Papa, touring to a city near you soon.

Nolan and Greg have formed a new band. Nolan got to name it and he named it Papa. Greg plays the tiny drums and Nolan performs his magic on the keyboard. A their number one fan I can tell you that they rock pretty hard.

Milko Update, prosecution is playing hooky

From the newspaper:

Project sell this house day 16- SOLD!!!!!!!!

Yes, you heard that right, today we sold our house. After having it on the market for 3, three, THREE days!!! We can not possibly express how excited we are and how great it feels to breathe again.

We once before tried to sell this house, and to make a VERY long story short, one that I may get into later, after 6 months of having our house on the market we took it back off the market because we were so, SO tired of the process, and the unsuccessful selling of the house and the stupid things our real estate woman did to us, that we decided to stay for a few more years. So going into this process again, we only had that experience to go from, and were mentally preparing ourselves for quite possibly a similar painstakingly tedious adventure. Though there were many reasons for us to believe things were going to be better and easier this time, we knew better than to be too positive about it all. Well, it couldn’t have been more different and quicker and easier, and sweeter, and lovlier, and fluffier, and better. Did I mention it only took us THREE DAYS!!!!!

Introduction to the inside of our future home

Today as Greg tailed the inspector under, through, and over the house, I took the time and took TONS of interior pictures of the house so I could use them to start fantasizing about all the goodness I could be doing to them from the comfort of my laptop. I will share a few of them here to give you an idea of our future surroundings- be warned, these are going to be terribly boring, but just imagine all the yummy colors that will grace the walls hopefully soon, and all the delicious refinished hardwood floors that will replace both the terribly stained cream and hunter green carpets. And that’s only the beginning. If you can’t get enough of the boring boringness, be sure to check out the additional bland and boring angles on flickr.

First off, the entry way:

The only room where someone wasn’t dumb enough to cover up the beautiful hardwoods with some heinous carpet. It’s got a great size closet.

Off the right of the entryway is what will be Greg’s office and the guest bedroom

Here you can see one of the 4 closed off fireplaces. This room and what will be Nolan’s bedroom have back-to-back closed off fireplaces, as do the living/dining rooms.

Off the left of the entry way is the living room

And it’s delicious hunter green carpet, which will soon be the lucious hardwood underneath.

The living room gives access to the dining room, which will be my hopefully tidy studio space.

Here you see the dining room side of the living/dining room non- fireplace combination, which set also features the mirror on this side, and black plexi glass in the same spot on the living room size. We are a little confused by this and unsure what to make of it, but I am sure we will figure something out.

Off the dining room there is the spacious kitchen, which also grants access to the back yard

I am going to have a great time fantasizing of a perfect ikea custom kitchen in there, but in reality I will be more than happy just to see the faux green marble countertop go at some point.

Going back into the dining room and into a cute little hallway that connects to the master bedroom, Nolan’s bedroom and 2nd bathroom we venture into the Master bedroom:

Now this room, along with the kitchen was added onto the house since it was first built. This unfortunately means that the horifically stained carpet here is not also hiding hardwood floors. This doesn’t mean we won’t be pulling it up, it just means we’ll have to replace it with something like pergo when we do.

Off the master bedroom there’s the master bathroom, which also connects to what will be Nolan’s bedroom

And Nolan’s room:

Nolan’s bedroom leads back to that cute little hallway, which also connects to the 2nd bathroom

And to close it all all off here’s a shot of the view off the front porch per request of mommy dearest. I didn’t realize until I took this picture how colorful the houses are on this street:

Project sell this house day 12- House For Sale!

It’s been a long and intense 12 days, but the house is ready to hit the market!! Today our lovely real estate gal took the pictures and measurements, plopped the sign in the yard and we signed the agreements. We will start showing the house this Saturday.

Thanks to a migraine yesterday, one the started 5 minutes after the carpet cleaners showed up (ggggreat timing!) I am a bit delayed in showing off the remaining before and after pictures, so here they are.
First off, Greg’s office

Before:

After:

And the kitchen
Before:

After:

Can’t you just hear the echo just by looking at it now. We keep forgetting what a huge kitchen we have until we take out the island.

And last, but not least the ‘after’ pictures of the exterior of the house, before pictures can be seen here

Now excuse us as we pass out.

