Two long weeks

Previously on parentheticals blog - we had already moved the bare minimum of stuff and furniture into this house so that we could survive. We then discovered that our car was broken in such a way that we shouldn't drive it and our mechanic was unable to get to our car before Wednesday of last week.

As all of this was going on all of the kids were coming down with symptoms of some sort of sickness. Timmy ended up having symptoms that could theoretically have been covid so we had to keep the whole family quarantined until we were able to get Timmy's test results back.

For the first half of last week we pretty much had to stay home the entire time and tried to eat whatever random stuff we happened to have in our freezer. Wednesday we went back to Sandy to drop the car off at the mechanic. We took the entire family back to the old house and spent the day boxing up every single thing in the entire house. we ran out of boxes, however we were able to make it through by using garbage bags thanks to Grandma Julie's advice and Mike's biking trip down to Macies.

The mechanic was unable to figure out what was wrong, and so he sent us home with the car and told us to bring it back the next week on Monday.

We drove back home, and then on Thursday Mike rode a scooter down to the local u-haul. the U-Haul was awful. Needless to say we were able to eventually get a U-Haul and go and pick up all the stuff from the old house. so by the end of Thursday the old house was empty but dirty and not fixed up and the new house had boxes from floor to ceiling in the front room.

On Friday Alison spent about half the day on the phone and then after that Mike spent about half the day on the phone in order to get Timmy's test results back so that we knew whether or not he actually had covid. Spoiler alert: he didn't.

Friday night Grandpa Mike came over to help us clean up and fix up the old house. we ended up painting almost the entire house, fixing up a bunch of things that we needed to fix up, power washing the outside of the house, and doing a million other things that had to be done. we ended up working all weekend and Mike continued going back every night up until Wednesday to work on the house more.

We also hired window washers, maids, and some stagers who helped us to get the house ready to sell. the window washers and stagers were highly valuable. We were not super impressed with the maids. 

The photographers came on Thursday to take pictures of the old house, and then by Saturday the listing went live. Since it has gone live we have had more than 20 people sign up to see the house. We expect that it will probably take less than one week to choose an offer for the house given the speed at which people are looking at it.

Monday after working on the house Mike left the car at the mechanics. Mike's parents lent us one of their cars so that we were able to drive around while our car was broken.  We could finally go shopping at long as we didn't try to bring the kids.

By Thursday the mechanic had figured out what was wrong with the car and was able to fix it, so we now have a car back. Hooray! on the way back from getting the car we stopped and picked up an electric dryer that we found on ksl. The dryer that Amy gave us from the house that she bought was a gas dryer, and therefore it would not work in our electric powered dryer slot in our house. we priced putting in gas for the dryer, however it was prohibitively expensive, so we decided to just buy a cheap electric dryer off of ksl.

In addition to getting a dryer we also discovered as we were attempting to install the washer that the washing machine spigots were leaky. Mike decided that we should replace them, however since they were old copper Mike didn't realize that they were not threaded in any way so when he tried to twist them off instead we exploded the pipe and shot water all over the utility room.

We turned off the water to the house so that we didn't end up drowning in the flood, and then Mike ended up having to go over to the home Depot super early in the morning and purchase the necessary equipment to replace those pipes and get the water flowing in our house again.

Since we finally got the washer and dryer installed we could finally do laundry for the first time in two weeks since we moved in. We ended up doing seven loads and it took all day and all night. And we are all wiser for it.

As all of this was happening we were living at our new house with our stuff in a state of disarray. Alison would put away as many boxes as she reasonably could during each day, and try to maintain some semblance of order in the house.

On Friday we went to the park for a little break, however on the way back home from the park Timmy somehow put his finger underneath the wheel of the wagon that he was riding in and ripped off a layer of skin of one of his fingers. He was very worried about it, however Mike was pretty sure that it was fairly minor. It is healing well, and it looks like he will be fully better in a few days.

On Saturday we put in a marathon day of attaching bookshelves and chests of drawers to the walls to keep them from falling over on people, and unpacking all of the remaining boxes, so that we had the house mostly ready. Unfortunately the kids spent most of that time trashing the playroom, so in order for the house to actually be clean we had to finish by cleaning up the entire play room again.

By Sunday morning Rea was starting to feel sick with an unknown sickness. She stayed in bed all day, however at about dinner time she started to feel a little bit better. Now she says she is all the way better, so perhaps it was food poisoning?

Today the house is actually fully usable for the first time since we have moved here.

Now, because some of this seems pretty negative we decided to end with all of our favorite things.

Alison's favorite thing that happened this week was getting the front room cleared and the major rooms of the house all usable for the first time since we moved all of our stuff to the new house. Her favorite room in the house is our bathroom.

Mike's favorite thing that happened this week was how good the old house looked after we were done working on it so hard. Mike loves our whole new house, from the bedrooms to the kitchen.

Rea loves the garden, slide in the tree and the little staircase that you can jump down. Her favorite thing that happened this week was making dinner for the whole family (which was excellent).

Sara likes playing outside of our new house. She likes her shared bedroom with Rea the most of all the rooms in our house.

Timmy loves the big staircase the most. Timmy's favorite thing that happened this week was playing with Logan and Dustin (and Brooklyn).

Gideon loves the downstairs play room, his bedroom, and the back yard the best. His favorite thing that he did this week was to put on a haunted house with Timmy.

Baby Elizabeth loves playing in the play room, and sitting on the stairs. Her favorite thing was crying all night for some reason the last three nights.