Kitchen Change

Crazy times at our house lately. We are working on the kitchen a little bit. We found a deal on a sample section of countertop in Home Depot and snatched it up and then suddenly we were buying a new faucet and making phone calls and then yesterday morning work dudes showed up in the kitchen in the flesh.

There was a lot of dumping all the contents of the counters and cupboards in the dining (still there y'all....I promise I'll put it all away again!) and then my counters that normally look like this:

disappeared.

There was a lot of banging and we lurked in the playroom, the sunroom, a cafe nearby, and the front porch to stay out of the way. The boys got in arguments over Legos and I read them a lot of classical history. Then, just before dinner prep time the work dudes packed up and backed their vans out of the driveway and I came tiptoeing back into my kitchen.

Y'all. Look at that.

This is my real life! Sometimes change is fantastic.

Garden Excavation

Tomorrow morning A will roust us all out of bed early and we'll head down to our local U-Haul pick up station and collect our cargo van. Then we're off to the old apartment to spend the day digging plants, bundling them into um....plastic grocery sacks? (I haven't any better ideas) and then hauling them in variously layered loads back to our new house.

I was really supposed to carve a "holding bed" for them out of the lawn but instead I'm going to hack it out in two minutes and pretend that was the plan while A stands there looking dubious and our children roll in the freely sprinkling topsoil. I expect to be one big filthy family from top to toe by tomorrow bedtime. Good thing I bought a fingernail brush earlier this week, eh?

I have made a list of all the plants I want to dig and even though its a list of (lemme check)......a list of 30 plants, but truly, that's not terribly daunting, is it? [*note: if you disagree this is the spot in the dialogue where you lie] A is planning to spend the entire day digging plants and hauling and hauling and hauling.

I on the other hand am glibly planning to dig them all in the morning, have a jolly lunch together and then go and do something clever and fun that we haven't though of yet! I like optimism.

One last fond goodbye to the old garden of yore.....

And P.S.

While we're on the subject of gardens and home decorating...we were perpetually thinking about home decorating, right? Right. Anywho. I am in mad, mad love with this very expensive rug. Blast you Anthro.

Back in the Saddle

I am very full of heart tonight. How could I not be? Really, sitting here in the cricketing evening (yes there are crickets in our part of the small city we've moved to) listening to the wind in the maples behind our house I feel so many shades of "good" that its preposterous to be trying to enumerate really. The keyboard is just as springy as I remember, the lovely, zippy Internet so full of inspiration, friends and brilliance and the house, this lovely, dreamy house...every inch my hopes come to life. Its true that there's no bathroom on the whole first floor, and yes there's some amazing acoustic tile and faux wood paneling and heaven knows the master bedroom entry floor could hardly be creakier....but I do love it. There are wood floors, there's a fireplace, windows everywhere you turn, a clotheline pulley, an old apple tree, some glass door knobs, radiators, and all kinds of fabulous little bits that I'm still discovering.

Can you believe this cool window crank on my kitchen sink window?

And check out this cool old clock they left....am swoony over it.

A nun from next door (there are nuns next door!) stopped by to beam at the children and greet us energetically and made sure that we knew were were welcome to come over anytime. The neighbor lent us forks for our first meal at the house, we've had three plates of welcoming cookies and two deliveries of homegrown tomatoes and something like 10-12 visits with people from the surrounding houses, all grinning away and telling us to knock on their doors if we needed anything. The garbage men have been past and taken away the first load of packing paper and boxes, we've found the flour and the canned peaches and our collection of silverware although admittedly we have no silverware tray at the moment. I have cooked real food for three days running now and we're starting to think about finding some of the laundry baskets and hoping one of the dressers I keep trolling Craigslist for will materialize so we can start putting clean clothes away again and stop living out of our suitcases.

This is just about how great life is at the moment.

It is a bit absurdly chaotic still but, really...every time another neighbor rings our doorbell or we're pulling our hair out over all the boxes and we go outdoors and watch the kids tumbling around in the grass of our very own, generous lawn....I feel painfully, stunningly lucky. I can't believe this is me! I feel like I'm living in a movie script or like I've wandered into an episode from Mr. Rogers. How in the world does this sort of thing really happen to people, least of all me! I feel a little dizzy from the fabulousness.

The Big Rock in our backyard. (with a load of cousins on it)

There are so many thousands of little delicious bits about our new house to share with you all that I am sure the introduction will stretch out for some time but, tonight I especially want to share with you the lovely wood floors we uncovered when we took off the amazingly nasty blue carpet that was EVERYWHERE in many of the rooms.

The men who ripped it out for me said that that guessed it was at least 30 years old. My shots somehow look a lot more rosy than it really did.

 There were dark grey trails where the main traffic patterns had been. It was positively delirious to see the beautiful wood emerge from under all of that and watch as it became more and more alive as it was swept and then washed.

I knew it was going to be stunning.

Our tree hydrangea....so pretty!

The basement door.

Of course the rooms are mostly a jumble of boxes and assorted homeless items with the occasional bushy haired child thrown wildly in for good measure but, eventually here I will be able to do a more personal introduction to the particular spaces we're living in these days. I am already dreaming of paint!