Putting my faith in Miss Serendipity

(clickonenglish.blogspot.com)

Buying a house is both exhilarating and stressful. I'm really excited about my new space, about making it my very own, although I underestimated how long it would take to paint rooms with 12-foot ceilings and highly saturated, dark paint colors. But I'm getting there. I'll post some photos next week.

I also should have suspected I'd have trouble getting people in to do the work I don't want to do myself. That's a given. The electrician I intended to hire for a few small jobs hasn't called me back after almost 2 weeks, so I need to find someone else. He's a friend of my daughter Elvira's, so I wanted to give him the business. I wish he'd told me he doesn't want it. It would have been so much simpler if he'd just said "no," and let me find somebody else 2 weeks ago.

I wrote last night about the trouble I had getting work done over Thanksgiving 10 days week. I was kind of bummed that I wasn't going to get the floors done in time. They need to be refreshed if nothing else, but that's not a job that can be done in a day.

And then Miss Serendipity dropped an answer right in my lap in the form of this blog post on the Young House Love website. Apparently I can do the floors myself with a product called Rejuvenate. It will take hours I didn't intend to spend -- just like everything else has -- but it will also save me the $2000+ the contractor was going to charge me to buff, stain and seal the floors with polyurethane. A win for me.

One thing I was going to do myself, with the help of my future daughter-in-law Montana, was learn to install laminate flooring (something like Pergo) in the upstairs hallway. Yeah, I know, putting laminate over original wood floors in an old Victorian is a sin in a lot of people's eyes, but the floors are in terrible shape up there. So terrible that, after doing some research online, I realized I wouldn't be able to put down laminate, because there's no way to level them.

Miss Serendipity to the rescue again. My excellent friend Chicken Grrrl asked me if I needed any carpet. Turns out her in-laws just bought a house too, and they tore out all the almost new, neutral-colored carpet. She asked if I could use it.

My son Drake was home last weekend, so he went with me to their new house, and we filled my van with carpet and pad. Now I just need to find somebody to lay it. It's not original hardwood, but it's a solution I'm perfectly happy with.

Finally, last week I set up an appointment for professional movers to move my large items over: washer/dryer, couch, wall units and bookcases, dining room furniture. What warms my heart is that the moving company is owned by the parents of the last tenant of my house, who is a dear friend. In fact, she loved the house and wanted to buy it before she decided to move to Austin with her man. I met both of her parents at her going away party, and now they're going to move my stuff into what was their daughter's house.

Connections all over the place!

(I'll be writing soon about the fiasco that was my last move, and why I won't ever hire Two Men and a Truck again. Ever. In fact, if they offered to move me for free, I'd tell them to drive their truck up their manager's ass. It was that bad, and I am a veteran of many professional moves. They would have to pay me to move my stuff.)

I don't expect that to happen this time.

In fact, I am working hard to trust that everything will work out just as it should: that I will finish the work I want to do myself and have done by others on the house (at least what has to be done prior to moving in), that a few of the people who have offered to help me move my stuff will have time to come and help me, and that everything will fit when I get it all into the house.

Truly, the hardest part at this point is waiting to move in. I'll still have a lot of work ahead of me unpacking and organizing once I'm in, but I can do that in my own time .... and I will be in my own house doing it.

Harmony House