardwood flooring throughout excepting the Kitchen, front entrance and powder room which got porcelain tile)
2. Reshingled the roof.
3. Almost all the trim has been replaced except around the upstairs doors.
4. New sliding door for the deck
5. Clad all the windows in aluminum.
6. Rebuilt the retaining wall and the associated fence on top. (about 4 yards of dirt moved by yours truly)
7. Regraded around the house (about a yard of dirt moved by yours truly)
8. New interlock beside the house and up to the front entrance (about 2 yards of dirt moved by tours surly).
9. New flowerbed beside the aforementioned interlock by the front entrance. (about 2 yards of dirt and manure moved by truly surly).
10. New eaves-trough on the whole house which involved no dirt moving and no ladder climbing by yours truly.
11. Replaced all but one light fixture, I'm not sure why I never got around to that last fixture though.
12. Removed the basement stairs, jacked up the header supporting the hallway and installed supporting posts.
13. Refinished the Kitchen cupboards.
14. Moved the wall between the kitchen and the garage back two feet into the garage to open up the front entrance and installed a new pocket door and built-in bookshelf in the powder room.
15. Painted every frickin' wall in the entire frickin' house at least once.
16. Clad the stairs going to the second floor in hardwood.
17. Installed a new counter-top in the bathroom and a new sink in the powder room.
18. New kitchen faucet.  New  faucet in the Powder Room and bathroom.
19. Moved the cupboard uppers and installed a microwave above the stove.
20. Installed a dishwasher and new china cabinet.
21. Repainted the garage door (which really needed it).

All this in just over four years.  I still have to repair the shed floor and finish the trim on the stairs before Wednesday when we are having the real estate agent over to list the house.  Before I moved in Mrs Bugbear had done a few renovations on her own:

1. Painted the downstairs.
2. Insulated the attic
3. Painted the ceilings
4. Painted most of the upstairs
5. Added ceiling boxes to two of the upstairs bedrooms.

On the plus side, when we list our house I'll finally know what the house will look like when we're finished renovating.

The Zen of Lego, Mechano and Fence Building

When I was a kid I inherited a mechano set when my uncle Donnie died and shortly thereafter my parents gave me my first Lego set.  Showing a doubtless early aptitude for engineering I built my own toys for many years thereafter. Little Miss Bugbear is showing some early signs although she seems to build a lot of houses and buildings so perhaps she'll be seduced by the dark side (architecture) like my wife.

Growing up on the farm I've mended fences, built miles of panel fence, stretched many rolls of page wire fence.  This weekend for the first time I started building the ubiquitous back yard fence.  Now many things on the farm are very Zen-like experiences, plowing, cultivating, baling hay. As a side note picking rocks is more like misogi, the type where they strike your back with bamboo canes not the cold water type.

So you wonder where I'm going with this, in building the back yard fence I rediscovered the mindless repetitive tasks that induce in me at least a Zen state, but I also discovered on a trip to Home Despot that building a backyard fence is just like playing with Lego for fully grown boys.  There are metal hangers for any connection between two peices of wood you might imagine, no more morticing and tenonning for this fellow, for 35¢ to $10 you can find any stamped steel hot-dipped galvanized connecting widget you can imagine, and some you probably can't.  It was just like combining Mechano and Lego together.   Mechano equalling nails, screws, widgets and Lego being pieces of wood.

Once I got into the actual building of the fence I entered into the usual Zen state as my mind shut down I and hammered screwed and cut on autopilot.  But for a few moments in Home Despot I got to relive some of the best times of my childhood...all the way from aisle 15 to the checkout counter.

Adult Mechano adds up quickly.