19 March 2006

Be nice to your mother.

On a more or less random spur of the moment decision, I called my parents last Wednesday or so and asked if they'd bring dad's little truck down to help us get rid of the (nastyrattyheavy) couch that we inherited with the house*. We could get it out and had a place to take it, but not a vehicle large enough to transport it between the two. They had no other plans**, so arrived yesterday morning***.

In more or less short order, Dad and Jack finished moving the futon downstairs and then started moving the bed from the old-bedroom-new-craftroom to the new-bedroom-old-craftroom. The bed is a hardwood futon that my dad made and is somewhat heavy and cumbersome to move. So that took a bit, but they got it moved and then ripped out the mauve shag carpet remnant to get back down to the hardwood floors. Then we moved the rest of the furniture (two dressers, two book cases, a desk, a small chest of drawers, a bedside table) between the two rooms and the boys took the couch to the dump and mom and I reshelved books and put clothes away.

Then the real fun began. *smile* We went to Home Depot, where we opened a credit account (because it got us 10% off our purchases for the day and if we spent over $300 we would get no interest, no payments for a year) and proceeded to buy.. over $300 worth of home improvement stuff. Namely, we got stuff to strip the woodwork around the windows and doors, including a little Ryobi Corner Cat Finish Sander; a programmable thermostat (finally!); a new toilet seat for the upstairs bathroom; a new vacuum (just a little one (we only have one room with real carpet), but bagless and with a HEPA filter); and vinyl mini-blinds for 10 of the windows (the ones that had shades). A quick stop at Target netted two hampers, but we weren't able to find a reasonably priced area rug for the bedroom, so we'll still need to pick that up at some point.

Once we got home (after dinner at Famous Dave's), Jack installed one of the blinds in the new bedroom while dad installed the new thermostat and I installed the new toilet seat. This morning, we finished installing the blinds and I organized the craft room and did laundry. And vacuumed.

I must say, I really love how much lighter things are with the blinds. We used to keep the shades pulled by default because we live on a corner and didn't like random passers-by being able to see our every move. With the blinds, we can slant them and still get the light, but also maintain our privacy. Definitely worth it. And now there are no more pink (yes, they were pink, with little lace edges) blinds in the living room.

And my craft room is marvelous. Without the futon, there's room to put up the larger table, which means both the sewing machine and the serger can be set up, and there's still space for at least one of my looms on the table. And I finally have a long enough continuous surface to set up a warping area so I can *finally* warp the loom dad made me for Christmas. Under table storage space works well for yarn and fabric. The desk is still available for paperwork and such, though the filing needs to find a more useful spot to live. Now all it needs is .. chairs.

And I think that Jack is rather more fond of the futon in the living room than the old couch. He's napping on it, fully stretched out, while pretending to watch "Firefly".

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*In due defense of the previous owners, they asked if we wanted the couch; we said "Sure" because we didn't think we'd have enough furniture to fill out the rooms in the house. We were right, but the kind of furniture we need more of is chairs, not couches.

**Well, really, they *had* other plans, or at least dad did. He was going to go to my sister's house to help them work on their bathroom (the second one they're refinishing - they've been in their house much longer than we've been in ours), but my neice was sick all last week with the flu (and ended up being admitted to the hospital for fluids and observation Friday night). Since Kaleigh'd been sick, dad decided to go next weekend instead, leaving this weekend more or less free.

***Yesterday morning was somewhat busy before they arrived, as well. See, I got up at six, left for the pharmacy****, and then had a two hour pseudo-Board meeting at which we didn't have a quorum, but did manage to get some planning accomplished. When I got home at 10:45, Jack had also been industrious: he had moved the couch to the porch and also brought the futon from the old-craft-room-new-bedroom down to the living room.

****Backtrack a day or two, and we can observe our heroine start what would be a four-day (and counting, though it's admittedly only annoying anymore) odessy in acute pain. Seems the crown build up on Monday aggravated a dying nerve in another tooth (at least, I'm pretty sure it's another tooth)*&. Since it was Friday evening before I finally capitulated and decided I couldn't make it through the weekend on 4 ibuprofen every 4 hours, I called my dentist and she called in a prescription for penicillin that should at least kill the infection and, thereby, stop the immediate acute pain. (It's starting to work. Mostly. Except that it was 10 p.m. and I didn't feel like making the hour round trip into La Crosse to pick it up since the most recent dose of Advil was working. Then.

*&Tooth, which, if it's the tooth I think it is (and, as I said, I'm pretty sure which tooth it is), they did a root canal on a year ago. Yeah. 'Cept that said tooth started aching a couple months ago again - nothing so strong as it was before the root canal - and when I mentioned it to the dentist during my semiannual exam, he (not my regular dentist, who is a she) said that he thought the the crown which was not seated all the way and therefore causing issues with my bite, and that was pr'bly really the cause of the pain, not the possibility of an additional root that they missed*%%. So nothing happened with the "phantom" root, but the crown at least is getting replaced.

*%%Yeah, see that whole dead roots are s'posed to show up on x-ray thing appears not to work for me. So they're sort of limited in their diagnosis options for me on this one.

3 comments:

Liz said...

You could come to the cities and do some shopping at IKEA. They have great rugs!

Anonymous said...

You're cracking me up with the footnotes!

Sorry about the dental health crisis (better, I suppose, than a mental health crisis). Here's hoping it gets better.

Yay for a craft room. Jealous? Me?

Miri Mack said...

What a couple of days! I need to do something about the darkness in my house too. It's driving me crazy.

I hope your tooth is doing better. Dang, those things can hurt.