Project sell this house day 9- Long ass weekend

Phewee, what en exhausting weekend we just had. We worked and worked and worked until we just couldn’t work no mo’ on Friday and Saturday, and we had the best intentions to work Sunday too, but happened to both get floored with exhaustion. Good thing it was easter so we had a great excuse to lay low, and stuff ourselves at the buffet with our good friends, but sad soon-to-be-ex-neighbors Ed and Elana, and their more than adorable little Blase. After stuffing ourselves so much we could barely walk we headed over to the new digs with them and showed them how cool it would be if they also moved down there. I think we nearly convinced them.

But as far as the projects are concerned this weekend left us with just a few (relatively) small projects to finish. We are a little behind on the schedule that we had set for ourselves, but the fact that we did in one week last week what we had planned to do in the span of two weeks makes us feel like we are doing a-okay.

Our master bedroom is the next to show off.
Before:

As you can tell we had quite a job on our hands, but to be honest, this ‘before’ picture was taken already-mid-project-clearout, so please don’t think our bedroom always looked like this. As a matter of fact, I have been proudly making the bed almost every single morning (my mother is falling off her chair as she reads this) this past year, ever since we got that great bed from Ikea. It’s pretty shocking to me that I would ever be ‘together.’ enough to do such a thing. Doing something so regularly and repeatedly is just not in my bones. I suppose I should write Ikea and thank them. But I digress…

After:

Pretty freakin’ amazing huh. I mean who wouldn’t want to buy this house instantly after walking into such a serene bit of paradise. Seriously!

The hairy monster speakers next to Greg’s dresser are two items I have been trying to get out of our lives for the past 11 years. They came with the wonderful package that is Greg, but I have never been able to accept them. Sure they are “liquid cooled” and sure they sound awesome, but they are monstrous, and they are hairy. Need I say more?

Project sell this house day 5- Additional Evidence

Additional evidence that we have been working our nimble fingers to the bone. The living room was next on the list just because it would give us a great feeling of accomplishment right smack dab in the middle of this project, so that we would find the energy to keep up the good work.

Before:

After:

Now the PINK! wall had not actually been our intention. It was one of the, what we thought to be neutral color, paints that we picked up from the *oops* shelves at the home improvement store. We love buying there because paint is a mere $5 for a full gallon instead of the full $24 when you mix the color yourself. We picked up most of the paints there for this project, and have been pleased with the colors and savings!
Well, when I first opened this can of paint I saw a near Pepto-Bismol pink. This should have been a clue, but I figured maybe when it dried it would be near brown-ish. The more I painted, the more I realized that is really was a pink, and even though it became more muted when drying, it was still no brown family.
So I ran back to the store, and picked up a self selected ’sand’ from the Martha Sterwart paint chips, and finished the remaining 3 walls in that, figuring I would paint over the pink wall the next day.
To my surprise, when all the walls were done I realized that the sand went really great with the PINK!, and the PINK! had actually dried into a very nice mauve, which also looks nice with the reddish wood furniture we have, and as I look outside to all the green in the yard, the PINK! mauve wall surrounding the view really made the green-ness outside POP! And just for that, the pink is staying! Well, unless our real estate gal decides it needs to go, in which case I will paint it again, no problem.

Conversations, understaning gender.

Nolan: Hey mamma, are you a lady?

Me: Yes, I am.

Nolan: Is pappa THE man?

Me: Yes, pappa’s THE man.

Project sell this house day 4- Finally some proof!

Proof that we have not been sitting on our hands. Today I officially got one room ready for showings. It’s a start, only 5 more rooms to go!

Before:

The room of honor is Nolan’s room. We had to get LOTS of toys out, some furniture, and paint the walls a perfectly acceptable brown.

After:

Done….

And done! And yes, that is an adorable tiny drum set Nolan is playing with. It was a gift some sweet people gave us, and Nolan is more than ecstatic that he can use it to be JUST like his daddy EVEN MORE!

Now I’ve got some more work to do.

Project sell this house day 3- the savior is here!

In the shape of a pod. Oh the wonderful things the pod will do for us. This piece of lovely will allow us to toss in it 75% of our belongings so it does not look like our house really is too small to house all of the goods of an average 3 member family. It will also allow us to pack a lot of things now, and the rest of the things later. It will also allow me to just walk out my front door to fetch that BARNEY BOOK! that Nolan did not notice me packing. A storage space would make that trip a lot harder and further. The nice folks at pods will also pick up this piece of heaven when the day comes, and then plop it in front of the new house, so we can take our sweet time unpacking it once again.

If only all of this convenience would come at the same price of a normal storage space, I would probably marry it. Unfortunately it comes at a much more hefty price tag, but heck, that’s what tax returns are for.