The house, that is – the house that we’ve been going bonkers over for the past six months is finally ours. We made it through the final walk through, the repairs from that walk through, the check on the final walk through list, and the closing, which I thought should have taken days for the hassle that the loan was, right up to the very end. They handed us the keys and we almost ran from the building in case they decided to ask us for one more piece of documentation or some of our DNA to confirm our credit scores. All of that happened a week ago, and I sit here typing this on my brand new couch in my brand new family room, watching the rain fall outside through the seven windows that show me the glorious back yard of our home. It is starting to sink in that this is real, and I get to live here.

I thought that this move would be glorious, and that every box that was unpacked would be accompanied by the sounds of angels singing from up high. Or hell, that the boxes would unpack themselves. We postponed our actual move for two days after closing so that we could get some stuff done around the house before the furniture arrived; pendant lights installed in the kitchen, a ceiling fan on the back patio, and a ton of other small things that have to be configured and messed with when it is just easier to do it with nothing in the way. Sunday arrived, bright and shiny, and after a friend popped over to the house to watch the kids (Christina, I owe you BIG TIME), I took off back to our old apartment to box up the odds and ends.

Did I mention that I had the flu the entire week before we moved? Not the SWINE FLU! but the normal flu? 103 fever? No energy? Yeah. We literally had nothing in boxes on Sunday morning because of that damn flu. Mike and I flew around boxing things up as quickly as we could before the movers showed up, and we still had a ton of stuff in closets and cabinets when they moved our furniture out that we had to come back and get on our own. Let me be a PSA for the lot of you and tell you , right now: GO GET A FLU SHOT. If you can save yourself TEN DAYS of fevers, exhaustion, and all the other joys of being sick, then GO DO IT. I have never been as sick as I was the week before we moved, and it did not completely clear up until Tuesday after we were in the house. You don’t want to jack with this, folks. Trust me on this.

We’ve had something delivered or adjusted or painted or connected every damn day since we moved in; strange people flitter in and out of here like a train station. Painters turned my dining room into a shade of delicate, soft blue and our media room into a deep slate blue; furniture delivery men dropped off new couches and punctured a hole in the door to the same media room with a couch. (I kid you not – I thought Mike was going to explode in a shower of fury when he saw it, but he managed to stay calm long enough to tell the delivery folks that he would not be signing the “no damage” sheet when they offered it to him. I probably would have punched him in the nuts for even suggesting it.) Rooms are starting to take shape, slowly but surely. And we’re getting to know the staff at IKEA rather well, as their furniture graces many of the rooms of our home.

I’m going to get pictures next week, when everything is more organized, but for now I’m just glad to be here. In my own home, on my couch, watching the rain.

We’re getting so close to the purchase of this house that I can taste it. Literally. I’m licking the house as I’m typing this – THAT IS HOW CLOSE WE ARE.

This is my new porn.

So many things are going on – trying to get the apartment repacked to move, although that starts next week; trying to get movers scheduled, closings scheduled, childcare scheduled, painters, furniture, it’s like I’m going a mile a minute and it doesn’t feel like there is an end but I know there is because HELLO GIANT EMPTY HOUSE WAITING FOR ME. I’m driving my kids crazy. And my husband. And probably a million other people that want me to just shut my face up about the house. I will, I promise, in about 11 days.

In the meantime, I’m keeping myself busy with this:

Funny what a ton of triangles can look like when sewn together.

And this:

All sewn by hand, y'all!

And I’ve even dabbled in a bit of this:

The craftiness is about to be boxed up, though, and shifted about two miles west to the new digs.  This is one move that I’m not dreading one little bit.

I haven’t posted a lot about the house lately; there hasn’t been much to say, other than OH LOOK, MORE BEAMS or HOLY CRAP, AN ELECTRICAL OUTLET! which only my husband an myself are excited about. But in the past week, things have really starting moving along; this is the part where I bore you with pictures and details that you really don’t care about. But since it’s my blog, I’m allowed.

Kitchen Cabinets, or alternately: Where We Decided to Invest The Children's College Funds

These are the cabinets that we picked out, after hours of dickering back and forth. That giant white thing in front there is going to be the bar facing into our family room. It will invariably be covered with mail, keys, gadgets, toys, crayons, cups, paper, and the various other things that we’re just too lazy to put away. It is amazing how something as simple as a kitchen cabinet can completely define a room, and I love these more than when we saw them in the design center. And as of a few hours ago, our walls are painted, our banister is in, and our house officially has doors that my children will become well acquainted with slamming.

In the mean time, I’m spending my time with this:

Cassidy, by Bonnie Marie Burns

This looks complex, I’ll give you that. Don’t trust your eyeballs. There isn’t really any crazy difficulty here, and once I got into the rhythm of the cables, it is basically knitting itself. This is another one of those difficult, eye-catching type patterns that I love. Big bang for my buck (especially considering that I am knitting it in Valley Yarns Northhampton, excellent yardage for the price).  And there has been sewing, of both the hand and machine variety.

Look! I made a dress!

Hexagon Wreath

All in all, I’d say things are clicking along nicely.

This site would have been updated waaay before now.

The past month has been full of activity: new job, new house on contract, picking out crap for the new house, getting sick, working out details on selling old house, finding apartment, getting insurance in case we burn down new apartment (seriously, we are required to have renters' insurance; it's a good idea anyway, but I've never been required to have it before), yada yada yada. My stress levels are UP TO HERE :gestures to neck region: and I haven't had time to knit. Well, I've had some time to knit, but not enough time.

The design options we chose for the house are AWESOME, if I do say so myself.

The lot is being scraped and leveled today, and there are rumors that our foundation will be poured next week. And in two weeks, we move out of our tiny little house and into a tinier apartment for four months while we wait for the house to be built. School will be over for the year, as I am not taking any more classes until the spring semester, so the summer will be spent constantly checking on the progress of our new home. And driving the builder crazy. Here's hoping that we don't drive him to peeing in our foundation before the concrete hardens (not that, you know, we're that bad. Ahem.).