This and That

When you are looking at homes to buy and see beautiful trees, please remember the fall. We did not think about this at all, and we now have the most leaves continuously falling that I think I have ever seen! They are all over our front yard, so you can't even see what a nice job mowing Honey has done, and are covering the sidewalk too. Our gutters were cleaned last week and already are filled up with the most gorgeous yellow leaves. We wouldn't trade these trees, but we certainly did not consider the tools or time it would cost! Off to borrow some rakes and a leaf blower from the neighbors before we splurge on our own.

We have been living here for a little over a week now, and we have a functional bathtub, two working toilets, and a little kitchen efficiency downstairs. We are hoping to have work start on rebuilding our kitchen by the end of next week. We have hired a green building contractor to do our drywall and hang the cabinets as well as lay the flooring and help with the countertop measure and ordering process. We can't wait to get started as we'd like to have Thanksgiving here, but we are preparing for plan B. Here is what our kitchen currently looks like -

Today we made a horrific discovery. We were building our IKEA kitchen cabinets and realized that a) our initial order was wrong b) we did not get what was on our initial order, and c) we are missing some very important parts of our kitchen (doors, the sink base...) and have lots of extra stuff we don't need (two extra pantry cabinets and a zillion 12" base cabinets). I've already called them and left a message but we plan on going there tomorrow first thing and trying to figure it all out. It just doesn't even match at all - the receipts are different from the original order and the packing slip is accurate for what we got - we just got the wrong stuff! Oh - another day at IKEA that I'm sure will be really entertaining.

We do have a few rooms that are starting to come together, though. The rec room is looking pretty good - just needs a little quarter round and we are done there. Our bedrooms are pretty well set, and the bathroom in the upstairs hall is starting to look more like a bathroom and less like a closet with a tub. We got the vanity in, and just need to install the sink top and toilet. We did decide to do the Caroma dual flush thanks to a comment on this blog! Hopefully it will work out for us - we should get it next week I think.